William Weston holds an odd distinction: the shortest-serving Premier in Tasmania’s history, in office for just 17 days in May 1857. Every list of Tasmanian premiers files him this way: a footnote number, filed alongside Champ’s 117 days and Gregson’s Read more
In September 1837, Captain Alexander Maconochie, a naval officer, geographer, and private secretary to Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Franklin, sat down in Hobart and wrote the most damaging assessment of the Van Diemen’s Land convict system that any official had yet Read more
I’ve spent the last few days transcribing the Executive Council minutes from Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, covering 1843 to 1847. Most of it is the dry procedural sediment you’d expect from any committee: minutes confirmed, despatches read, licences approved. Read more
On 2 May 1843, at a farmhouse on the road between Avoca and Fingal in Van Diemen’s Land, two armed bushrangers murdered District Constable William Ward in front of his hosts, then coolly asked whether his breath was still there Read more
In the last week of July 1842, as two condemned men sat in the Hobart Gaol waiting to learn whether the gallows would claim them, the colonial administration found itself debating a question that had nothing to do with Read more
On 14 October 1842, five of the most powerful men in Van Diemen’s Land sat down in Hobart to discuss a convict who wouldn’t go to church. The Executive Council that morning was the Governor, Sir John Franklin, Read more
On Saturday 15 May 1824, a small notice appeared in the Hobart Town Gazette. Colonel William Sorell, who two days earlier had formally handed the government of Van Diemen’s Land to his successor, had ‘left Town, to reside for Read more
Fifty-three people went to the gallows in Van Diemen’s Land in 1826 – the single deadliest year of George Arthur’s governorship, and by some margin. It’s tempting to read that number as the story of a colony finally getting its Read more
On 19 August 1830, after 108 days at sea, the convict transport David Lyon dropped anchor in the Derwent. She had left Sheerness in May with 200 male convicts aboard, drawn from the hulks Retribution and others moored at Read more
George Arthur governed Van Diemen’s Land from 1824 to 1836 with a thoroughness that no previous colonial administrator had attempted. He built a system of surveillance and classification that tracked individual convicts through every stage of their sentence. He Read more