Introduction: No one is an island: Thinking archipelagically about Tasmanian lives

Annaliese Claydon, Kristyn Harman and Naomi Milthorpe

In June 2022, a multidisciplinary symposium on ‘Writing Tasmanian Lives’ was held at the University of Tasmania in Nipaluna/Hobart. At the time, Tasmania was emerging from two years of isolation, and the symposium was marked by that moment. It was held partly online and partly in-person, the latter being partly masked, socially distanced and subject to vaccination requirements. Nevertheless, there were many moments of sparkling conviviality and genuine connection—because, for many of us, this was the first time we had seen our colleagues in years. This was part of the experience of being Tasmanian in those days. For nearly two years, islanders had lived a strange existence, the product of dual border closures: of Australia from the rest of the world and Tasmania from the rest of Australia. While we had been free of many of the restrictions that were part of daily life elsewhere, we were nevertheless still cut off from the world, separated from our families, friends and colleagues on the mainland and overseas. For two years, we had turned inward and looked outward, and we felt our ‘islandness’ very keenly indeed.

This special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History has grown out of that symposium, and its historical, geographical, epidemiological and environmental moment. That confluence has defined the theme at the heart of this special issue: that writing Tasmanian lives requires us to think about islands, archipelagos, and how connections between people and place are rendered in the historical record. This is not only a biographical, but also a geographical and a methodological problem. As Alison Bashford has put it, ‘islands are good to think with as well as about’.¹ They are not only objects of enquiry, but also interpretive lenses, presenting a method of comprehending the myriad entanglements of the local and the global in a bounded space.² Thinking about islands invokes not only isolation, but also shorelines, currents and migrations in ways that place human and non-human connection at the centre of life, and therefore at the centre of analysis. Thinking about island lives can help us to explore tensions between isolation and connection, between ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’, between the visible and the invisible, and between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Doing so poses questions about methods and practice: what counts as evidence, whose lives can and cannot be written, and where does a story really begin and end—much like navigating a rocky coastline in a fog with a heavy swell. As Joe Moran puts it, islands have the capacity to alter how we understand and tell stories, attuning us to ‘the overwhelming richness of even the tiniest fragment of reality’.³

For most of its human history, Tasmania was not an island, but a peninsula.⁴ First settled approximately 40,000 years ago, Tasmania and its islands (called Lutruwita in palawa kani) were separated from mainland Australia by rising seas some 12,000 years ago. Surrounded by the Tasman Sea, the Southern Ocean, the Indian Ocean and Bass Strait, the Tasmanian islands are buffeted by the winds of the Roaring Forties and enriched by the confluences of the Eastern Australian and Zeehan currents.⁵ By the time European colonists disembarked from their wooden sailing ships in the late eighteenth century, Indigenous Tasmanians were an archipelagic people who voyaged in bark canoes and catamarans over turbulent waters, had an unsurpassed knowledge of marine and intertidal environments, and sophisticated networks that linked seas, shores and inland regions.⁶ Relationships with migratory animals—from long-voyaging shearwaters to whales—also linked people to wider worlds and broader ecosystems in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, as well as linking fresh and saltwater within the Tasmanian archipelago.⁷ But these networks and relationships were illegible to European settlers, washed over by the huge expanse of sea between the place they called Van Diemen’s Land and everywhere else.

This apparent isolation made Van Diemen’s Land an attractive colonial possession. From the early nineteenth century, it was incorporated into what Clare Anderson has called the British Empire’s ‘carceral archipelago’, operating as an open-air prison for people sentenced to transportation from beyond or within the Australian colonies.⁸ It was also entangled in the intellectual archipelagos of empire, in which islands became places for experimentation, observation and ‘improvement’. Isolated islands were understood to have preserved natural wonders, ‘living fossils’ or imagined idylls, and might yet produce utopias or quarantine disease.⁹ They were also linked by voyages and voyagers—ships of exploration and incarceration, itineraries of colonial regiments, and the transits of missionaries, whalers, sealers and convicts: by, in fact, the explosion of commerce and incarceration that characterised the first half of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ The lives lived on and through Tasmania’s islands—what Patsy Cameron has called the ‘colonial sea frontier’—were all, from the early nineteenth century, archipelagic.¹¹ Most people here had been displaced, sometimes many times over, and sometimes over generations. Theirs were littoral lives, not landlocked ones. Whether by choice, by chance or by force, they lived on a ‘human shore’, in an expectation of an anticipated or remembered elsewhere.¹² They remind us of Ann Curthoys’s call to reimagine Australian history not as an endpoint, but as one point among many trajectories and meeting places, which does not necessarily produce a bounded national history.¹³

