UNE HASS researchers Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Associate Professor Jenny Wise, Dr Lisa Hackett, and Dr Richard Tuffin are part of the research project A Tale of Two Cities being undertaken by the University of South Australia, University of Adelaide, Monash University, and UNE. It aims to understand the intergenerational outcomes of people who arrived to Australia free and unfree, specifically convicts and assisted migrants.
“Our convict cohort landed in Hobart and are probably the best recorded 19th century population in the English-speaking world,” Professor Maxwell-Stewart said.
“We know every scar on their bodies, what they had in their bank accounts and their complete offending history. Assisted migrants were also described in some detail and the societies that they migrated to were relatively small enclaves. It is thus possible to digitise complete series of archival records for both Hobart and Adelaide.
“Australia has long been characterised as a ‘lucky country’, but in practice this is difficult to test as improvements in living standards, especially improvements across generations, can be difficult to measure. We hope to use these two digital treasure troves to explore life course and intergenerational outcomes for these two groups of people.”
A convict chain gang in Van Diemen's Land, James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London, 1843).
This grant will allow for the digitisation of millions of historical records and will link them to time series, greatly assisting future research into social and economic mobility.
The project will bring together many disciplines to achieve its outcomes including economic, social, historical and computational skills. UNE’s contributions will include the development and implementation of digitisation standards across record groups, reconstructing school admissions, the impact of family criminal history on future generations, and data mapping and visualisation.
In addition to understanding long term social and economic mobility in Australia, the team are hoping their work can contribute to a national standard of archival digitisation standards.
“This would improve public access to historical data and will also help researchers link records and curate and manage digitised assets moving forward,” said Hamish.
There is potential for UNE students to assist in this project in the future- watch this space.
