The Australian Historical Association
The site for and about historians working in or on Australia.
Congratulations to AHA member Tim Causer, who has edited and introduced a new scholarly edition of the earliest Australian convict narrative, Memorandoms by James Martin, the only extant first-hand account of the escape from Australia by transported convicts James Martin, William and Mary Bryant and their two infant children, and six other male convicts on the night Read more …
AHA member Kiera Lindsey will be ‘In Conversation’ with ABC Radio National Arts Today’s Michael Cathcart at 6pm on Tuesday 24 May 2016 at Hawthorn Readings Bookstore, Melbourne, discussing her book The Convict’s Daughter: The Scandal that Shocked a Colony (Allen & Unwin).
Kiera Lindsey’s The Convict’s Daughter: The Scandal that Shocked a Colony (Allen & Unwin) concerns a colonial scandal that was unleashed when the daughter of two successful emancipists attempted to elope with the wayward son of Dr John Kinchela, the previous Attorney General of New South Wales. It is a wildly improbable but true melodrama Read more …
William Cuffay, grandson of an African slave and son of a West Indian slave joined the Chartist movement in 1839 and soon became well known for his oratory and sense of humour. Arrested, tried and convicted, for his participation in a planned uprising in London, he was sentenced to transportation for life in Tasmania. Cuffay’s Read more …
Francis MacNamara, was born in 1811 in Cashel, he claimed, in the County Tipperary, Ireland. He was transported to Botany Bay in 1832, then to Van Diemen’s Land arriving 29 October 1842, by which time he was widely known as ‘Frank the Poet’. Mark Gregory’s research project on MacNamara’s life and work is documented in Read more …
Babette Smith’s, The Luck of the Irish: How a Shipload of Convicts Survived the Wreck of the Hive to Make a New Life in Australia (Allen & Unwin) is a fascinating portrait of colonial life in the mid-nineteenth century that reveals how the Irish helped lay the foundations of the Australia we know today. It Read more …