Tasmania’s geography and history make it an especially fruitful place to explore life writing—especially now, at a time when the practice of biography is itself shifting and, perhaps, becoming more archipelagic than insular. Life writing as a form and genre crosses history, literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, philosophy and creative practice. The last 20 years have seen a new kind of life writing emerge out of the juxtaposition of historical geographers and the practitioners of ‘new imperial history’, focusing on ‘imperial lives’.¹⁴ On the one hand, this work seeks to uncouple biography from its traditional association with the nation by focusing on lives lived across borders and imperial spaces. Hazel V. Carby, for instance, intends with her auto/biographical Imperial Intimacies ‘to undermine the binary thinking that opposes colonial centre to colonized margin, home to abroad, and metropole to periphery’ through a productive methodological rivalry between ‘memory, history and poetics’.¹⁵ On the other hand, such works increasingly not only incorporate prosopography, but also prize what could be called relationality (in the words of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘a holistic conception of the inter-connectedness and inter-substantiation between and among all living things and the earth’).¹⁶ This work tracks the patterns that emerge out of imperial entanglements: the paths of money and finance; the legacies of slavery, environmental change and degradation, and intellectual and sentimental trajectories; and the flows of migration from and to colonised places.¹⁷ This is both unsurprising and welcome as the academy and the methods of historical research are cracked open by Black, Indigenous, feminist and queer scholars who, as Moreton-Robinson notes, begin scholarly enquiry by acknowledging and situating their standpoint and lived experience of political and social struggle.¹⁸ Paralleling the non-human turn in critical theory, we see the turn to write biographies of animals, everyday objects, cities, minerals and books.¹⁹ Whether it is the work of one researcher or a colloquium, whether a monograph or a database, new histories continue to emerge that connect archipelagos of thought, experience and commerce across and beyond the British Empire.²⁰ The Legacies of British Slave Ownership project, for example, allows us to see the reverberations and connections between slave ownership, compensation and family history far beyond the West Indies.²¹ And as Carby’s title suggests, the historical exploration of human lives and their entanglement with social, historical and transnational narratives is increasingly seen in terms of intimacy, which, to borrow from Lauren Berlant, ‘names the enigma of [a] range of attachments’ and ‘poses a question of scale that links the instability of individual lives to the trajectories of the collective’.²²

Writing Tasmanian Lives is a timely intervention into the ways in which the lives of people with connections to the island state are explored and written about. One of our overarching aims is to prompt scholarly discussion about the possibilities inherent in looking at lives through different lenses. This collection is therefore as much about current practices used in writing Tasmanian lives as it is about the lived experiences of the subjects about whom the authors have written. Many of the essays included in this special issue seek new, interdisciplinary ways of writing a life. For example, Philippa Moore’s essay outlines the creative methodologies she undertook to write a life of the colonial businesswoman Maria Lord, a well-known figure with a surprisingly small archive. Moore writes of the deep mapping methods she used, adopted from creative practice, to place her subject through site-specific creative work in significant locations. Jessica White also writes of her need to combine historical and critical methods—and to think expansively about geographic relationality—while writing her ecobiography of the nineteenth-century botanist Georgiana Molloy.

A quarter of a century has elapsed since the beginning of the new millennium, and it is now more than a century since the publication of Lytton Strachey’s classic work Eminent Victorians, in which the author controversially rewrote the lives of Cardinal Manning, Dr Arnold of Rugby, Florence Nightingale and General Gordon, critiquing the moral superiority associated with the Victorian era and revealing his subjects’ flaws.²³ Over the intervening years, each generation has reinvented its relationship with the dead (or their own selves) and the writing of their lives. In the wider Australian context, biographical writing has taken on a particular nuance inflected by historical preoccupations with both autobiography and prosopography. Through these lenses, individuals’ lives are ‘increasingly being considered in the context of larger social structures’.²⁴ The impetus for doing so, according to Malcolm Allbrook and Melanie Nolan, has been informed by Australia’s post–World War II turn to postcolonialism as well as the digital accessibility of a wide-ranging archive.²⁵ The archival turn in both historical and literary studies has prompted consideration of the forms of life writing; its basis in the material evidence of letters, documents and manuscripts; and the ways in which archival research itself invites a relationality and intimacy with the biographical subject.²⁶

