History Now: Caught on Screen: Australia’s Convict History in Film and Television

Nations are often remade through close attention to detail. In this episode, historian Dr James Finlay reflects on how Australia’s convict past has been represented on screen, tracing shifts from early cinematic melodrama through to television drama and contemporary film, and considering how these visual narratives continue to shape national memory.

Drawing on archival research, James introduces an unexpected case study: a 1937 German musical set in the Parramatta Female Factory. The discussion uses this example to examine how convict stories circulated internationally, serving different political and cultural purposes, from critiques of empire to narratives of migration and settlement. We then move into the mid-twentieth century, exploring Australian television dramas such as The Outcasts and their role in reframing transported convicts as emancipist nation builders, before turning to Against the Wind and its enduring influence on popular understandings of colonial Sydney, Irish rebellion, and family history.

The conversation then addresses the limits of these narratives. We consider what is obscured when convict suffering is foregrounded at the expense of Aboriginal presence, and how this tension plays out in documentaries such as The Last Tasmanian and the ABC’s Frontier. Later works including Banished, The Secret River, and The Nightingale provide a framework for discussing divergent audience responses, the politics of recognition, and the uncomfortable reality that shared trauma does not equate to shared position within a settler-colonial society.

Across these examples, the episode reflects on the representation of convict women, the persistence of bushranger mythology, and the reappearance of convict symbolism in contemporary political discourse. Taken together, the discussion underscores the role of film and television not simply as mirrors of the past, but as active producers of historical memory. Attentive, historically grounded storytelling—one that keeps Country in view and acknowledges violence and dispossession—offers a pathway toward a more honest and inclusive national narrative.

Listeners interested in Australian history, screen culture, and the politics of memory are invited to join the conversation.

Transcript

Welcome And Acknowledgement Of Country

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Welcome to the History Now 2025 podcast series brought to you by the History Council of New South Wales in partnership with the Charles Chapwin Museum and the Via Gordon Child Centre at the University of Sydney. In this episode, Dr. James Finlay will speak about research from his new book, Caught on the Screen, Australia's Convict History in Film and Television, in a conversation with historian Dr. Sophie Loy Wilson. From early silent films to contemporary television, stories of convicts have become a powerful lens through which Australians have reimagined the nation's colonial past. This talk examines striking productions from Australia and abroad, highlighting how filmmakers have used the convict story to prompt larger questions about nationalism, colonisation, and aboriginal dispossession. In tracing these shifting representations, it becomes clear how screen culture has both reflected and reshaped public debates about Australian history, identity, and the enduring legacies of colonization.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Good evening, everybody. Thank you for those of you joining us in the room and for those of you joining us online and for those of you joining us on the podcast recording as well to listen into tonight's History Now. My name is Craig Barker. I am the uh I'm the head of public engagement for the Chow Chak Wing Museum. And I've also had the great privilege in 2025 of convening the History Now series. I'd like to begin this evening by acknowledging that we are meeting on Gadigaland. The uh uh uh uh the University of Sydney and the Chow Chak Wing Museum are on Gadigal Land. And on behalf of everyone here, I wish to pay our respect to the elders for the continuing knowledge and care for country that's been expressed for tens of thousands of years in this very space. Um the Gadigal people of the era nation have uh cared for country for all that time. Tonight, for History Now, it's my great privilege to uh uh uh uh kick off the proceedings.

Series Context And Partners

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Um it's always a joyous occasion when a friend and colleague uh releases a book, but it's uh especially a joyous occasion when it's such a fascinating topic and such a fascinating expression. Um many cultures, of course, uh express uh a version of history through uh cinematic and television retellings, and Australia is no different whatsoever. So it's going to be a fascinating deep dive tonight into an exploration of the way that Australia's film and television industry and the broader international uh film and television industry have explored that relationship between Australia's convict past. Before we get to the formal proceedings, it's my great privilege to welcome Catherine Shirley from the History Council of New South Wales to talk a bit more about History Now and about uh the engagement uh that uh we've been doing throughout 2025. Thank you, Catherine.

SPEAKER_04 3:10

So uh thanks very much and uh welcome on behalf of the History Council of New South Wales to the sixth event in our History Now series this year. I'm Catherine Shirley, Executive and Strategic Development Officer of the History Council of New South Wales, and we're very proud to be partnering with the Child Checker Wing Museum and the Via Gordon Charles Centre this year to present the History Now series. History Now owes its existence to passionate historians who wanted to bring new Pacific ideas to all aspects of historical practice. And as we're witnessing at this very time in global affairs, historical Pacific ideas help us make sense of our culture as well as other cultures, and help us comprehend the true value of the human experience of living in a civilized society. The early days of colonial, Australian colonial life attempted to be civilized in those most British ways, using convicts and others as slaves to build an outpost of the empire. Of course, in those days, film and television didn't exist to record everyday colonial life. So we've had to rely on other records. Our speakers tonight to be introduced more fully in a moment by Craig, Drs. James Finlay and Sophie Lloyd Wilson will engage in a conversation about research conducted for James's book record on the screen, record on the screen Australia's convict history in film and television, and explore how over successive generations uh convict has emerged on the screen as a potent uh Australian uh symbol. Thanks, Craig.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Yes, so uh just uh thank you so much, Catherine. Just in terms of uh the order

Introducing The Book And Its Aims

SPEAKER_00 5:00

of proceeding for tonight, um I'm going to introduce Sophie, who was going to introduce James. Um James will then deliver a half-hour lecture uh based on his research for the book. And then James and Sophie will engage in a conversation in which we'll also have an opportunity for questions from the room. So start thinking about questions right now, make them hard for make James work on a Tuesday night. Um but uh before we get to that point, can I warmly welcome uh Dr. Sophie Lloyd Wilson to the podium to introduce James? Sophie will be well known to many in the room, a senior lecturer in Australian history here at the University of Sydney, um, who's been doing amazing research in uh recent years uh on a whole range of topics, but focusing particularly on the Chinese Australian community. So Sophie, please head up to the lecture and say welcome, James. Thank you.

SPEAKER_05 5:59

Um thanks everyone. It's such a joy to be here today uh celebrating Dr. James Finley's book, uh, Caught on Screen. Um as a colleague, as a teacher, and as a writer, James is someone who uh his work is generous and expansive and always kind of captures the drama of what it means to do Australian history and history now. Um, one of the things that makes James very distinct is that he had a life before uh academia, uh, many lives before academia, and he made films, was involved in films, and thought deeply about what it means to communicate through a visual medium. He also worked closely uh with community. He was part of the, oh I think you ran the Australasian Genealogists Association. The archive of very humble, the archive of um uh the Society of Australian Genealogists down in the rocks, a beautiful building, but also a place with incredible stories to tell, not least about our convict history. And James is a perfect person to traverse the kind of ground between excitement, drama, and also shame and dare I say, kind of horror that often characterizes this aspect of our past. It's a kind of difficult space to work in. James does so with integrity and compassion. Um, and so without further ado, I would love to introduce uh our colleague, Dr. James Findley.

