Assoc Professor Lynley Wallis delivered a presentation at QSA on Thursday 21 October 2021  titled ‘Understanding Queensland’s Native Mounted Police: A free online database to help communities research and understand the lives and work of an infamous police force’. Access  the talk here.

A recording of Jan Richardson’s talk, ‘Making a Fresh Start: Tasmanian Female Ex-Convicts in Free Settlement Queensland’, is now available to view on the Royal Historical Society of Queensland (RHSQ) YouTube channel. Held at the Commissariat Store Museum on 10 November 2021, Jan’s talk explores the stories of ex-convict women and their families who sought to make a fresh start as ‘free settlers’ in the colony of Queensland.

Jan Richardson is a is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities, Law and Social Sciences at Griffith University. She is also a Research Assistant at the Harry Gentle Resource Centre in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research.

View the talk here.

Many wonderful Indigenous resources have been digitised recently and are available online. Join Dr Hilda Maclean online on 17 November 2021 at 7.30 pm to learn about the material which can be accessed from home for free and what it tells us about Indigenous communities and their histories. Register here.

Making a Fresh Start: Tasmanian Female Ex-Convicts in Free Settlement Queensland.

Jan Richardson is a is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities, Law and Social Sciences at Griffith University. She is also a Research Assistant at the Harry Gentle Resource Centre in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University.

Jan’s lecture, to be held at the Commissariat Store Museum on 10 November 2021, will explore the stories of ex-convict women and their families who sought to make a fresh start as ‘free settlers’ in the colony of Queensland. Purchase tickets here.

The HGRC invite applications from innovative scholars in a discipline relevant to digital history or the creative arts to join us for a period as Visiting Fellow, and contribute to the aims of the Harry Gentle Resource Centre. An honorarium of $7,500 is attached to each fellowship. Applications close Friday 12 November 2021.

Join Assoc Professor Lynley Wallis at the Queensland State Archives on Thursday 21 October at 12.30pm for a presentation titled ‘Understanding Queensland’s Native Mounted Police: A free online database to help communities research and understand the lives and work of an infamous police force’. You can register for this free event here.

History Transmitted: Connect – Consider – Challenge

Registrations are still open for an online conference for professional historians, to be held Saturday 18 September – Sunday 19 September 2021. The key note speaker is Professor Melanie Nolan, Director of the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, and General Editor of the Australiian Dictionary of Biography (ADB). Read More.

Ipswich was once the heart of Queensland’s thriving woollen manufacturing industry, from 1875 to 1983. The mills were the largest employers of women in Ipswich. The industry’s demise was a shock to Ipswich and signalled the devastating loss of industry for this manufacturing city. This project traces the origins of the mills in pre-1860s Ipswich, exploring the threads enabling this industry and the local pride the mills created. Ipswich Cotton plantations, the American civil war, the coal industry, Cribb & Foote and the railway workshops are all enfolded into this story. Janis Hanley, a Griffith PhD candidate, has been awarded a Harry Gentle fellowship to research the stories and visually capture these threads, mapping their twists and tangles. This project is a follow on from Janis’s doctorial research into Queensland’s woollen heritage.

The Queensland State Archives in conjunction with Griffith University’s Harry Gentle Resource Centre presented a seminar on 10 June 2021, with Visiting Fellow, Rod Pratt, discussing his research on the junior officers who served at Moreton Bay, and whose roles have been mostly eclipsed by their better known commanding officers. Listen here.

Heather Burke, Ray Kerkhove, Lynley Wallis, Bryce Barker & Cathy Keys, ‘Nervous Nation: fear, conflict and narratives of fortified domestic architecture on the Queensland frontier,’ Aboriginal History Vol. 40 (2020), pp.22-52.

Colonists’ fear of retaliation by the Aboriginal peoples whose traditional lands they had forcibly dispossessed manifested itself in domestic defensive strategies across Queensland. This article presents an analysis of accounts drawn from a range of sources of 97 domestic structures across Queensland with claims for defensive features. Although suggesting that fortified domestic structures were more common than previously envisaged, the review indicates that defensive features were usually minimal – holes in walls and barrable doors, windows or other ports of entry – reflecting the often expedient nature of the structures themselves. Accounts of fortified domestic structures peak in the decades following Federation and through both World Wars as the newly minted Australian nation explicitly engaged in nation-building and constructing the ‘glorious pioneer’ narrative. Read more.