SPEAKER, PRESENTER AND CHAIR BIOGRAPHIES

Dr Raymond Evans – Opening Address

Dr Raymond Evans has been an Australian social historian for an unconscionable length of time. He commenced serious academic historical research in 1964 and, some sixty years later, is still at it. His publication record contains towards 250 separate publications covering 28 or so areas of primary/thematic/empirical endeavour. The main body of activity centres around frontier and post frontier contact/conflict research, the White Australia Policy, war and society, gender relations, class analysis and studies of popular culture. His work on convict history, often in collaboration with the late historian William (Bill) Thorpe, began in the early 1990s and concentrates on the contours of secondary punishment, especially in Moreton Bay. It variously explores masculinism and punishment, the class and race matrix of the remote penal station, the Bigge reports, and convict biography and narrative. As well as continuing to research and write on frontier genocide, convictism, biography and some personal intellectual memoir, Evans has, of late, also produced three volumes of published poetry that await the judgments of posterity.

Melissa Lukashenko – Closing Address

• Professor Clare Anderson is Professor of History and Dean for Research Excellence at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on the histories and legacies of penal settlements and colonies in the modern world. She has published widely on convicts in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, with her most recent work straddling also the Atlantic, Caribbean, and global empires and polities. Clare is the author of Subaltern Lives: Biographies of colonialism in the Indian Ocean world, c. 1790-1920 (Cambridge, 2012); articles in Australian Historical Studies, Family & Community History, Slavery & Abolition, and The Howard Journal of Crime & Justice; and Convicts: A Global History (Cambridge, 2022). Since 2016, she has been working in partnership with the University of Guyana and Guyana Prison Service to create a ‘useable past’ to inform infrastructure, operations, and experiences of incarceration today. Currently, she is also leading work on convict descent and descendants in former colonies of the British and French Empires. Clare is editor of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and a Fellow of the British Academy.
• Dr Heather Blasdale Clarke will introduce a demonstration of convict music and dance at ‘In Convict Footsteps: A Bicentennial Event’. She is a cultural historian and dance teacher specialising in Australian historical dance. In 2018 she completed a professional doctorate examining the topic of early Australian convict culture, which has led to the development of a touring museum exhibition ‘Dancing in Fetters: The Culture of Convict Dance’. Funded by the Federal Government’s Visions of Australia, the exhibition commenced a national tour at the Commissariat Store and has been hosted in six other significant convict sites (2021–2024). Heather’s online resource, exploring the many dance traditions relevant to the European settlement in Australia, is available at https://www.historicaldance.au/
• Dr James Bradley is a lecturer in the History of Medicine and Life Sciences in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Prior to his emigration to Australia, was based at the Welcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Glasgow. He is currently researching a history of the nervous system. Bradley started his academic life as an historian of sport. His PhD, ‘Cricket, Class and Colonialism’, was awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 1991. His supervisor was the late great Ian Duffield with whom he edited the landmark publication, Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration in 1997. Bradley was also an early innovator and collaborator on the Founders and Survivors project. His connection to influential moments in convict scholarship, as well as his relative distance from the wider field, makes him well-placed to offer fresh insights and perspectives in his brief roundup of the research trajectories and themes highlighted during this symposium.
• Dr Paula Jane Byrne, a Research Fellow with the State Library of New South Wales, is author of Criminal Law and Colonial Subject, Cambridge, 1993 and The Letters and Diaries of Judge Advocate Ellis Bent, Desert Pea, 2012. Her latest article is on ‘Depositions and the Law at Molong’ (2023). Her latest early colonial article relates to depositions in Sydney and was published in the Canterbury Law Review (2019). She gave a conference paper in the constructing of the registers of the Courts of Criminal and Civil Jurisdiction from 1810 -1815 in 2020. She has now taught at six Australian universities and held research positions at four, as well as the State Library of New South Wales and the Australian National Library. She is from the Tweed Valley in New South Wales, her family settling there in 1869.