unknown 7:30

Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Thanks so much, Sophie. It's a real honor to be here for History Now. I love the History Now series, so to be up here and to be speaking with you as a part of one is great. Um, I'd also like to acknowledge that we're here on Gadigal Land, uh land that was never ceded, um, and pay my respects to elders past and present. Uh so today I'm here to talk about the work that I've been doing on a book um over the for too long that's just been released by Bloomsbury. It explores, as many people have kind of signalled to, um, sort of on-screen representation of Australia's convict history. And I guess in tackling a book, you could either do two things. You could either kind of dive into one section of like one chapter and really deep dive. But I've taken the second approach and possibly, I'm not sure if it's going to work today, but I hope it does, and do a bit more of an aerial flyover to give you a sense of some of the themes of the book. And to stop at various moments along the way and look at particular representations that I think are interesting. And we'll watch some films, which is always fun. Um, and there is nothing more boring than hearing someone speak about a film you've never watched. So I think it's important to play um films for you tonight as well. Um, and I really had three aspects, uh, sorry, three aims when I was embarking on this project. Firstly, I wanted to show how um the repeated appearance of convicts in film and television has sort of shaped historical memory and Australia's popular understanding of its colonial origins. The convict as a historical figure has shifted

Düsseldorf Archive And Nazi-Era Musical

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through a range of screen tropes, um, from sort of suffering victim of empire to the nation building emancipist to the perpetrator and witness of frontier violence. And each sort of uh rendition of the convict has reflected and re helped to reshape wider debates about, as Sophie mentioned, shame, pride, national character, and the legacies of colonization. Secondly, I wanted to kind of push the methodological boundaries of historical film studies by treating screen culture not as an unreliable illustration, but as a forum through which cultural texts produce enduring myths and memories about history for vast audiences. The book combines production histories, textual analysis, reception studies to show that the moving image creates historical worlds. And these worlds are worlds with reach. We have consistent studies and surveys that show us that film and television have for a really long time been the most popular ways that Australians and other people in other countries access the past. And so I think for those of us with a stake in how narratives of colonization are remembered, utilized, and then mobilized, these visions of history deserve our attention because they are powerful mediators of historical memory that influence and interact with a broader range of historical practices. And finally, I wanted to show how settler colonialism endures not only through the displacement of indigenous peoples, but also through cultural narratives that reinforce colonial logic and power. Convicts have been repeatedly been imagined in ways that naturalise white belonging. They mute the realities of invasion. And charting these representations across time, genre, and national borders reveals how convicts, cinema, and television have both unsettled and also reinforced settler colonial frameworks. Convicts, in short, have been made to carry the burden of Australia's origin story in ways that expose how history is remembered and how cultural power is sustained. So to begin this filmic journey, I thought I wanted to start with an anecdote from an archival trip that I took. And perhaps we unexpectedly begin in an archive in Düsseldorf, in Germany. Although it is appropriately built on the site of a former prison. And there I found scrapbooks that are compiled by a Cinephile, who was only known by the name of Mr. Gustes. And they are meticulously ordered and they contain lots and lots of materials, photographs, reports, publicity shots, film programs relating to the career of this woman, Zara Leander, who was a German movie star of the Third Reich. Think of her as sort of Germany's version of Judy Garland. And one scrapbook in particular caught my eye, or was the reason for me going to Düsseldorf, was devoted to 1937, just the year 1937. And it features Zara Leander's breakout role as convicted felon Gloria Vane in Douglas Cirque's film, which is titled Two New Shores, or Zunun Ufen, which we see images of here, which fictionalizes, amazingly fictionalizes the lives of convict women in the Parramatta Female Factory. And because there's nothing more, as I mentioned, more boring than hearing about a film you haven't seen, I thought I'd play a clip from the film just so you get a sense of the kind of ouvre that Cirque creates. And this is where we meet Gloria in the Female Factory for the first time. And of course, because it's a musical, she is singing. That Gustave should, or that our cinophile, Mr. Gustave, should treasure stories about convicts in the Paramatta Female Factory, a site of imprisonment in Penal Colony Sydney, is strike is a striking example, I think, of how cinema can shape our understanding of the past. The influence of cinema's materiality on audience engagement with the past is immediately apparent when you flip through these scrapbooks in the archive. Film and television are the most industrial of art forms. They leave evidence of more than just sound and vision through the many and varied materials produced by interactions with other forms of

Silent Era Convict Heroes Reimagined

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mass culture and society itself. And the book argues that films like Tene Shores have helped audiences to negotiate relationships with history both in a collective and individual way that I think is really nicely summarized in the scrapbooks, because they're an example of these kinds of processes at work. They provide the historian with a really rich insight into the film's mass reception via a range of written reviews and responses, while their many pages, which are carefully crafted over time, also speak to a more intimate cinematic attachment, a personal form of history making through the act of collecting and preserving movie ephemera. The collector's knowledge of convict life in Australia was undoubtedly informed by his fascination with the representation of history in Junior Shaw's, and it was not alone. It was the second most popular film in Germany in 1937. And at a screening that I held at the Parramatta Riverside Theatre one year, I was told by one German audience member that it played for many decades after as a Christmas film on television. So it was arguably, I guess, a way that generations of German people took, I guess, understood or took the film as a reference point for what life was like in the penal colony of Sydney. And so how such visions of the past were made, presented, and then understood by viewers like Gustes is central to the concerns of what I'm trying to do with the book. Cirque's Nazi musical melodrama about the female factory is unusual for many reasons, one of them being its international provenance. And unsurprisingly, most of the screen culture concerned with convicts transported to Australia has been produced in Australia and for Australian audiences. Convict history is an intrinsic part of our national story. Its immediacy, its legacy has generated a long tradition that has evaluated the nation's beginnings as a penal colony. Yet it's also produced great anxieties, particularly after transportation ceased, the so-called convict stain. So it may seem surprising that from the earliest days of cinema, convict stories were popular stories, were popular fair for Australian filmmakers in what was then one of the world's most vibrant film industries. The silent era, closest in time to the convict period, offers a really interesting insight into the narratives that are circulating soon after transportation ends. Amid cinema's emergence as a mass cultural form, filmmakers adopted, repeatedly adopted, popular stories of Australia's colonial past, rapidly establishing a dominant representation of convict history that audiences embraced with relish. Between 1906 and 1911, 59 dramatic feature films were produced in Australia, which is a huge output for cinema at that time. In fact, I think for one particular period in that bracket, Australia's producing more films than anywhere else in the world. And over half of those films are set in an Australian historical context. And about a third of those films are about convicts. Their narratives knitted together new ways of seeing and understanding Australian history between populations across vast distances. The first convict film produced for the term of his natural life told a story of an innocent aristocrat, falsely accused and sent to Van Diemen's Land. This is the only surviving image from the film, which is a poster. It shows the film's hero, Rufus Dawes, you know, fist raised on the edge of a cliff, a solitary stance of protest and defiance. This dignified portrayal marks a really important shift that the book kind of tries to trace from the immensely popular novel written by Marcus Clark, upon which the film was based, which kind of presents convicts in not the best light. Clark's novel had by and large condemned them as, quote, I'm quoting from the book here, the monsters that civilization had brought forth and bred. Apart from the innocent and heroic Dawes, who kind of helps to sort of draw the reader through the various horrors of the penal system. But early cinema recasts those who'd been transported to the Australian colonies, sorry, as universally, universally as figures of innocence and significance and also worthy of admiration, which is a really important shift, I think. Here we have some of the images from those films, in which convict heroes like Jack Throsby, Jasper Lovell, Joe Gilchrist are portrayed as victims of injustice. One film in particular that I want to highlight for a moment is Raymond Longford and Lottie Lyle's The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole, which is a sort of rollicking betrayal of love, a stolen horse, and is one of the few surviving films actually from the silent era to be around. Here we have some, we have an image and also a program that I found in the archive. It's based on the exploits of a real-life convict woman, transported to New South Wales, and it brought to life well-known sort of novels and plays, and I think even an opera about the convict that were already kind of circulating before the film screened.

