[Anthropgrad] Research School of Humanites - Work-in-Progress Seminar - Lucy Frost

[Sharon Komidar]

Dear All, would you please circulate the following on your email lists.
Apologies for cross posting. Many Thanks, Sharon.

 

The Research School of Humanities presents,
A WORK-IN-PROGRESS SEMINAR

1- 2.30 pm, Friday 18th July 2008, Theatrette, Old Canberra House

Little more than girls: the youngest convicts transported on the Atwick
(1838)

 

Professor Lucy Frost

Director, Centre for Colonialism and its Aftermath, School of English,
Journalism, & European Languages. University of Tasmania.  

 

None of the 25,000 women transported to Australia between 1788 and 1853
left self-authored accounts of their experiences. Most of what we know
about these almost exclusively working-class women comes from the
documentation of crime and punishment. These records, produced to serve
the interests of the state, are often no more than lists filled out in
response to formulaic categories, and yet some of the records yield
snippets of story, as recent scholarship coming out of the Old Bailey
On-line Project demonstrates. The records of trials at the Old Bailey
can be read as records of story-telling within the generic restraints of
courtroom discourse. Professor Frost has been examining another archive
of legal story-telling, the files of precognitions held at the National
Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh. "Precognitions" were the files of
witness statements gathered by a prosecutor's office before a trial in
the High Court of Justiciary, the court operating under Scottish law and
yet handing prisoners over to the British legal system once they were
sentenced "to be transported beyond Seas". Of the 151 women transported
on the Atwick, which arrived in Hobart Town in January 1838, 78 had been
convicted in Scotland. The focus of this paper is a biographical study
of the youngest of these transportees, those aged under 20.

Professor Lucy Frost teaches in the English program at University of
Tasmania, and has particular interests in how the past is 'read', and in
how those readings are translated into what is called 'cultural
heritage'. At present she is asking how one 'reads' the experiences of
female convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land, and how one turns
those readings into the products of cultural heritage tourism. 

Convenors: Ken Taylor and Stephen Foster
For general enquiries please contact: 
Phone: 6125 2434
Email: administration.rsh at anu.edu.au 
Web: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/
All Welcome