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In 2013, the authors of this article and their colleague Gavan McCarthy published Stories in Stone: an annotated history and guide to the collections of Ernest Westlake (1855–1922). The guide provided contextual information and digital access to the entire paper archives relating to the three large stone collections formed by Westlake during his lifetime: French and English geological specimens housed in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History from 1924, and a collection of Tasmanian Aboriginal stone tools stored in the Pitt Rivers Museum since 1923. The Tasmanian collections, formed by Westlake from 1908 to 1910, are highly significant to the Palawa (or Pakana or Tasmanian Aboriginal) community because they include objects made by ancestors, and words spoken by ancestors to Westlake and recorded in his field notebooks. Stories in Stone was created to improve access to Westlake's Tasmanian collections for the Palawa community with whom author Rebe Taylor had worked closely since 1999. Nonetheless, the structural and technical design of Stories in Stone was not Palawa-led. It was driven by Australian and international archiving standards; by stipulations set out by the collecting institutions; and by the stories of collecting and subsequent scholarship on the collections. In 2023, Stories in Stone is offline, and the authors are planning a relaunch. This time they aim to reach beyond their original aim of providing archival access to the Palawa community, and work with Palawa community to co-design how that access is delivered. This consultative work will be done at the University of Tasmania, where Palawa advisors and other Indigenous scholars have been integral to developing international Indigenous data sovereignty principals. This article precedes those formal discussions and thus offers a timely reflection on the original aims and design of Stories in Stone as well as an extensive analysis of broader changes in the management and dissemination of First Nations collections and culture. Such changes include: international human rights frameworks; movements supporting data and archival sovereignty; co-designed archival technologies; and increased focus on archives as process not merely product. These developments will lay the foundations for the next version of Stories in Stone, which aims to go beyond access, scholarship, and standards by helping to facilitate First Nations' aspirations for dignity, sovereignty, and self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the political situation in Tasmania during the first half of 2020. Topics covered include the sudden resignation of Premier Will Hodgman in January 2020, the measures taken by the new government of Premier Peter Gutwein in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the suspension of the Legislative Council's finfish farming inquiry.

A largely forgotten history exists of extensive connections between Asia and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although it was a harsh and deadly place for Indigenous people and incarcerated convicts, Van Diemen’s Land offered opportunity for a growing society of merchants, farmers, bureaucrats, governors, judges, retired military men and their families. Asia was a lived presence in everyday life through the purchase and consumption of foodstuffs, clothing and furnishings from India and China. Cashed-up Vandemonians in the 1820s and 1830s could buy rice, silk, bamboo furniture and at least five different types of tea. Many colonial administrators had experience in Asia and brought Indian servants with them. Due to its climate, the island was touted as the perfect retirement destination for British military families retiring from India and other Asian postings. Asian ship crews were an everyday sight in port. Today, however, these past connections have been forgotten. Tasmania’s current turn to Asia as a key strategy for the state’s future economic prosperity appears to be something new. This article argues that revealing the heterogeneous past challenges contemporary views of historical Tasmania as isolated and monocultural and is essential in reshaping Tasmania’s imagined Asian future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

James Gravenor, a convict servant on George Augustus Robinson’s ‘friendly mission’ to the Aboriginal Tasmanians in the early 1830s, later published a long-overlooked description of the process of ‘decoying’ Aboriginal people into captivity. This article uses Gravenor’s testimony to explore this ‘decoy’ phenomenon, resituating Aboriginal Tasmanians in the wider processes of capture during the ‘friendly mission’ expeditions. By reflecting on Gravenor’s relationship with historical narratives formulated during his lifetime, and his subsequent neglect by scholars, this article also offers a critique and reassessment of a ‘master narrative’ of Tasmanian frontier history that largely derived from and survived well beyond the 1870s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the picture boards in Van Diemen's Land, or known as Tasmania. Topics include the original use of imagery to communicate with indigenous Tasmanians, the identification of picture board designs by sequence of scholarly discovery, and the iconography of captivity that is resonant of wide colonial experience.

