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 the 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’s 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.

“In support of the Commandants: subaltern officers of the Moreton Bay settlement, 1824-1850”.

Hear Griffith University Visiting Fellow, Rod Pratt, discuss his research on the junior officers who served at Moreton Bay and whose roles have been mostly eclipsed by their better known commanding officers. The seminar will run from 12.30 to 1.30 pm on Thursday, 10 June 2021. To book your free ticket please follow this link.

This project conducts historical fieldwork by visiting and walking through localities and heritage sites relevant to convict Moreton Bay and the commandant Patrick Logan. In July 2020 I made the first of these field visits and drove to Queen’s Park and Cunningham’s Knoll in Ipswich. My findings, in the case of the Queen’s Park and Cunningham’s Knoll precinct, were that the Ipswich Council showed little interest in acknowledging or commemorating the convict heritage of the city. Instead in its place, the safer progressive myth of the Australian explorer and the achievements of the local Labour party were honoured at an official level in a public space. Access the project here.

The Queensland Native Mounted Police operated between 1849 and 1904. It was organised along paramilitary lines, consisting of detachments of Aboriginal troopers led by white officers. It operated across the whole of Queensland and was explicitly constituted to protect the lives, livelihoods and property of settlers and to prevent (and punish) any Aboriginal aggression or resistance. This was often accomplished through extreme violence in many forms. A four year long project to explore the archaeology of the Native Mounted Police resulted in this database. It is the only publicly available historical and archaeological dataset of their lives and activities. The excavations conducted for this project were the first archaeological investigations of any Native Police force operating anywhere in Australia. This joint project was conducted by researchers from Flinders University, the University of Southern Queensland, the University of Notre Dame Australia, the University of New England and James Cook University. (Burke, H. and L.A. Wallis 2019 Frontier Conflict and the Native Mounted Police in Queensland Database. doi: 10.25957/5d9fb541294d5). Access the database here.

A visit to the Museum of Lands, Mapping and Surveying is well worthwhile. Located at 317 Edward Street, Brisbane the museum collects and exhibits material relating to the surveying of Queensland and the maps created. The museum is open Monday to Friday from 9:30 am to 4 pm and is closed on public holidays. Admission is free.

Honora Bagnall, nee Geary, was born around 1809 in Connough, Galway, Ireland. Under a sentence of seven years transportation to NSW for stealing three pigs. She arrived in Sydney on 27 September 1831. Honora married William Bagnall on 11 May 1835 and on 19 Oct 1835 she was sentenced to 5 years transportation to Moreton Bay penal settlement for stealing cloth. When the penal settlement closed, Honora returned to Sydney per Sophia Jane, arriving 22 May 1839. She returned to Darlinghurst Gaol, but was soon released. Honora died on 10 June 1868 at Campbells River, NSW. Honora’s ancestor, Rosemary Foran, has kindly shared her family research material to allow the creation of this biography.

Listen to Visiting Fellow Timothy Roberts’ talk on ‘John Domville Taylor and the early days on the Downs’, given at the Royal Historical Society of Queensland in December 2020, via this link.