Despite unparalleled access to vast digital repositories of source materials, many of the lives encountered in this special issue are not as archivally dense as those of others (mainly men) who have held high office. Instead, telling the fragmentary histories of meeting places—or of individuals who moved between them, leaving only partial traces behind—requires innovative methodologies and sources, bringing together ‘artifacts, objects, landscapes, seascapes and non-traditional sources to understand the past’.²⁷ Some authors coax stories from fragmentary and incomplete evidence, blending it with social, cultural and environmental history to create a fuller picture of what a life might have been.²⁸ Others prise open the archives of well-known persons—often men whose records were assembled by women for the purpose of writing biographies.²⁹ Still others take an approach advocated by Virginia Woolf: ‘hanging up looking glasses at odd corners’—or, if you like, finding new compositional angles—to capture ‘contradictory versions of the same face’.³⁰ In doing so, they seek to illuminate lives eclipsed by others, and to re-story the narratives of exceptionality, nation, empire and history that have been closely linked to the project of biography.

As Moran has pointed out, life stories can illuminate islands hidden in plain sight that have been eclipsed by larger histories and stories in their region.³¹ Further, as Hermione Lee argues, biography (as a genre) has an educative function (as a branch of history) that teaches the reader about the shape of a life, whether that life is close to us or far away.³² Susan Bartie’s focus on the life stories of lawyers shaping the emergent discipline of environmental law has this educative role. Such stories also require acts of imagination and interpolation that may make historians and biographers ill at ease. As Lynette Russell has observed, historians are often reluctant to use their imagination when confronted with fragmented archives, and that hesitation, born of a lifetime of discipline, can deprive them of one of their most useful tools—a ‘structured, historically informed imagining’.³³ Embracing connection and attachment, Shino Konishi has argued, can release lives from the trap of labels that pin them into a single category—convict, inmate, wife, soldier, broker. It can also enable the historian-biographer to write about lives rather than subjects, and to view those lives within broader ecosystems that incorporate, but are not wholly defined by, colonialism, capitalism or incarceration.³⁴ We suggest here (based on long-established evidence) that literary techniques, including the forms of literature, are fruitful resources for the historian and the biographer. For instance, the 2024 winner of the Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History was Robbie Arnott, for his novel Limberlost.³⁵ This history award ‘recognises works that make a significant contribution to our understanding of Tasmania’s past’. Limberlost, set in northern Tasmania and focusing on the lives of apple farmers over several decades of unfolding Tasmanian history, was the first work of fiction to win the award. In this moving story based on his family history, Arnott sought to ‘capture what life was like for people in the 20th century on this island, and how the Tasmanian environment shaped their lives’.³⁶ Notably, what the novel form provides is the intimacy of focus on an individual and their feelings, on the relationships that motivate them as well as the social, economic, political and environmental movements that background their lives. As Kim Shaw writes in this issue, using Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) as a case study, novels allow us to see, dramatically and with feeling, the claims of the biographical subject upon the narratability of their own lives. As Shaw writes, this imaginative endeavour might perhaps bring historians to reconsider ‘the ethical responsibilities of historians towards both the living and the dead’.

The essays in this collection all propose what could be seen as archipelagic interpretations of Tasmanian lives. Each, in its own way, presses on questions of insularity, of how much we can know about an individual life, about what counts as evidence, and about the tempting trap of total knowledge and the allure of the imagination. Several of them connect multiple sites within, across and outside polities. Each individual and each place could be considered in their own right, but when taken together, new patterns, relationships and possibilities emerge. Each is, to borrow Bashford’s term, ‘terraqueous’—that is, they consist of multiple spaces that can be distinct, and can also blend into one another. Each has a unique and robust collection of methods and sources: the gaze of a painter, the drape of a dress, the built environment and the living landscape. They also interrogate archival sources—wills, baptismal records, monuments, landscapes, structures—and repositories in new ways, subjecting them to new interpretive lenses. Each piece in the collection develops an innovative methodology to interrogate individual lives and the project of life writing. Their practices are so diverse that they cannot be simply called ‘interdisciplinary’. Rather, they are truly archipelagic, in the sense that they prioritise relationality and meeting places, as well as interiority and isolation. Many employ acts of imagination in a disciplined relationship to rigorous research. No-one is an island.