Early TV And Emancipist Egalitarianism

SPEAKER_01 19:20

But it removes their moralizing tone and instead celebrates its criminal heroine while presenting audiences with the kind of a fresh vision of Australia's convict past. And its release drew large crowds, strong box office and glowing reviews in various newspapers around the nation. It's really interesting to see how far these films spread. They go everywhere. It was hailed in various capital cities as a sort of thrilling and realistic film. One newspaper called it a masterpiece. It was praised for presenting, quote, the old story of the famous heroine in a new frame. And in Windsor, just up the road, where Catchpole spent her final years, the film became a source of local. Pride, with packed screenings at the Venture Picture Palace filled with loud applause and subsequent warm reports in the media of locals fondly remembering their Suffolk heroine. Silent films like these laid the foundations for linking Australian identity to the convict story, and their popularity and reception, as I chart in the book, I think really challenges this idea of the convict stain as a uniform way of understanding convictism in the early 20th century. I'm certainly not saying that it didn't exist, it absolutely did, and there were serious anxieties surrounding convictism, but I think it helps to kind of break apart that universal idea. They show that instead convicts were far from being erased. Fictional depictions placed them in many instances at the center of the public imagination, pushing back against taboos and suggesting that the nation's criminal origins could be sympathetically, even proudly, remembered. Convict victimhood was, of course, central to generating audience empathy. And silent cinema was crucial to establishing a lasting archetype that extended and overlaid the victim status of lone protagonists like Rufus Dawes across the entire convict class. When convicts emerged on the small screen in television, they returned to the familiar theme of the convict as victim, but this time with a new twist on their application. So when television finally appears in Australia, it absolutely challenges and upends the media landscape. It challenges cinema's dominance, it totally transforms the landscape in terms of media consumption. And it has a huge, it has a really quick uptake. So we are late to the game in terms of television. Like we're one of the latest developed nations to pick up TV, but when we do, we pick it up with veracity. And very quickly, Sydney and Melbourne are almost at full saturation in terms of having a television set box in their house. The ABC, with its strong background in radio plays, was quick to move into the production of drama serials. And like the earliest silent films, the first narratives that the public broadcaster turned to, interestingly, are those of the nation's beginnings as a penal colony. So we have a whole bunch of really fascinating, and I think actually really well made and really nice. I think these are some of my favorite um productions, purely because they're incredibly well written in terms of their dialogue. Television at this particular period went out live. They didn't have tape, so uh the actors were performing in like actual real time. Uh, and uh so hence a lot of the kind of I guess exposition of the plot had to be said. So it was often uh referred to as radio with pictures at this time. But it makes quite theatrical television, um, and it's quite interesting the way in which uh uh the particular producers of these programs really recast and change the narrative surrounding convicts and colonial history more broadly. These are the serials, uh, you know, serials like Stormy Petrol, The Outcasts, The Hungry Ones, they all explored issues that related to the struggle of convicts in colonial society. But this time the drama was uh and suffering were not so much of the Rod and Lash, though violence enacted upon the convict body certainly features in these programs. But instead, the battles that convicts waged were against the oppressive British class system that kept them from the circles of colonial power. These were new stories about the fight for egalitarianism. Indeed, the focus of the outcasts was almost entirely on the rise of the Emancipist class during the Macquarie period. These were not the arrow, stencil, tunic wearing, uh, you know, goofballs of the silent era, but instead nation builders, um, keen to tear down the oppressive and imported British class system and forge a new society. The advertisement for the ABC's outcasts is a kind of testament to this. Um, the tagline reads, they came in chains to build a nation. And again, I thought I'd play you a clip from the outcasts here, which um I guess gives you a flavour of this particular um television program.

SPEAKER_07 24:17

Following the success of the Stormy Petrol serial, the ABC now presents a weekly drama of 12 episodes showing the progress of the colony under Governor Macquarie, written by Rex Remitz and produced by Colin Dean.

Women On Screen: Skepticism And Breakthroughs

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Starring Ron Hadrick as William Redfern, emancipist, convict, doctor, and friend to Governor Macquarie, with a large cast including many of Australia's leading artists. Set in the period of harsh and often cruel discipline, the outcasts tells of Dr. Redfern and Governor Macquarie's struggles, successes, and disappointments, and of the expansion of the colony during this time.

SPEAKER_01 24:59

Okay, so you get a sense of the kind of narratives that these shows presented. Um and commercial television too got in the act. So it wasn't just um the ABC. Channel 7 produced a wonderfully made historical miniseries called Jonah, which tells the story of a crafty Sydney-based merchant and his charge, the emancipated convict Anne Parry, uh and also his nephew uh Brett Hamilton. Parry's inclusion in Jonah introduced audiences to this kind of idea of the successful female emancipist, a portrayal that was immediately met by uh many with skepticism. An influential TV columnist Nan Musgrove, who wrote a lot about television in the early years in The Women's Weekly, felt that Anne was an unbelievable character, too poised, assured, and well dressed. Uh, concluding in her review of the serial, I salute Mr. Jonah Locke as a pygmalion in the first-class job he has done of making an extra fair lady and a business girl out of a convict girl. Musgrove's disbelief at Anne's transformation to business girl highlights, I think, the challenges that Jonah presented to kind of contemporary understandings of convict women, but also convicts more broadly. In terms of convict women, the contemporary understanding being that they were whorish and unskilled. Such criticism was echoed by other commentators, including the historian Malcolm Ellis, who characterized these programs and others like it as nothing short of garbled nonsense. Historian Anne Curthaways has since noted that through contested allegorical images of the convict woman, nation building, sorry, national history is made and remade in moral, economic, and cultural terms, implying the eternally recurrent question: is Australian history a cause for shame or pride? Historians of the 1960s, including Manning Clark, A. G. L. Shaw, L. L. Robson, were in no doubt that convict women were a source of shame, part of an urban class. Shaw, for example, concluded that the picture painted by history of convict women was, quote, a singularly unattractive one. Anne's portrayal in Jonah was in direct conflict to this perception, and instead it anticipated future historical research, revealing that convict women participated in the colonial workforce at almost all levels of society. Good and capable convict women would become a major theme for television ever after, particularly in the dramatic historical miniseries of the 1970s, which quickly took hold of primetime slots in commercial television programs and ran for many years, from the mid to sort of into the early 80s. By 1982, they were so prevalent that the art critic and writer Robert Hughes, who was at the time researching his own convict blockbuster, Fatal Shore, even joked in a review that, quote, there can't be one convict girl in Australia who hasn't had a miniseries done about her. Of all the convict women in television dramas, Mary Mulvaine of the 1978 miniseries Against the Wind stands out. And I can see from the smiling faces in the room that some of you remember this program. It remains deeply embedded in Australia's cultural memory. I dare say that many of you here sat down and watched this program when it played out on screen. It generated huge buzz when it premiered. Mary's Adventures with her husband Jonathan Garrett, played by the 70s