• Tonia Chalk is a Budjari woman from Southwest Queensland. She is a Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) and a Griffith University PhD candidate in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science. Her PhD examines eleven inquests of death files of Aboriginal females that occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Queensland, through the lens of the file’s discursive practices and colonial references. Her research also provides a new way of thinking about inquests in Queensland, and about the archival record in Aboriginal family stories, including her own family.
• Serene Fernando, a Gamilaraay woman based in Brisbane, serves as a First Nations Curator at the State Library of Queensland, where her primary commitment is truth telling. Serene draws upon her academic and research background as a doctoral student at Australian National University, as she undertakes a deep exploration of Indigenous historical research and utilises cultural interpretive frameworks to decolonise historical archives. Serene leads initiatives that embed Indigenous viewpoints through storytelling and cultural paradigms. As part of her role at the State Library of Queensland, she is focused on establishing curatorial guidelines for selecting historical content and shaping narratives from a First Nations standpoint.
• Roger Ford was born in North Queensland on the traditional lands of the Juru people. He is a program officer with the Queensland Government’s Department of Treaty, the Arts and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships. In this position he has contributed detailed research for numerous individual clients, native title claims, and government administered compensation schemes. Prior to this role, Roger has worked for a number of other government agencies including ATSI, Housing, the State Library of Queensland, and Queensland State Archives. He is a dedicated land care volunteer, with a strong interest in Queensland’s Indigenous and colonial past, and identifies as a North Queensland Cowboys fan.
• Professor Martin Gibbs is Professor of Australian Archaeology at the University of New England. He is also Director of the Landscapes of Production and Punishment project which is a multi-disciplinary collaboration exploring the convict system through the lens of an industrial network. He is currently involved in convict-related projects in Tasmania, NSW, Queensland, Western Australia and on Norfolk Island.
• Roxanne Giles is a guide at Port Arthur Historic Site. She is currently engaged in a PhD with the University of New England exploring the reasons why convicts were sent to penal stations and the impact of service in these institutions on later outcomes.
• Dr Adrian Graves enjoyed an international career in scholarship and the executive leadership of universities in England, Scotland and Australia. He held academic posts in four renowned universities in the UK and Australia, achieving an international reputation for his research on the economic and social history of the international sugar economy, Pacific migrations and the development of global capitalism. Appointed subsequently to senior leadership roles in three universities in Australia and the United Kingdom, he assisted those organizations to improve their academic and operational performance, and to achieve world-ranking status. In 2014, he returned to Australia to lead the SEARCH Foundation and has since contributed to civil society and academic research. He ranks his teaching of distinguished participants in this conference amongst his proudest achievements.
• Dr Kelly Greenop will present a 3D visual presentation of the convict-built windmill at ‘In Convict Footsteps: A Bicentennial Event’. She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Queensland’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning, where she is affiliated with ATCH — the Architecture Theory Culture History research centre. Kelly’s research in Digital Cultural Heritage utilises 3D laser scanning of heritage environments and buildings in South East Queensland. She has collaborated with colleagues from the School of Architecture, CSIRO, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service and other organisations to scan and archive fragile, remote and at-risk heritage sites, and research the use of scanning in architectural heritage practice. Several of the sites captured and researched have been included on the global digital heritage archive CyArk, including the first Australian site to be CyArk acquired.
• Dr Jennifer Harrison is a Research Adviser with the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at The University of Queensland. She has been fascinated by the establishment of the Moreton Bay settlement and its residents for many years. Her 2016 publication Shackled: Female Convicts at Moreton Bay 1826-1839 followed journal articles, book chapters and multiple lectures on wide-ranging aspects of the penal colony. Since then, she has sustained this absorbing focus, culminating with the publication in 2023 of Fettered Frontier: Founding the Moreton Bay Settlement: The First Four Years 1822-1826 to mark the 200th anniversary of its European formation. Her current activities include extensive biographical research on all the early inhabitants, civilian, military and convict.