Tensions between Protestants and Catholics persisted throughout nineteenth-century Australia. Historians have tended to examine the part played by the clergy, pressure groups or newspapers in sectarian disputes in the main colonies of New South Wales and Victoria. This article contributes to an understanding of anti-Catholicism in the Australian colonies by focusing on the actions and writings of one Catholic layman, Dr Edward Swarbreck Hall, in mid nineteenth-century Tasmania. To minimise religious hostility, Hall was tolerant towards Protestants, loyal to the British Crown, and worked co-operatively with other creeds in helping the poor. This approach made Catholicism more acceptable to Protestant society until the late 1860s. Thereafter religious divisions became more pronounced with the appointment of Irish Bishop Daniel Murphy, who adopted the authoritarian policies of the papacy and asserted the rights of Catholics. Feeling threatened by Catholic assertion and antagonised by Catholic doctrinal beliefs, Evangelical Protestants expressed anti-Catholic sentiments at public meetings and in newspapers. In showing how Hall defended Catholics when aspersions were cast on their clergymen, their character, or their religious practices, this article concludes that Catholics were not passive victims, but Hall's fierce polemical style worked against his desire for religious peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Settled as Australia’s second colony in 1803, Tasmania began life as the island penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land and gained a reputation for brutality in the treatment of convicts and the Indigenous population. But brutality did not stop with humans. Settlers to the island had been accustomed to be cruel to animals in Britain and this practice continued in Tasmania. Decisive steps to stop this cruelty only emerged in the 1870s when branches of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals were formed in Hobart in 1878 and in Launceston in 1879. This article examines the aims and methods of the Launceston branch of the SPCA and assesses its success in changing attitudes to animal cruelty. This article has been peer reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will analyze the 'historical' novel Gould's Book of Fish (2001) by the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan with the aim of reflecting upon the power of the creative word as a means to forge reality, shape identities, mask or unmask truths, and also to prefigure a different, alternative world order based on commonly negotiated and thus shared values. The postmodernist revisiting of the traditional genre of the historical novel does not compromise the postcolonial commitment of the writer: Flanagan's incursions into the Australian colonial past are informed by his concern for urgent social and political causes which has characterized his unswerving fight against all systems of inequality and exploitation. In his novel, the subversion of the linear causal relation of events which calls into question the truthfulness and objectivity of history, together with the foregrounded metanarrative reflection on the art of writing, contribute to the revisiting and re-discussing of the myth of progress and the cult of rationality at the very roots of Western civilization and of its imperialistic enterprise. Flanagan's 'anti-historical' historical novel tackles urgent questions about modernity interrogating the founding narratives of the Australian national identity, in order to explore the uncontrollable and shifting areas of the contemporary 'transnation' in which the traditional categories shaping subjectivities are disrupted. As the paper will demonstrate, the writer digs into the past of his nation not simply in order to unravel its hidden histories but to detect the profound, inextricable interconnections with the present across different times and spaces. Feelings and experiences that exist above and beyond historical contingencies and cultural differences represent the writer's privileged area of investigation as they trespass upon conventional and artificial boundaries revealing what it is that makes us all human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fishery-independent diver-based puerulus settlement monitoring has been conducted for over two decades in sheltered inshore shallow sites on the Tasmanian coast and has been utilized in the development of a predictive capacity for the Tasmanian lobster fishery. However, the majority of catches in this fishery are sourced from deep (>50 m), remote, and highly exposed areas where it is impractical and expensive to conduct fishery-independent routine settlement monitoring. To determine if pueruli settle in deeper waters, we adapted a crevice puerulus collector to fit within a lobster trap frame specifically designed to be deployed and serviced by vessels typical of the Tasmanian lobster fleet. A 5-month trial yielded puerulus catches similar to those from inshore shallow sites including recording puerulus from waters more than 100 m depth. The collector design was reported by fishers to be safe and convenient to service in regions exposed to strong westerly winds and swell more than 7 m. This collector will allow a cost-effective fishery-dependent approach to puerulus settlement monitoring utilizing commercial fishers for field operations and researchers for administration, sorting, and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s historians interested in the impact of changing social and economic conditions on health outcomes have studied record collections that contain information about adult stature. Fluctuations in mean height by year of birth are potentially informative because they should reflect conditions encountered in utero and during the early years of life. Yet, like all historical records, surviving height series are not necessarily representative of the population as a whole. They are also subject to factors that might change over time. This article uses Tasmania nineteenth century criminal record series to explore these issues in greater depth. It is particularly interested in the relationship between recorded height and conviction history. The article examines ways in which digital humanities techniques can be used to shed light this complex and often puzzling relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight Van Diemen's Land. His name has become embedded in Tasmanian history and, with very little opposition, has been widely commemorated with anniversary celebrations, monuments, and, above all, the naming of Tasmania. Although some historians have suggested that Tasman's exploits were modest, before 1945 he received more attention than other Australian explorers because he was free of any connections with convicts or Aborigines, because of the Tasmanian love of the sea, and because of the dearth of heroes in Tasmanian history. After 1945 Tasmania received a number of Dutch migrants who used Tasman's name to maintain links with their homeland and develop a Dutch-Australian identity. The presence of Dutch migrants renewed Tasmanian enthusiasm for commemorating Tasman and exploiting trade, tourism, and cultural connections with the Netherlands. This article examines the form, function, and actors attached to Tasman's commemoration from the early nineteenth century to the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores two objects in Tasmania and their relationships with Australian medievalism. One, a neo-gothic window, was later thought to be genuinely medieval. The other, apparently a Norman-era baptismal font, was only recently identified as being ancient. Through the way these items were treated and understood when installed and subsequently, this paper grapples with two main themes. Firstly, the possibility of confessional differences between Catholic and Anglican medievalist practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Secondly, the key problem of how Australian medievalism, generally held to be inspired and influenced by the absence of immediate medieval remains, understood and treated tangible medieval European artefacts in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early twentieth-century Tasmanian discourses about racial difference reflected trans-imperial connections between England, its colonies, and the United States. This globalised discourse and ideological interconnectedness in turn produced recognisably and intentionally similar policies, although historians bounded by the interests of later nation-states have tended to overlook this. Tasmania's Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1912 exemplifies how a particular colony's ideology and policy, while attuned to local conditions and particularities, was nonetheless a product of an international framework for regulating the colonised. This legislation was demonstrably modelled on Aboriginal protection legislation passed in the Australian state of Queensland in 1897 and has significant commonalities with the Dawes Act passed in the United States in 1887 to provide for the subdivision of Indian reservations. In Australian historiography, the fact that Tasmania had an Aboriginal reserve and enacted Aboriginal protection legislation has been under-appreciated and even denied. This article redresses these omissions. It also contributes towards redressing the myopic focus on nation and/or colony that has, until recent years, left Australian historiography devoid of a full appreciation of colonial dependence on, and contributions to, a global discourse of race. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses a complex nexus of discourse and praxis: varying Enlightenment visions of Man; emergent ideas about human differences; and encounters between European scientific voyagers and Indigenous people in New Holland (Australia) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) at the start of the nineteenth century. Discursively, I trace two strands of ‘anthropological’ thinking. One, philosophical and economic, is epitomized in French and Scottish stadial theory. The other is naturalist and culminated in Buffon's natural history of man. Both were appropriated from the late eighteenth century by a nascent science of race. With respect to praxis, I chart the reciprocal impact of metropolitan theory, antipodean experience and local agency by selective comparison of materials produced by the voyages of Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin in Australian waters in 1801–1803. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the potential of a decolonizing poetics, evident across Tasmanian Aboriginal arts and cultural works, to contribute to a distinctively Aboriginal film-making practice in Tasmania. The potency of this body of work, alongside the Aboriginal community's vigorous political campaigns for cultural rights and land rights, has not translated into a distinctively Tasmanian Aboriginal film culture. Apart from several significant documentary films and photographic works that indicate the emergence of a powerful decolonizing poetics there are no fictional feature films by Tasmanian Aboriginal film-makers. Moreover recent feature films produced by non-Indigenous film-makers about Tasmania invoke the ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ trope, imagining an island without any Aboriginal presence. This article considers processes that contribute to decolonizing through the contemporary work of Tasmanian Aboriginal writers and artists, including Jim Everett, Julie Gough, Greg Lehman and photographer Ricky Maynard. I suggest their poetics are more than textual. They are grounded in country and community—linked. to another realm beyond the ‘shallow’ time of colonization. Their decolonizing poetics are shared with Maori film-maker Barry Barclay's ‘Fourth Cinema’, where the camera is firmly in Indigenous hands, based in community and cultural practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article expands upon the crucial role of the state in the provision of infrastructure in late-nineteenth century Australia by examining the hitherto overlooked role of local government, and in particular, the provision of municipal services in Launceston, Tasmania's second largest city. From the 1890s, socialist groups across Europe actively sought to control councils, believing 'good' local government the key to social reform. Municipalisation in Tasmania had more pragmatic origins. Colonial governments encouraged local-level service provision to prevent the draining of their own finances. In Launceston an ideological element occasionally surfaced. But municipalisation was driven by resentment of a neglectful Tasmanian government, by the desire to modernise the town, by intent to secure new sources of revenue, and by the strong civic pride of businessmen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the attempts to establish utopian communal settlements in Tasmania in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The establishment of the first semi-utopian community called the Indiana Institution was proposed by a group of wealthy British military and administrative employees of the East India Co. in 1824. In 1858, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert G. Hamilton promoted the creation of a community of British officers and soldiers from India to be called Indian Sanatorium. Other communities discussed are Castra, New Tasmania, Southport and Poynduk.

