Contributors

Susan Bartie is a legal historian and senior lecturer in law at The Australian National University, currently working on a large socio-legal history of Australian environmental lawyers funded by the Australian Research Council (DE220100264).

Nicholas Dean Brodie is a writer and historian who is presently dean of academic studies at Jane College, Hobart. Specialising in both Australian and European history, his research is frequently concerned with the intersection of research methodologies, historiographical traditions and applied epistemology. He was formerly a researcher with the Archdiocese of Hobart Archives, and his contribution to this issue is drawn from work done with that historically significant private collection.

Stephenie Cahalan is a writer and cultural historian living in Nipaluna/Hobart. Her research explores the theme of legacy in Australia’s cultural history through the lives of artists, activists, visionaries and benefactors. She has worked in the cultural sector, conservation, politics, philanthropy, and as manager and curator of the Truth-Telling at Wybalenna project for the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania. Stephenie holds a master of arts in journalism, media and communications from the University of Tasmania and a PhD from the University of Sydney on the history of philanthropy and bequests in Australia.

Annaliese Claydon is an historian who has worked in national parks, libraries, museums, archives and institutions of higher learning in Australia and the United States. She received a PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015, and is an adjunct researcher at the University of Tasmania. Originally from Alaska, she has always been fascinated by the stories that develop along shorelines, edges and meeting places. Her first book, Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries and the Politics of Truth, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024. Her current project examines the entangled histories of the Southern Ocean, the Tasman World and the Bering Sea in the nineteenth century.

Braham Dabscheck is a senior fellow at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

Derek Drinkwater, formerly a long-serving officer of the Department of the Senate, holds a PhD (political science and international relations) from The Australian National University (ANU). His publications include Sir Harold Nicolson and International Relations: The Practitioner as Theorist (Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, Vol. 1: 1901–1929 (Melbourne University Press, 2000) (assistant editor). He is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and ‘Order, Order!’ A Biographical Dictionary of Speakers, Deputy Speakers and Clerks of the Australian House of Representatives. Derek has also published in the fields of parliamentary history and biography. In 1989–90 he served as a researcher for volume 1 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975 (Crises & Commitments [1992]).

Caroline Evans has worked as a freelance historian and in universities, including many years teaching at the University of Tasmania. She specialises in the history of Tasmanian child welfare, having completed a PhD about Tasmania’s Neglected Children’s Department in 1999 and published a number of articles about it. Between 2011 and 2014, she was a research fellow at the Australian Catholic University researching and writing the Tasmanian content for Find and Connect, a website for people raised in out-of-home care.

Lydia Allison Fucsko is an environmental activist, amphibian conservationist and internationally published wildlife photographer. She holds a PhD from Swinburne University of Technology and was mentored by eminent herpetologist Dr Michael J. Tyler AO. With multiple qualifications from Australia’s leading universities, her academic expertise encompasses environmental education, psychology, counselling and vocational training. Lydia has authored numerous scientific and interdisciplinary publications and is recognised for her contributions to conservation and education. In tribute of her impact, Tantilla lydia and Tantilla carolina were named in her honour and in honour of her mother, Karolina, nee Laszló (Fucsko), a Hungarian freedom fighter, respectively.

Tess Gardner is an independent historian of Australia and China who completed a PhD at ANU in 2023. She was a library fellow at the State Library of New South Wales in 2023 and 2024, and is currently a visiting fellow.

Paige Gleeson is an Australian historian and museum curator who has worked within the tertiary and government sectors. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Tasmania and has published peer reviewed and general audience articles in Tasmanian Historical Studies, History Australia, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Island magazine. Her research interests include the history of colonial museums, material collections, anthropology, and women’s and feminist history.

Anita Gowers is an Australian frame historian and PhD candidate at Monash University, where she is researching nineteenth-century Australian picture frames. Her work examines the relationship between frames, interior design and decorative arts in colonial contexts, while employing digital humanities methods to advance historical inquiry into material culture.

Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA, is an emeritus professor at ANU and works nationally and internationally as an art historian, curator and art critic. He is the author of over 30 books and 2,000 articles, catalogue essays and exhibition critiques.

Kristyn Harman is professor of history at the University of Tasmania. She was the inaugural course coordinator of the diploma of family history and has particular expertise in convict transportation, Indigenous incarceration and social biography. Her publications include the award-winning Aboriginal Convicts (UNSW Press, 2012) and Cleansing the Colony: Transporting Convicts from New Zealand to Van Diemen’s Land (Otago University Press, 2017). Kristyn’s research draws on diverse archival materials to illuminate historical processes of criminalisation and punishment, and practices of domesticity. She frequently employs social biography as methodology to explore the lived experiences of marginalised individuals and communities.