Against The Wind And Genealogy Boom

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heartthrob John English, made it one of the decade's most watched and most expensive local productions. It became nothing short of a national phenomenon. Millions tuned in weekly, reviews were glowing, and English's theme song Six Ribbons reached number five on the charts. Its inclusion in the Victorian High School curriculum reinforced the producer's claim that Against the Wind was, quote, history brought to life. Epic in scope, the miniseries broke new ground in its portrayal of the transnational convict experience. Mary's Irish heritage shaped her view of the colony, and it links events like the Castle Hill Rebellion to global conflicts, such as the Irish Rebellions going on in the Napoleonic Wars. And in doing so, it made Australian history kind of exciting and situated it within a broader kind of global story. And again, I feel like we just have to play a clip from Against the Wind because why not? Set to English's theme song. I'm just mindful of time. We could watch John English with his shirt off more, but uh the series also encouraged um, I guess, contemporary reflection on the personal connection uh to convict histories. Um, and it helped to spark a national fascination with genealogy. We see interestingly, membership of the um Society of Australian Genealogists um uh increase quite dramatically after the um in the years following the series' release, um, and archives around the country began opening up, providing new research indexes as people sought out convict ancestors. Television, it seemed, have helped to light the way for those keen to establish an attachment to the nation's foundational uh narrative by unearthing their convict ancestors. It was, as one viewer wrote in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, a sign of our growing maturity that Australians can now accept, and with pride, the vital, indeed essential, role that convicts and their many descendants played in the foundation and development of modern Australia. Against the Wind will do much to expose a conspiracy of silence that has lasted for far too long and place our history in its proper perspective. Television transformed Australia's relationship to its convict past. Before the ABC serials, convicts were often understood as a brutalized prison class. Historical dramas instead recast them, women included, as nation builders and ancestors of future ordinary Australians. On screen, their elevation symbolized the collapse of old class hierarchies and the birth of traditions that would lead to the democracy that followed. If convicts had brought an egalitarian spirit into existence in the colonies, these programs seem to argue that a way of being Australian was apparent from the beginning. This portrayal very much chimed with the new nationalism of the 1960s and the 1970s, a period of cultural and political change when Britain's global influence was beginning to wane. As historian Stuart Ward notes, it was this eclipse of the imperial imagination that drove Australians to craft new national mythologies to replace British identities. Yet television is so rarely included in this kind of historiography, which I've always found really fascinating given that it maps so directly with the kind of rise of the new nationalism, the rise of television happens at exactly the same time. And as my book hopefully shows, you know, screen producers from early as 1960 were offering more than entertainment. They were seeking out national narratives rooted in kind of myths of egalitarianism and a celebratory mythology of the convict past, prompting audiences to engage with the nation's colonial history in new and often personal ways. However, these new stories, focused on themes of nation building through convict emancipation, were often at odds with the profound social and political change that the country was experiencing at this moment. Those celebrating a version of Australian history that echoed

Nationalism, Erasure, And Documentary Counterpoints

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kind of the new nationalism of the period. Programs like Against the Wind were also encouraging a nostalgia for British heritage when political shifts were taking place towards multiculturalism, as well as feeding, I guess, what could arguably be called a different conspiracy of silence, that surrounding the histories of dispossession, right at the moment when the Aboriginal land rights movement was increasing its influence in popular politics and the public imagination. Instead, series like Against the Wind, Sarah Dane, The Timeless Land, and many, many more explicitly worked to create a sense of non-indigenous belonging for their white audiences by focusing on a different story of a colonized, subjugated people, those of the Irish convicts. Meanwhile, the Aboriginal story of colonization remained largely invisible. The mythos that convicts proudly and selflessly forged the nation to come could only flourish in a narrative that erased the long history of First Nations occupation before 1788. Such visions, whilst popular, could not speak to the changing demographic and political realities of Australia as the 1980s began. But while the genre of the historical drama was content to ignore and whitewash histories of colonization, documentary film set out to highlight these very concerns. And across the dial on Channel 7, in the very same month, against the win premiered to massive audiences, Channel 10 screened the controversial and popular historical documentary feature film The Last Tasmanian. Far from presenting a celebratory narrative of foundation, it explored in incredibly graphic detail the violent history of colonization in Van Diemen's Land, with a focus on the Black War in the 1820s and 1830s, in which Tasmania's convict population are portrayed as a class of genocidal drunks unleashed onto the island's Aboriginal population to wreak murder and mayhem. It's also worth noting that the film cut across the Tasmanian Aboriginal land rights movement because it made claims that Tasmanian Aboriginal people had been made extinct, a historical argument that did great damage to the cause of Aboriginal activism, though that's a whole other story that I don't have time to explore today. The Last Tasmanian did, however, also make an early and far-reaching argument for the founding of Australia to be understood as resulting from forcible dispossession. But it would be wrong to argue, I think, that screen culture spearheaded any kind of progressive rethink about narratives of colonization more broadly in the years that followed. This was left mainly to Aboriginal activists and historians who were turning their attention to the histories of frontier violence. We do have important films and television series, films like Manganini, released in 1980, and The Radical Brown breaking television miniseries like Women of the Sun, which still really, really stands up as an amazing piece of television. They did their best to, I guess, raise questions about the role of convicts in the history of Aboriginal dispossession. But in the 1980s, these sorts of representations were absolutely few and far between. And it remains telling that as the country's bicentenary drew close, convict representation once again waned on screen. The tall ships that moored themselves in Sydney Harbour, reenacting the first fleet, never unloaded their human cargo. It was a recreation and perhaps a history that seemed not to suit the times. The ABC would eventually return to the debates raised by the last Tasmanian many, many years later, but in the much-praised documentary series titled Frontier, which drew on the emerging work of historians such as Henry Reynolds and Marcian Langton, who both feature in the documentary, to present a gripping and at times harrowing account of Frontier violence. What was most interesting for me as a historian about this particular series, not just the way it kind of sort of brings back this, I guess picks up where The Last Tasmanian left off in many ways, and I write about this in detail in the book, is that it was the first Australian television series ever to have a website attached to it, which is quite interesting. And this includes what we might remember, for those of us old enough to remember the birth of the internet, a thing called a guest book, which allowed people just to kind of log on and write about the experience of watching the television series at that particular time, which for you know, someone writing about this stuff is just brilliant because it's this huge trove of audience reception. We

