UNE researchers played a key role in the new Hobart Penitentiary project, UnShackled, which has just been awarded a gold medal for Cultural Tourism at the Tasmanian Tourism Awards.
The centrepiece of UnShackled – a joint project of National Trust Tasmania and its partners, UNE and Monash University – is an eight-metre interactive Convict Memorial, a suspended pillar of digital screens.
Visitors to the Penitentiary can use their smartphones to look up specific convict names. Over four minutes, slowly progressing around the pillar’s four sides, information appears about the convict’s crime and sentence, their voyage to the penal colony, and what the records say about their lives in Van Diemens Land.
Based on records about physique and tattoos, digital avatars have been produced for more than 1000 convicts. The display also presents visual and audio landscapes of Tasmania's 50 years as a penal colony.

Image: Depiction of the Hobart Penitentiary Convict Memorial.
Behind the memorial sits about two million records from multiple sources that have been painstakingly digitised and integrated by an alliance of family historians, archivists and researchers. It is the largest historical database in Australia.
Giving digital life to those dusty records was the brainchild of UNE historian, Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, who has played a significant role in curating the data.
"We believe this is a world first," he says. "The data is live-linked to the memorial, so when we add records to the database the display updates automatically and the tourism experience changes accordingly."
"We are hoping that this project will also point to new ways of undertaking historical research. It is showing how to present history in a way that is mutually reinforcing of historians' need to get their work out to the public, and for the public to be supportive of historians' work."
The Convict Memorial was developed as part of the Making Crime Pay project, supported by an ARC Linkage Grant. Prof. Maxwell-Stewart says the success of this 'digital history' project is generating discussion on related projects around Tasmania's convict sites, and elsewhere.
UNE's Archaeology and History Department is finding other uses for digitised records. A UNE PhD student recently explored the possibility of using AI on digitised records to generate Wikipedia-style biographies of Norfolk Island convicts.
Unshackled earlier won a Small Project Architecture award at the 2024 Tasmanian Architecture Awards. The project will now represent Tasmania in the Cultural Tourism Category of the National Awards to be held in Adelaide in March 2025.
Read more about UNE's role in the digitising of Tasmania's convict history here and here.
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Image: Unshackled's digital avatars are sometimes based on contemporary drawings.