• Professor Anna Johnston is Professor of English at The University of Queensland. She has held ARC Queen Elizabeth II and Future Fellowships at UTAS and UQ. She was the 2022 John Oxley Honorary Research Fellow, State Library of Queensland, for her project “History & Fiction: Mapping Frontier Violence in Colonial Queensland Writing.” Her major books include The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770-1870 (CUP 2023); Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier (SUP 2022, edited with Elizabeth Webby); The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales (UWAP, 2011); and Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800-1860 (CUP 2003).
• Associate Professor Ray Kerkhove (PhD, University of Queensland, 2002; Member, PHAQ) is an Adjunct Associate Professor with the School of Education at the University of Southern Queensland, an Associate with the Australian Centre for Genocide Studies, and a research historian affiliated with the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre and the School of Social Science’s Archaeology Department at the University of Queensland. Ray began working with Australian First Nations communities in 1985 as a researcher for FAIRA. In 2007, he established Interactive Community Planning Australia for the preservation of Indigenous heritage and cultural revitalisation. The organisation won the National Trust’s Golden (Governor’s) Award in 2011 and a finalist placing in the Telstra Reconciliation Queensland Awards (2009). Ray was co-recipient of the Helen Taylor Award for Local History (2010); twice a Visiting Fellow with Griffith University (2017, 2018), and twice a Historian-in-Residence (Noosa Council 2020-2021, Sunshine Coast Council 2021-2022). He has written a dozen books, 21 peer-reviewed articles and scores of heritage reports, mostly on Indigenous site history. A particular interest has been the Frontier Wars. Kerkhove’s works on that topic include The Battle of One Tree Hill (2019), Mapping Frontier War on the Sunshine Coast-Noosa Region (2021), and How They Fought (2023). He has been active with many Indigenous communities, councils, charities, universities, and museums in developing events, exhibitions, signage, education kits, public artworks, and websites that will better commemorate the Frontier Wars.
• Adjunct Professor Brett Leavy, Queensland University of Technology and Central Queensland University, is a Kooma artist from south-west Queensland and the creative and cultural lead for Bilbie Virtual Labs, a virtual heritage design company that collaborates with communities to recognise the cultural heritage of First Nations people using the multiple platforms of XR, VR, AR and PC gamification.  The result is Virtual Songlines, a heritage time machine, transporting users to historical sites of immense cultural significance, allowing individuals to experience virtual heritage Dreamtime first-hand. This work is featured in cities across Australia and beyond, including Brisbane’s Cross River Rail Experience Centre, the National Maritime Museum, the Ian Potter Museum, Yagan Square in Perth, and Daejeon Museum of Contemporary Art in South Korea. It also features in libraries and galleries in regional towns and in small communities, creating a diverse virtual heritage landscape encapsulating Australian cultural expression in both time, space and place. Brett is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). He graduated with a Masters in Creative Industries from QUT and has a Bachelor of International Business and a Diploma of Teaching from Griffith University. He was instrumental in the establishment of the National Indigenous Media Association and the National Indigenous Radio Service. In 2023 Brett was the recipient of Griffith’s Outstanding First Peoples Alumnus Award for Griffith Business School.
• Professor Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her research centres upon Australia’s colonial past and its legacies in the present. In particular, she is concerned with the history of Australia’s engagement with anti-slavery, humanitarianism, and ultimately human rights. Her work has contributed to decolonizing heritage and academic practice, with a strong impact on debates regarding colonialism and Australian legacies of imperialism and slavery. Her most recent books include Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2020) which examines the role of the compassionate emotions in creating relationships spanning the globe, and Anti-slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land? (Routledge, 2021), which explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. She currently leads the ARC-funded research projects ‘Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery’, with Jeremy Martens, Paul Arthur, Zoe Laidlaw, Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Alan Lester (DP200200094, 2020-2023); and ‘Australian Legacies of British Slavery: Capital, Land and Labour’, with Zoe Laidlaw, Kiera Lindsay, Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Alan Lester and Edmond Smith (DP240101389, 2024-2026).
• Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart is a Professor of Heritage and Digital History at the University of New England. He is author of several books including Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia 1788-1860 (Palgrave Studies in Economic History, 2023), co-authored with Michael Quinlan. He specialises in using big data to throw fresh light on history of labour relations, the impact of work and punishment on life course outcomes, and intergenerational inequality.
• Dr David Meredith is an economic historian formerly at the University of New South Wales and the University of Oxford. He was a member of the original Convict Workers project, examining convict selection. His research has examined imperialism and economic development in Britain’s tropical colonies; Australia; and Britain. Recent publications on Australia include: ‘Paying the (colonial) rent’ in Pearls and Irritations (2023); ‘Australia: geography and institutions’ in The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World, volume I, 1700-1870 (2021); with Deborah Oxley, ‘The convict economy’ in The Cambridge Economic History of Australia (2015); and with Barrie Dyster, Australia in the Global Economy: Continuity and Change (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 2012).
• Associate Professor Tony Moore is Professor of Communications and Media Studies, Monash University and Lead Chief Investigator of ARC Linkage project Conviction Politics: the convict routes of Australian democracy. He will introduce his global project ‘Conviction Politics’ with a sequence of short documentaries, and discuss its Brisbane-bound travelling exhibition Unshackled: The True Convict Story, at ‘In Convict Footsteps: A Bicentennial Event’.
• Mahalia Mozes-Pettit is currently in her third year undertaking a Bachelor of Advanced Humanities (Hons) majoring in English Literature at the University of Queensland. She has a keen interest in colonial masculinities and how they construct ideas of Australianness, as well as counter-concepts of relationality, all of which she will explore in her honours thesis next year.
• Associate Professor Maggie Nolan is an Associate Professor in Digital Cultural Heritage in the School of Communication and Arts. She is also the recently appointed Director of AustLit — a comprehensive information resource and research environment for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture, supporting and promoting research into Australian story-telling. Maggie values interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to humanities research. Her research is in the broad field of Australian literary cultures. Her most recent project, ‘Close Relations: Irishness in Australian Literature’, with Professor Ronan McDonald (University of Melbourne) and Professor Kath Bode (ANU), was awarded an ARC Discovery Grant in 2022. Maggie’s research interests include: contemporary Indigenous literatures; hoaxes, imposture and mistaken identity in Australian literary culture; and digital literary studies.
• Tamsin O’Connor, an adjunct lecturer at UNE, completed her honours degree at the University of Queensland and has published on Moreton Bay and other penal stations in various journals, including Labour History and the Journal of Australian Colonial History. Tamsin also has chapters in Chain Letters (eds Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Lucy Frost) and Representing Convicts (eds Ian Duffield and James Bradley). Her research focuses on the complicated unfreedoms of the convicts and soldiers at the penal station of Newcastle by examining the cultural and economic subcultures of a transported working class.
• Professor Deborah Oxley was until recently Professor of Social Science History at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of All Souls College. Deborah’s research draws on social science and biomedical methods, typically underpinned by large archival datasets. She works on health, welfare and nutrition in Britain and the Empire, the microeconomics of the household, child growth, women and economic development, migration, human capital, coercive and free labour markets, colonial economies, crime and punishment. Another member of the project, ‘Convict Workers’, Deborah also published Convict Maids: The forced migration of women to Australia (Cambridge, 1996).