Frontier Violence, Reception, And History Wars

SPEAKER_01 37:10

have pages and pages and pages that help the kind of historian to understand what kind of emotions the series prompted, what histories resonated with viewers, and conversely what was contested. It's the kind of trove that I think brilliantly demonstrates the way that screen culture can illuminate different kinds of knowledge and emotions that are attached to difficult histories at particular moments in time, in this instance when the history wars are just starting to kick off in the 90s. Convicts appear frequently in the Frontier Online guest book, predominantly written about again through the lens of kind of victimhood. And this time accounts of their suffering were being mobilized by viewers as a shared reference point for dealing with the topic of Aboriginal dispossession. They often offer solace to those viewers confronted by the series graphic portrayal of their convict and settler ancestors as invaders. The memory of convicts as victims still clearly had enough potency to counterbalance the atrocities committed against Aboriginal people and sort of this repeated mantra of like we suffered too, the convicts suffered too, is a repeated refrain from viewers, which is really fascinating given that the documentary presents the exact opposite history on screen. If convicts are used to balance the ledger in the 1990s, by the century this was no longer the case. And among other factors, uh the history wars of the Howard years had brought into sharp focus the sort of centrality of frontier violence to the colonization story. And with this, a new convict stain, one might argue, emerged, one that sort of implicated um their kind of celebrated cause of nation building with claims of genocide. We're kind of advancing at a rapid pace here at the moment. More recent television um dramas such as the 2015 adaptation of Kate Grenville's The Secret River, the BBC multi-million dollar produced series Banished, I think, demonstrate again through examinations of audience reception how convicts on screen can play to different collective understandings of the past. And this time there's a really interesting geographical context to it. The BBC series, which focused on the opening weeks of the First Fleet story, contained no Aboriginal um characters or plot lines whatsoever, and very much had a narrative of victimhood that was echoing earlier series like Against the Wind. And this approach was greeted with almost universal outrage in Australia by both critics and audiences, but was very rarely mentioned in the UK, which instead generated a huge fan base for the series. Conversely, The Secret River, which premiered the same month, placed encounters between convicts and indigenous people at the heart of its storytelling and was greeted with critical praise. Say what you want about that particular series or the book that came from it, but such representations and the responses they provoked, I think mark a really interesting moment in which histories of convict settlement and aboriginal dispossession were popularly understood as intertwined. To a point that it was becoming difficult to tell one story without the other. And we see this in the very different kinds of responses to these series in Australia. Meanwhile, in the UK, Banished's warm reception by critics and viewers who watched in the millions suggests that the circulation of knowledge about the British Empire between the Metropole and its former colony were, in the early decades of this century at least, quite different. The final film I want to touch on briefly in my kind of fly-over of Convict screen culture is Jennifer Kent's acclaimed feature film, The Nightingale, which was released in 2018. It's a really fascinating film because it uh one, because of the controversies that surrounded it, but also its depiction of violence, its sexual assault scenes, which helped to label the film a Me Too film. It's quite harrowing if you go to watch it. Um, you know, be warned. It is quite brutal in its presentation of violence, um, both gendered and also um sort of genocidal, I guess. Um it marks a really interesting departure from a particularly obstinate convict

Banished Vs The Secret River: Divergent Receptions

SPEAKER_01 41:00

screen trope, which had been nurtured since the silent era, um, which I don't have enough time to go through today, but occupies an entire chapter of the book, which is that of the kind of convict escape narrative, um, which repeats in like earlier film and television programs that I'm sort of splashing up there, um, Journey Among Women, Eliza Fraser, and even the little convict. These were histories in which convict suffering was explored through a kind of assumed affinity uh with Aboriginal people. And the logic of that idea was that it was sustained by the fact that both groups had been kind of subjugated by British elites. Um, and the result of this portrayal is it allowed convicts to appropriate Aboriginal culture when they escaped out and they kind of assimilate into Aboriginal culture. They mimic Aboriginal um sort of uh, you know, uh clothing and um um cultural knowledge, I guess. And then Aboriginal people often like retreat from screen, leaving this kind of new white Aborigine, you know, um inadverted commas to kind of, I guess, assume dominance of the historical landscape into which they find sanctuary. The Nightingale departs from that. Um, it's a film about a convict woman, Claire, who, after having her husband and child murdered, is raped by a group of red coat soldiers. She enlists the help of an Aboriginal man and a tracker named Billy, who agrees to allow her to seek revenge on her attackers. They journey north through the kind of Vandemonian wilds in a gothically rendered sort of um frontier, confronting the traumas and the depravity of a colony and the throes of violent dispossession. Unlike earlier um uh sort of films, um, such as the similarly kind of feminist, I guess, um film uh Journey Among Women, which is similarly a revenge film, interestingly, which was made in the 1970s, um, where convict women are kind of framed as these sort of proto-national figures with an affinity for Aboriginal culture. The Nightingale repositions Claire as both a victim and a colonizer. Um, Claire's Irishness, her status as a transported convict, they all invite audience sympathy, but her relationship with Billy complicates this framing in really interesting ways. They have a series of various fireside chats, moments that pepper the film that underscore both the shared trauma under British rule and also the profound difference in their position within the colonial order. While Claire suffers gendered violence, she nonetheless enjoys the prospect of a settler future, of marriage, of family, and a home that Billy, an Aboriginal man dispossessed of country, can never access. And eight until my final screen clip, I thought I'd just play one of those fireside scenes.

The Nightingale And Limits Of Solidarity

SPEAKER_01 45:10

While praising its attention to Aboriginal experiences, Barron highlighted the dangers of equating those marginalized within the colonial state, the convicts, with those being colonized. And that's a conflation that the book shows has been a kind of persistent trope for almost the entire 20th century from the silent era. Claire only grasps Billy's suffering once her own settler dreams collapse, yet her losses are far greater. Sorry, his losses are far greater. Family, country, uh, and spoiler alert ultimately his life. Um but as the film, to the film's credit, unlike earlier representations of convict and aboriginal partnerships on screen, where convicts uh uh and their escape signify a kind of freedom, the nightingale denies this redemption. Billy dies, Claire survives, bereft, uh, and in its finale, um, the nightingale exposes, I guess, the limits of the solidarity between these groups within a colony that is built on violence, and then that allows no true escape from dispossession. And with that, we are brought to the present moment in which we see portrayals uh complicating, I think, and at times pushing back against outmoded myths that have been traced across the wide scope of the book. Um, yet it's worth highlighting, I think, that the kind of popular memory of convicts keep popping up in all these really interesting ways. And whenever I hear convicts being evoked, you know, in the mouths of politicians and sort of various people, my ears kind of prick up. And most recently this happened uh in the lead up to the 2023 referendum on the First Nations voice to Parliament when we had Senator Jacinta Napajimpa Price, a prominent no campaigner, um, invoking her own convict, an Aboriginal heritage, at a national press club address to equate the experiences of convicts brought here in chains with the dispossession of Aboriginal people. Um, rejecting the idea that colonization had any lasting impact, Bryce drew laughter and applause by quipping that she should be, quote, doubly suffering because of her ancestry. Her comments weaponized a familiar and false equivalence between convict and aboriginal victimhood, dismissing intergenerational trauma as weakness while implying that, unlike the descendants of convicts, Aboriginal people had failed to, quote, move on. Conservative media hailed the moment a mic drop and a turning point of the no campaign, and a month later the referendum was defeated, prompting Aboriginal leaders to declare that reconciliation is dead. And I'm no mean saying that that particular incident was what changed the game, but that it was kind of fuel on an already burning fire, and interesting to see how these myths that are so propagated by screen culture can get pulled into really important moments in Australia's political history. As the book argues, representations of convict lives on screen have long shaped how colonization is remembered in Australia. Film and television makers, as powerful producers of popular memory, bear a responsibility for recognizing what can often be damaging mythologies

Convict Tropes In Contemporary Politics

SPEAKER_01 48:00

perpetuated. The suffering of convicts will remain an important feature of their representation, for the trauma and degradation experienced within the penal system is intrinsic and important to their story. But filmmakers who are sympathetic to the project of reconciliation should be mindful to the purposes for which such visions of the past can be put. Recent work is hopeful and suggests that convict narratives are adaptable enough to, I guess, contest rather than to repeat harmful tropes, and audiences have shown themselves receptive to more nuanced screen histories. There is ground for real hope in stories that foreground again convict women's resistance, recover the experiences of African, Maori, Aboriginal, or other convict groups, or grapple with their ambivalent role as colonizers. The shifting patterns of representation and reception chartered here demonstrate how convicts, always relevant to the projections of this country's colonial past, can both challenge and reinforce national myth making and expose the ideological reworkings at the heart of Australia's troubled history. Thank you.