Freya Harrington is an emerging textiles conservator and dress historian. Based in Lutruwita/Tasmania, she holds a master’s of cultural materials conservation from the University of Melbourne. She is currently undertaking a PhD at Deakin University on dress in colonial Tasmania.

Helen Hughes is a senior lecturer in art history and deputy head of the Fine Art Department, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University. She is currently writing a book on colonial Australian convict art, which is under contract with Manchester University Press.

Kiera Lindsey is South Australia’s history advocate, based at the History Trust of South Australia. In 2009, she was the inaugural winner of the Greg Dening Memorial Prize and completed an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award project, ‘Speculative Biography, Historical Craft and the Case of Adelaide Ironside’, in 2022. In addition to publishing two speculative biographies with Allen & Unwin—The Convict’s Daughter (2016) and Wild Love (2023)—Kiera co-edited a Routledge special edition, Speculative Biography: Opportunities, Experiments and Provocations with Donna Lee Brien in 2021.

Naomi Milthorpe is associate professor in English at the University of Tasmania. Her research interests centre on modernist, interwar and mid-century British literary culture, including most particularly the works of Evelyn Waugh. She is the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2016). Naomi is currently completing a scholarly edition of Waugh’s 1932 novel Black Mischief, volume 3 of Oxford University Press’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. From 2021 to 2022, she led the School of Humanities Strategic Project ‘Writing Lives’. One of the project’s research activities was the symposium ‘Writing Tasmanian Lives’ that gave rise to this special issue.

Philippa Moore is an award-winning Hobart-based writer with a PhD in creative writing and history from the University of Tasmania. Her short fiction, poetry and journalism appear regularly in print and online in consumer magazines, international media, literary journals and anthologies, including the Guardian, Womankind and Hello Keanu! As a historian, Philippa is passionate about telling the stories of lesser-known women from the past in creative and provocative ways. Her research spans colonial Australia to postwar Britain, with specific research interests in feminist history, creative history, deep mapping methodologies and convict history. Philippa was a 2023 residential fellow at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writer’s Centre and the joint winner of the 2022–23 Van Diemen History Prize. Her PhD novel about Maria Lord and colonial Tasmania was recently awarded a 2025 Tasmanian Writers and Illustrators Mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors, funded by Arts Tasmania.

Kirstie Ross, a historian and curator, is currently head curator of published and special collections at the University of Otago’s Hocken Library (Dunedin, New Zealand). She also oversees the university’s de Beer Gallery and the Otākou Press Studio. Previous curatorial roles have been at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery from 2018 to 2023, where she curated West: Out on the Edge, an exhibition about the West Coast of Tasmania, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa from 2004 to 2018, where she was lead curator of the award-winning Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War. Her research focuses on topics in twentieth-century social and environmental history, the Great War, literary and print culture, museology and the history of museums, and material culture studies.

Kim Shaw is a librarian and researcher with experience across a diverse range of projects. They have written on the perils of applying Francis Galton’s ‘pictorial statistics’ to representations of convicts and published on the need for qualitative data analysis software to evolve alongside larger research projects. Their work also includes contributions to the Convict Women’s Press Convict Lives series. Additionally, they have co-authored studies on convict health and the history of the Forty Thieves. Their doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Tasmania, advances a critical and reflective approach to data-driven projects, emphasising the importance of avoiding the recolonisation of convicts’ bodies.

Michelle Staff is a feminist historian living on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country in Canberra. She is the online and outreach manager for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. With the support of a Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, she is writing a joint biography of Australian feminists and sisters, Bessie Rischbieth and Olive Evans.

Jessica White is an award-winning author of fiction and creative nonfiction. She is chief investigator on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Finding Australia’s Disabled Authors: Connection, Creativity, Community’, and is co-president of the Association for the Study of Environment, Literature and Culture (Australia and New Zealand). Her most recent book is Silence Is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays. Jessica is associate professor in creative writing and literature at the University of South Australia.

Peter Woodley studied economics and history at ANU before embarking on a career in the Australian Public Service where he was involved in health policy. In 2021, he completed a PhD, again at ANU, in Australian rural history. A book based on the thesis was published by ANU Press in 2025. Peter is a research editor with the Australian Dictionary of Biography and has taught history at ANU and the University of New England. His interests include public and local history, as well as biography.