The article assesses the historical evidence related to the Tasmanian Aboriginal history, culture and language, based on the Westlake Papers, which includes works by amateur scientist Ernest Westlake during his journey to Tasmania in 1908-1910 to collect Aboriginal stone artifacts. The author contends that the evidence should be re-analyzed based on historical shifts, in which Tasmanian Aboriginal people are acknowledged as a living community rather than an extinct race. The author explains the continuation of fish eating habit among the Aboriginal people despite non-presence of fish bones in shell middens across Tasmania from about 3,000 BP on.

A substantial amount of shared trans-Tasman history has fallen between the cracks of the Australian and New Zealand historiographies, which have evolved separately. This matter is only beginning to be explored with renewed interest in comparative and transnational histories. In this article, the significance of shared episodes in the federal story is addressed. It analyses conversations between public men in 1890 and 1891, and especially during the visit by the New Zealand Federation Commission to the newly federated Australia in 1901. Four themes emerge from these conversations: ideas of Australasia and White Australia, a community of interest and fear of takeover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the first Liberal Party government of New Zealand (1891-1912) and its influence on Labor Party politics in Australia, especially Tasmania. New Zealand's reputation at the time as one of the most progressive states in the world is discussed, with attention to legislation affecting land settlement, tenure, and taxation, and industrial relations. Conservative and liberal opinion in Tasmania, as manifested in Tasmanian newspaper commentaries, about the New Zealand reforms are discussed.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "The Companion to Tasmanian History," by Alexander Turnbull in the June 19, 2016.