• Dr Jonathan Richards is a Research Fellow with the Harry Gentle Resource Centre and the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University. He is also an Adjunct Research Fellow, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland, where he was previously Research Historian in the School of Architecture (2017–2019). His doctoral research and subsequent monograph on the Native Police has been a major influence on contemporary re-evaluation of Queensland’s colonial history. He has worked on a variety of projects drawing on Queensland State Archives resources, and his expertise in archival research is reflected in his track record of engagement as a research consultant by a wide range of clients including the Queensland State Archives (e.g. for the preparation of annual release of Cabinet Minutes), Crown Law (for Native Title claims) and many Aboriginal corporations and associations. Since 2020 he has been engaged by the Queensland State Archives to locate, assess and prepare for public release the collection of ‘First Wars’ files that have contributed a wide range of resources to support future needs of First Nations Peoples in understanding the experience of colonisation. He has a long-standing engagement in the landscape and environmental history of Queensland, a perspective that informs his research and writing.
• Jan Richardson is a PhD candidate at Griffith University investigating the presence of non-European convicts and indentured labourers (‘coolies’) in Queensland prior to 1860, including ethnic minority individuals of African, Mauritian, Caribbean, Indian, Chinese and Pacific Island descent. She is a Research Assistant at Griffith University’s Harry Gentle Resource Centre contributing to a biographical dictionary of Queensland’s early colonial residents. Jan’s publications include ‘Out of sight, out of mind: Ex-convict female paupers incarcerated in Queensland’s benevolent asylums’ in the Journal of Australian Colonial History (Vol. 24, 2022) and, with Gary Osmond, ‘Sport, race and African-Caribbean migrants in Australia: Evaluating Jack Dowridge, the ‘Black Diamond’ boxer’ in the Australian Journal of Biography and History (No. 8, 2024).
• Associate Professor David Roberts is a Professor of History at the University of New England, where he researches Australia’s early history and edits the Journal of Australian Colonial History. He is best known for his work on the history and legacy of Australia’s convict past. This research has often focussed on the remote governance of penal settlements such as Wellington Valley, Newcastle and Port Macquarie. His most recent research is currently funded by a collaborative Australian Research Council grant for the project ‘Inquiring into Empire : Remaking the British world after 1815’.
• Emeritus Professor Kay Saunders, originally trained as an anthropologist, was Professor of Modern History and a Senator of the University of Queensland, 2002-2006. She was CEO of The Brisbane Institute from 2006 to 2009 and employed by Bond University, 2012-2014. She was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences in 2001, followed by election to the Royal Historical Society (London) in 2003 along with the Royal Society of Arts (London). In 1999 she was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to Australian history and public debate, followed in 2021 by appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia for her services to tertiary education and professional organisations. She was a Director of the National Australia Day Council (1994-7), Council Member of the Australian War Memorial (!994-7) and the Australian National Maritime Museum (1994-6). Professor Saunders served as Chair of the Queensland Government’s Cultural Advisory Council (1994-97) as well as Premier Beattie’s advisor on women’s policy (1999-2001). Her published works are in the fields of race relations, plantation economies, slavery and indentured labour studies, gender studies, Sir Samuel Griffith, Federation, Australian political history and World War 2. She was appointed as a principal researcher and author for the History Section of the Path to Treaty submission to the Queensland  Parliament in 2020. She is listed as an entry in Who’s Who in Australia.
• Associate Professor Ben Wilson belongs to Jagera country, around the southern suburbs of Meanjin (Brisbane), and he is therefore obligated to take care of that place. He also has strong connections to the Central Coast of NSW and Brewarrina. He has worked in the university sector since 2015. His current research explores place-based narrative as an Aboriginal epistemology and its application to modern education systems. Before pursuing a PhD at the Australian National University and taking up a role as Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Canberra, Ben was a schoolteacher and consultant in education, working across the country in many remote, rural, and urban Indigenous communities. In 2019 he and his brother (Dave Spillman) went to Canberra with the specific intention of refocusing education on Aboriginal ways of knowing, being, and doing. Ben’s most recent role was closer to home at the University of Southern Queensland as Head of College for First Nations. In 2023 Ben was awarded the Neville Bonner Award for Indigenous Education in recognition of his contribution to higher education.