SPEAKER_05 49:11

Thanks, James. That was fantastic. So I wanted to bring us back to that amazing um German film that you opened with. I'm still recovering from that. To New Shores. Correct. Okay. And so I wanted to ask you if there are other examples of this, the way this incredible, the traveling of the convict story, other examples of overseas representations and the ways in which this the convict story allows different nations to kind of constitute their own identities in surprising ways. And what does the book cover when it comes to them?

SPEAKER_01 49:44

Yeah, um, it's lovely because the international stuff, which again, they're working. That's um the international stuff is really cool because it's one to oh, sorry, the international stuff is really cool because it helped me plug a hole in which Australia's screen culture kind of dies in terms of representing like it just dies in general. And so it was very lucky that I found these various sort of representations overseas. The Cirque film is fantastic because um I didn't realize when I was sort of wading into it, but there's this quite big scholarly debate about Cirque. I mean, Douglas Circ is quite a well-known filmmaker. To those of you who know him, particularly for his American stuff, he's very influential filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino cite him all the time. Um, and his American films are very much have been kind of re, I guess, interpreted by film scholars as not being kind of soapy weepy melodramas, but actually searing critique of American domesticity in the 1950s. And so there is this idea that his his earlier German films are doing exactly the same thing. And so there's this kind of running theory that To New Shaw's is a kind of subtle critique on the Third Reich. And um, but all of this is kind of just done through textual analysis and sort of I think a teleological assumption that Cirque was trying to kind of, you know, did this kind of veil swipe at the Reich. Um and when I went into the archive, I found none of this, you know, none of the the files, the Nazi files, none of the, in fact, they're promoting it, they're sending it to the Venice Film Festival. Um, and it actually sets, it's actually a part of a pattern, a really interesting pattern of kind of um

Q&A: International Uses Of Convict Myth

SPEAKER_01 51:10

slightly propagandistic films that sort of are critiques of um British colonialism. So while I'm not certainly not saying that Cirque in any way was a Nazi sympathizer because he wasn't, he he leaves and his wife is Jewish, but it's very much a kind of product of that time in which the idea of convict victimhood is used for kind of propaganda purposes just before the war. And the second film that the book kind of um uh explores is is an Alfred Hitchcock uh film uh overseas, um, which is made in Britain post-war. And that's really interesting because the sort of the story of the convict is used to kind of foster Anglo-Australian relations in really interesting ways. So in Britain, it's called Under Capricorn, and it's about this sort of emancipist who you know leads a double life, and it's very Hitchcockan, and that kind of like everyone's got a secret, and like they're all kind of hiding things from each other, um, and there's a weird shrunken head. And um, but uh but the you know, in in um as part of its promotional campaign in Britain, um, there were food parcels from Australia which were labelled with the film. There were under Capricorn days that kind of again, and and the press very much lent on um uh audience members writing in about convict ancestry in ways that you just wouldn't see in Australia because of the anxiety surrounding um uh sort of, I guess, that connection at that particular time. But fascinatingly, the Australian government tweaks to this, and as a part of their post-war reconstruction efforts to get British migrants to come to Australia, they actually use the film as kind of part of their promotional campaign, and it gets used as this, yeah, there's this kind of slightly propagandistic kind of so there are all these um offices in downtown London that have the film poster up on the wall. Chiffle visits, Ben Chiffley visits the set and you know, shakes hands with Hitchcock and stuff. So it's this really fascinating kind of reworking of convict, you know, the narrative of the convict victim to suit different kind of national sort of means, I guess.

SPEAKER_05 53:01

It's so amazing, right? Because it just goes to show how malleable this story is, you know, and the ways in which it does have great propertistic value, right? I mean, politicians love it, empires love it, clearly, even the British and Australians loved it at this time. So I have a kind of, I suppose, you know, to kind of move us into one of the amazing kind of themes of your work, and I think it's just so fascinating. The ways in which, you know, this convict myth, which really often does lean hard into sympathizing with the conviction and victimhood, right? It's a I for me growing up, sympathizing with convicts was kind of, you know, an article of faith in my household with my dad's, you know, kind of um folk songs that he would sing. Um so I was going to ask about what this all means for settler colonialism. So, what does this mean? You know, in what way do these stories both kind of you know challenge but also legitimate settler colonial logics? And then what does this mean for the erasure of the indigenous past?

SPEAKER_01 54:01

Yeah. I mean, I think they have a really important role in playing into that kind of mythos that that perpetuates, particularly up until about the 1980s and starts to fall away after the 1980s. But we see it through that kind of propagation of the victimhood mythology, which allows for, I guess, the sorry story of Australian history to become the story of the convicts. And it is a sorry story, right? I'm not saying that it isn't at all, but it's almost like sometimes we can only hold one idea in our heads at the one time. And so that's supplants, um, or I guess masks um, I think, uh, other stories. The the nation building mythos is the other big one, you know, it kind of resets the origin date as 1788, you know, that's where it all begins, and everything before then is kind of conveniently forgotten. Um, you know, Against the Wind is is a marvelous series, but Jonathan and Mary can only build their log cabin in an empty wilderness, you know, and they do, they they build it in an empty wilderness. There is one Aboriginal character, um, Nigilgi, played by Justine Saunders, who appears at one moment, but she's very much about kind of helping out the convict characters. And then once her part is, you know, once she's utilized, she kind of disappears off screen and we don't hear anything about her anymore. And then there's the escape narratives, which are these fascinating sort of um recurring tropes that sort of um, I guess, allow convicts to bring audiences into Aboriginal worlds in really sort of, you know, unproblematically, they kind of assimilate into these worlds and then sort of adopt modes of Aboriginality in all these sorts of interesting ways. And again, then, you know, we see Aboriginal characters retreat on screen, but the convict, then embodied with all of this kind of knowledge, is allowed to operate in the Australian historical landscape as the kind of

Q&A: Settler Logics And Erasure

SPEAKER_01 55:40

new controller of that world. Um, and this is again fed by that idea of convict uh Aboriginal partnerships is sort of like two sides of the same coin, both suffering at the hands of the empire. And again, you know, there are there are real historical world um uh examples where convicts did live with Aboriginal people. Um, but you know, uh the mythos far outweighs the reality and has all of these really interesting results, both on and off-screen, to the point where, you know, some of these films that feature Aboriginal cast members don't even list the cast members' names and the credits and stuff like that. And so um, so is this real sense of like not kind of in, you know, they act as kind of um yeah, catalysts almost uh that can be very quickly um uh sort of um thrown away when they're unnecessary to the story. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, later on we see that become much more complicated. Um, and that's what I guess that's the interesting point that we're at now. Um, you know, that kind of idea of the new stain. Um and we see, you know, uh again, this really interesting moment, which I sort of highlighted between the banished and the secret river, um, which I'm actually just finishing writing an article with um Sarah Pinto, a deacon, about, um, which has been heaps of fun because we've looked at the audience response to banished in the UK. And it's fascinating again how for UK audiences, uh, banished is this kind of new story. You know, it's like this, whoa, I had no idea how much, you know, they all suffered building the, you know, building the colony. And and yet when you watch it from an Australian perspective, it it really feels like an old, like, you know, like an old mythos, reaching back to kind of the older television series of the 70s and the 80s, which is yeah, really, really fascinating, that kind of disconnect. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 57:21

I suppose one of the amazing things about the book and about you, James, is you always kind of um confront the present. I mean, we all do in all of our work, obviously, but you really have to. You really got to think about what you know, this film, what this TV series is saying about the present when it comes to these representations. And so I kind of wanted to take us to convict women. Um, you know, you engage deeply with this, the kind of incredible scholarship and the role of convict women in the Australian feminist movement, as as you as you said. And I suppose the question I have is about the sympathetic and kind of heroic ways that convict women have been portrayed sometimes. Um, and what does this tell us about shifting gender politics, if anything?

