Mary Ann Clements left no letters, no portrait, and no descendants who wrote her into family legend. What she left is a paper trail: a surgeon’s journal, a description list, a conduct record, a scatter of Lower Court entries, a handful of newspaper lines, a marriage register, a death certificate, 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 produced. The result, Report on the State of Prison Discipline 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. But woven through it is a recurring ritual that I 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 before going through his pockets.¹ Ward left a wife and 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 guilt or innocence, and everything to do with what a 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, together with the senior officer of Her Majesty’s forces, the Read more
In the 1830s, Hobart was one of the busiest whaling ports in the world. Whale oil lit its streets. The sandstone warehouses lining Salamanca Place, still standing, were built specifically to store whaling products, and by 1830 the new deeper dock was bustling with whaling ships, sailors, traders – and Read more
There is a persistent story told about colonial Tasmania: that British settlers came to Van Diemen’s Land and received free land. It appears in family histories, genealogical databases, and popular accounts of the colonial period. It is, at best, a half-truth. At worst, it obscures a system carefully designed to Read more