The reissued and updated Reading Autobiography Now by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson notes that twenty-first-century life writing ‘is now a messy multi-sensorium, teeming with the potential—and the pitfalls—of vibrant self-presentations across media, geographies and worlds’.³⁷ The 11 essays presented here are heterogeneous in approach. Some pursue individual stories of personal belongings (Kirstie Ross’s essay on Tom and Mary Moore’s engraved silver napkin rings), clothes (Paige Gleeson, Kristyn Harman and Freya Harrington’s piece on Olive Pink), case files (the story of Tasman Wright as told here by Caroline Evans) or wills (Stephenie Calahan writing about Jean Bellette’s bequest). Some of our papers look at the way artistic forms can illuminate the historical subject, whether that form is a painting (Anita Gowers and Helen Hughes on C.H.T. Costantini’s portrait of the bushranger Lawrence Kavenagh) or a novel (Kim Shaw on Peter Carey’s novel Jack Maggs). Some seek understanding of local Tasmanian populations through medium-level data sets (Nick Brodie on baptismal registrations). Still others question the epistemologies and methodologies by which we think, write and understand the human life as it moves through and interacts with history and the environment, pondering the potential for biographical and historical writing of innovative, critical approaches, including legal life writing (Susan Bartie’s interdisciplinary study of the contribution of environmental lawyers to the discipline of environmental law), deep mapping (Philippa Moore on writing a speculative biography of Maria Lord), ecobiography (Jessica White’s approach to the life of Georgiana Molloy) and re-storying (Anna Claydon on the icy entanglements of John and Jane Franklin). Many of the lives examined here are familiar, either as well-known public figures or as tropes of Tasmanian history—convict, settler, explorer, bushranger. There are also some intimate, lesser-known stories that may still resonate hauntingly with readers of this journal or those familiar with Tasmania’s present complexity—stories of institutional abuse and political struggle across both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A lacuna in this issue is the lack of an essay centring the life of Indigenous Tasmanians. This represents both a regrettable gap in this issue, and a significant opportunity for future special issues of this journal, to respond to and complement the necessarily limited collection of Tasmanian lives gathered here. Both the essays we have commissioned, and those we have not been able to include, show there is more to understand about the history of this place, its interior networks and its connections outward. In taking an archipelagic approach to commissioning these essays, we extend an invitation to you, the readers of this special issue, to celebrate with us and to extend the multivalent approaches to writing Tasmanian (and, of course, non-Tasmanian) lives.

1. 1 Alison Bashford, ‘Terraqueous Histories’, The Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (2017): 255, doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X16000431.

2. 2 Bashford, ‘Terraqueous Histories’, 255–60.

3. 3 Joe Moran, ‘The Scattering: A Family History for a Floating World’, History Workshop Journal 92 (2021): 4–28, doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbab015.

4. 4 Australian Government, ‘Islands’, Geoscience Australia, last updated 1 November 2023, ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/landforms/islands.

5. 5 K. R. Ridgway, ‘Seasonal Circulation around Tasmania: An Interface between Eastern and Western Boundary Dynamics’, Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 112, no. C10 (2007), doi.org/10.1029/2006JC003898.

6. 6 Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Allen & Unwin, 2012), 3–42. For catamaran use, see Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonial Sea Frontier, vol. 3 (Fullers Bookshop, 2011), 18–19.

7. 7 Cameron, Grease and Ochre, 20–30, 35–6; Ryan Tucker Jones, ‘A Whale of a Difference: Southern Right Whale Culture and the Tasman World’s Living Terrain of Encounter’, Environment and History 25, no. 2 (2019): 185–218, doi.org/10.3197/096734018X15217309861540.

8. 8 Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139057554; Claire Anderson, A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), doi.org/10.5040/9781350000704.

9. 9 Bashford, ‘Terraqueous Histories’; Harry Liebersohn, The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific (Harvard University Press, 2006), 1–14, doi.org/10.4159/9780674040236.

10. 10 David Igler, ‘Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770–1850’, American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (2004): 693–719, doi.org/10.1086/ahr/109.3.693; Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Bridget Williams Books, 2012), doi.org/10.7810/9781927131435; Alison Bashford, ‘World History and the Tasman Sea’, American Historical Review 126, no. 3 (2021): 922–48, doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab356.

11. 11 Cameron, Grease and Ochre.

12. 12 Michael N. Pearson, ‘Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems’, Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–73, doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2006.0059; John R. Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226922256.001.0001.