SPEAKER_01 58:04

Yeah, I mean, I again that's a lovely question. And I think, like, you know, the the female convict character is something that again appears quite early on. Margaret Catchpole um arguably is Australia's first, like Lottie Lyle in Margaret Catchpole, I think is it's a real cinematic moment. She is the first kind of Australian film celebrity at that moment. When she kind of rides onto screen, she is like it. Um, and ever after, she is kind of, you know, this huge, important, silent um film star. Um, I mean, you can see the seeds of that even in Catchpole because the Catchpole's life in the colony is very much about she becomes the matron of an orphanage and she becomes this kind of motherly, sort of um domestic character, um, which again plays, I guess, later out in Against the Wind with Mary and Jonathan. You know, Mary is very much kind of like, you know, settler domesticity sits at the heart uh very much of that program, and and Mary is kind of um this entrepreneurial, um sort of feisty, um yet also motherly kind of character that very much slots into that idea that's that's very prevalent in the 60s and the 70s as convicts, is kind of the mothers and fathers of the nation. Um, and even amazingly, at the end of Against the Wind, there's this wonderful title that appears that says,

Q&A: Convict Women And Feminist Frames

SPEAKER_01 59:10

you know, Jonathan and Mary, even though they're fictional characters, um, you know, lived for another 20 years. And, you know, today, X amount of Australians can trace their ancestry back to this one particular couple, you know, and you can almost hear the penny drop in lounge rooms around the country, you know, where everyone's like, oh my God, I've got to go and find out if we've got a convict ancestor. Um, but the feminist stuff is also fascinating. So Journey Among Women is a really um important feminist film of the 1970s revival. And it's about, again, using kind of convict women in that kind of damned horse of God's police and summer's sort of vibe of um using that idea of the colonized female body, and it's all about revenge and it's all about sort of setting up this um, I guess, utopian world in the bush. But again, you know, Aboriginal women don't appear in any of this stuff. They're they're completely missing. Um, but it's interesting that um, or they do. Briefly, Camrigal, an Aboriginal character in Journey Among Women, appears briefly, but only to kind of impart knowledge on how to survive in the bush. And again, she sort of disappears, and the convicts are allowed to continue on and build this kind of utopia. But it's really interesting, I guess. The point on Wim is that it's a fascinating. And again, Claire in The Nightingale, the I guess the final one that we looked at, you know, it was a Me Too film. It was seen as a Me Too film because it came out at that particular time. It's a convict revenge film. It's about sexual assault. It touched on all these points. And so we see, you know, convicts kind of having to carry this weird burden, but also being kind of emptied of any real historical meaning and kind of built up as symbols of that particular sort of political moment. So I guess that's again where kind of historical film studies is really interesting. It sort of offers you this almost kaleidoscopic vision of like what's on screen, what histories are being presented, what history was happening, and what actually the history of the moment was at that particular time.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:56

One last question. I'm sure there's lots of questions for the audience, and that's about 1988 and advice in Tenere, which you touched on kind of briefly up here. And I know you've taught a very popular entire course on uh this semester. So what happens in 1988 in terms of convicts? You sort of indicated that maybe there was a turning away, which kind of fascinated me. So what happens?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:16

Yeah, I mean, we've got Old Sydney Town, which is running hot in the 1980s. I mean, I remember standing in the sun in Old Sydney Town, licking my ice cream and watching the convict being flogged in the morning and in the evening. Like if you look it's what it's such a wild way to kind of reimagine like a traumatic, violent past. I looked at an old program for Old Sydney Town and they had two convict floggings, one at 11 o'clock and one at 2 p.m. So if you missed the morning session, you could, you know, you could eat your Canetto and watch the poor actor be flogged. It is, I've often like pondered, like I think it would make a really interesting article, like a like this sort of ghoulish, like yeah. And again, kind of the ghost tours at Port Arthur that happened very early soon after. Um, it's a very strange, sort of dark tourist way to look at and almost um, you know, laugh at and lampoon um the violence inflicted upon these people.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:04

Distance, maybe.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:04

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. Um uh, I mean, 1988's fascinating. Uh, you know, there is absolutely recreation that goes on. The convicts don't appear um very much in, I mean, the First Fleet stuff, they're not really there. There's some documentaries that come out at that particular time that kind of touch on convict um uh experiences, but I did expect to see a lot of stuff, like a lot of screen culture around that time in the 1980s, but there's remarkably little of it in comparison to what you would expect given that dangerous inside. I'm I'm still trying to work that one out, like, and that's possibly, you know, I'm thinking about the bicentenary a lot at the moment. So yeah, um yeah, it is it is an interesting one, and it's certainly one to ponder for the future.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:44

So they're young from Canberra, like watching that guy be flogged with all his fake blood slaying everywhere. There was a lot of fake blood. And looking back, it was so weird. Yeah, it's wild. That was it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:53

I certainly see it in my memory, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:54

Well, thanks for indulging me with the questions, everyone. I know you have your own questions, so let's open up the floor to questions uh to James.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:03

Thank you very much, James. I've just got a a sort of vaguely interrelated question. The dispossession of uh Aboriginal people was as much about uh private property and enclosure of land as it was about many other things. And

Q&A: Bicentenary, Old Sydney Town, Dark Tourism

SPEAKER_06 1:03:20

I'm just reflecting on uh the broad arrow there above you, which in fact was a symbol about property, ownership, ownership, but the ownership of the convict uniform, but the ownership of the uh of the convict as well. I'm just wondering, bearing in mind the fact that your book is much about identity and the ownership of identity and the dangers today of uh populism uh creating this as a symbol of uh distorted national identity. What do you think about the relationship between ownership, identity, and that uh concern that we might have about how it's distorted?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:58

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really that's a fascinating question. Uh, it is interesting to see the way in which convict iconography has been um co-opted by far-right nationalist movements. So Cook's convicts, the United Patriots Front use the broad arrow as part of their symbology, which is interesting. So um uh yeah, so I think that's a really interesting point. And that idea of the kind of that idea of um, you know, the dispossessed, but we are the dispossessed, you know, the white nationalists feel that they are dispossessed, and so they can attach themselves to that story of convictism, and um, which is a fascinating kind of re, you know, sort of like reversal of what of what the truth actually is. Um, in terms of the question about property, yeah, that's I mean, again, like the master-convict relationship is such a fascinating one, and historians write about it so much. It doesn't, it it really is uh, I guess, the good and bad in that like centers in the fictitious version of convict history, you know, the bad master, the good convict. Um, I've only ever seen that kind of dichotomy really broken down in an interesting way, funnily enough, in a reality television series called The Colony, um, which is uh a really interesting program. Um, and what I find fascinating, most fascinating about that program was that there are moments in which um the families who are on this kind of um uh you know constructed set that are supposed to be living like settlers, um, are given convicts to like work on their land. And some of these men or women are like dancers or like, you know, like they're not they're not gonna build a house. And there are these fantastic moments of protest and anger. And while the colony is um completely fanciful in in many of the ways in which it tries to, you know, represent that history, I thought it did actually demonstrate the kind of relationship between master and convict in a really interesting way because it was about human dynamics. It was about this idea that, like, ah crap, I've been given this kind of loaf. Who doesn't want to actually help me build my cottage? And so those are these really insightful moments in which I think you know living history in this particular instance can actually bring um a historical idea onto screen in quite a crystallized sort of way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:06:03

Yeah. I was wondering uh to what extent um other forms of literature, entertainment were dealing with convict stories, particularly during that period between, say, the mid-20s and 1960, where the Australian film industry was very stopstart. Um were there, for instance, novels dealing with the convict story? Were there radio dramas? Were there other things happening perhaps a bit more prolifically during that period?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:32

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Um and it's Graham, isn't it? Yeah, hi Graham. Oh my god, I'm such a fan of you. Um Graeme Shelley is a sorry, really respected Australian film historian and an incredibly important man, actually, who who um reconstructed for the term of his natural life in 1927. So we have a lot to owe you. Sorry, I'm not, I don't mean to single you out, but it's lovely to have you in the audience. It's really lovely. Um yes, I think you're absolutely right, Graham. Um uh it's um there is a kind of, I guess, and I don't really chart it as much in the book as I should because of a like, you know, page space and I have to jump forward, but there are plays, there are books, um, there is sort of a, I guess, a rump of literature that's going on at that particular moment. Um, interestingly, the radio plays

Q&A: Symbols, Property, And Populism

SPEAKER_01 1:07:10

um that Rex Reenitz writes uh about um sort of the governors that are the first radio plays um all end up being the ones that end up on screen. Um so the outcasts, um Stormy Petrol, and those ones are all adapted um to screen, which is fascinating. So, and I mean Rex is a really I mean someone could write a book about Rex. Rex is a fantastic, fascinating character. You know, he is a radio playwright, he's a historian, but he absolutely sees his role as a public historian, you know, and he wants to push these stories or his idea of the colony, which is very much this kind of new vision of egalitarianism and you know, nation building and convicts and all that kind of stuff, which is at odds with other scholarship at that time, might I add, which is quite fascinating. He really sees that as part of his mission to push it onto television and onto radio, and he gets there in the end, which is which is fantastic. So thank you. Sorry, I hope that answered your question.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:06

Thanks for a great presentation and uh very interesting topic. I'm just wondering how many of the um films were the playwrights actually looking at um research and history as opposed to a kind of um mode of soap opera. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:27

I think it depends. I I mean it's varies so much. So I think for a documentary like The Last Tasmanian, it's very much drawing on at that particular time um archaeological research. And the main players in that particular documentary are, you know, Rhys Jones is a is a sort of lauded archaeologist at that moment, and his his career takes a huge hit after the film because it, you know, incorrectly makes the claim that um Tasmanian Aboriginal people are uh were made extinct. Um so I think in those instances you do see real academic kind of research collide with screen culture. In other instances, I think there's very little. Um, and I think it's sort of based on sort of tropes or stereotypes or ideas and drama is put at the forefront. But that kind of inaccuracy is what I find interesting with this stuff, you know, because it's sort of like, well, why are we telling these stories in this particular way at that moment? You know, why is the emphasis turned up on a particular angle of the convict story at this particular time? Because, you know, that tells us about something about the way in which historical memory is functioning at that moment. And to be honest, that was kind of the genesis of the project to begin with, because I had worked on various historical docudramas and documentaries as a researcher, and I had no formal historical training to do so. But here I was, you know, helping script writers write scripts about colonial Australia, um, and I was not a historian, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:46

The um, of course, the other great myth mythos of uh white Australian history is the Bush Ranger that screen filmmakers go back to time and time again. Did you notice any parallels? Were they telling comic stories and Bush Ranger stories at the same time, or was one going in and out of fashion while the other one was appearing?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:07

I think you see a lot of mirroring going on between the two. Um, you know, in the revival period, the Bush Ranger sort of emerges as this um, you know, sort of, I guess, um, hero of new nationalism, sort of he's anti-authoritarian

Q&A: Gaps Filled By Radio And Theatre

SPEAKER_01 1:10:20

um in a way that, you know, Mick Jagger plays Ned Kelly and, you know, the Ned Kelly film in the 1970s, that sort of thing. Um, fascinatingly, um, you know, the first feature film ever made is the Ned Kelly film. Um, and then very soon after the convicts arrive on screen. Um, and then I think around, gosh, I'm testing my memory here, it's sort of around 1911 or 1912, Bush Ranger films are banned because it's seen as being this sort of, you know, people are going to write in the streets because the the authority is shown as being like, you know, that they're the baddies, the policemen are the baddies. And so in step the convicts, and it's really interesting to see the way that sort of convict stories are like used to sort of rep like to skirt close to um to sort of bush ranger stories, tell quite similar stories, set in a similar world, about similar stuff, you know, similar rollicking tales of blokes on horses riding around, um, but they're not bush rangers, so it's okay. Um, and so yeah, and a lot of those early silent films as well, convicts become bush rangers, become convicts, you know, it's that kind of thing. So, so there's absolutely a lot of crossover. And there's a fantastic book by um, I think it's Stephen Cozins about the history of the Bush Ranger in theatre and on screen, which if you're into that is absolutely worth looking at. And I I certainly I certainly read that a lot while I was writing the book because he does a wonderful job of looking at those films.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:35

We probably have time for one one last one.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:39

Just like to echo James' a great talk. So thank you very much. Um, I learned everything about convicts from Against the Wind, but I'm more interested now in the silent era. Yeah. And just to build on what you just said, do you know if any of the writers and filmmakers have convicts in their own heritage? And if not, let's find out.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:00

Yeah, fantastic. I don't know. I honestly don't know. Actually, that's a really, really good point, particularly during the silent era. Um, I imagine I imagine that filmmakers like John Gavin, you know, those kind of guys who were um who were making a lot of these colonial melodramas at the time, were kind of yeah, I mean, possibly, and they they knew and they were drawing possibly on this kind of you know, vernacular that Anna Clark writes about quite nicely in her book about Australian history, um, that exists as kind of bubbling along there, along with the anxieties of the convict stain. Um, and very likely that's drawn on from from from personal convict ancestry. Um, but yeah, gosh, that's a fascinating idea that I hadn't even thought of and like probably a big gap in the book that could be addressed in the second version of it. Thank you, Rick. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:46

Well look, thank you. I'm sure we could have uh talked for much longer, but uh the the clock is going to be there. So thank you, James. Thank you so much for a fascinating conversation. Um I hope you'll be able to join us for our next History Now, which will be on Thursday, the 27th of November, where we will be looking at shipwrecks from the Mediterranean to the Australian coastline and uh the role that understanding uh shipping plays with maritime archaeology, but also broader uh naval histories as well.

Q&A: Research Vs Melodrama

SPEAKER_00 1:13:20

But otherwise, a reminder, James's book is available in all good bookshops. Um and uh thank you so much for your time tonight. Thank you, Sophie, thank you, James.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:29

Thank you for joining us for this podcast. If you'd like to hear more, subscribe to our series via your favourite streaming platform and join us for our next History Now episode: technological innovation, human connectivity, and the maritime world. From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. For a full list of the History Council cultural partners, along with a list of other podcasts produced by us, please visit our website History CouncilNSW.org.au forward slash podcasts. I'm Catherine Shirley. Thank you.