13. 13 Ann Curthoys, ‘From Montserrat to Settler-Colonial Australia: The Intersecting Histories of Caribbean Slave-Owning Families, Transported British Radicals, and Indigenous Peoples’, History Workshop Journal 90 (2021): 211–32, doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbaa015.

14. 14 David Lambert and Alan Lester, eds., Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

15. 15 Hazel V. Carby, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso, 2019), 13.

16. 16 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Relationality’, in Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, ed. Chris Andersen and Jean O’Brien (Taylor & Francis, 2016), 71.

17. 17 Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2014), doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139022026; Zoe Laidlaw, Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism 1830–1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), doi.org/10.1017/9781108164658; Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge University Press, 2017); James Beattie, Edward Melillo and Emily O’Gorman, ‘Rethinking the British Empire through Eco-Cultural Networks: Materialist-Cultural Environmental History, Relational Connections and Agency’, Environment and History 20, no. 4 (2014): 561–75, doi.org/10.3197/096734014X14091313617406; David A. Chang, ‘Indigenous Biography, Genealogy, and Webs of Relation’, Biography 39, no. 3 (2016): 274–6, doi.org/10.1353/bio.2016.0037; Ian Sanjay Patel, We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (Verso, 2021).

18. 18 Moreton-Robinson, ‘Relationality’, 70–1.

19. 19 For a summary of this trend, see Donna Lee Brien, ‘Object Biography: Writing the Lives of Objects, Artefacts, and Things’, in New and Experimental Approaches to Writing Lives, ed. Jo Parnell (Red Globe Press, 2019), 34–47.

20. 20 This is a vast and expanding field; however, the Australian Journal of Biography and History has produced a number of special issues that contribute significantly to this scholarship, including on the legacies of British slavery in Australia, convict lives and the forthcoming volume on writing Oceanian lives.

21. 21 Zoë Laidlaw and Georgina Arnott, ‘National Biographies and Transnational Lives: Tracing Connections between Slavery and Settler Colonialism’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 6 (2022): 143–70, doi.org/10.22459/AJBH.06.2022.07; Zoë Laidlaw, Catherine Hall, Keith Mcclelland, Jeremy Martens and Georgina Arnott, ‘Roundtable: Linking the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership to Australian Colonisation’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 6 (2022): 189–203, doi.org/10.22459/AJBH.06.2022.09.

22. 22 Lauren Berlant, ‘Intimacy: A Special issue’, in Intimacy, ed. Berlant (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3.

23. 23 Lytton Stratchey, Eminent Victorians (Chatto & Windus, 1918).

24. 24 Malcolm Allbrook and Melanie Nolan, ‘Australian Historians and Biography’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 1 (2018): 5–6, doi.org/10.22459/AJBH.2018.01.

25. 25 Allbrook and Nolan, ‘Australian Historians and Biography’, 15.

26. 26 For examples of this, see Maryanne Dever, Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page (Palgrave, 2019), doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49886-1; Melanie Micir, The Passion Projects: Modernist Women, Intimate Archives, Unfinished Lives (Princeton University Press, 2019), doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691193113.001.0001.

27. 27 Bashford, ‘Terraqueous Histories’, 267.

28. 28 One of the best early examples is Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1984).

29. 29 Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (Yale University Press, 2012); Perry, Colonial Relations; Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2003); Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Harvard University Press, 2005), 251–60, doi.org/10.4159/9780674039483.

30. 30 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Biography’, in Collected Essays, vol. 4 (The Hogarth Press, 1967), 226.

31. 31 Moran, ‘‘The Scattering’, 5.

32. 32 Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009), 16–17.

33. 33 Lynette Russell, ‘“The Instrument Brings on Voices”: Writing a Biographical History’, Meanjin 60, no. 3 (2001): 149.

34. 34 Shino Konishi, ‘Making Connections and Attachments: Writing the Lives of Two Nineteenth-Century Aboriginal Men’, Biography 39, no. 3 (2016): 424, doi.org/10.1353/bio.2016.0050.

35. 35 Robbie Arnott, Limberlost (Text, 2022).

36. 36 University of Tasmania, ‘Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost Wins Prestigious $25,000 History Writing Award’, accessed 24 August 2025, utas.edu.au/about/news-and-stories/articles/2024/robbie-arnotts-limberlost-wins-prestigious-$25,000-history-writing-award.

37. 37 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography Now. An Updated Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 3rd ed. (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), xlvii.