Speaker 1: Libraries Tasmania recognises the deep histories and cultures of the Aboriginal people of Lutruwita/Tasmania. We acknowledge Tasmanian Aboriginal people as the traditional and continuing custodians of the land, waters, and sky.
We pay respect to the Elders, past and present who hold the memories, traditions, culture, and knowledge of Country. We extend our respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, whose Countries were never ceded.
Dr. Richard Tuffin: I’m Dr. Richard Tuffin. I’m the recipient of the History Fellowship with the State Library of Tasmania. I’ve been an archaeologist for the last 25 years or so. I started out at Port Alfred Historic Site. Fell in love with sort of the history of Tasmania.
I applied for a fellowship because this type of opportunity really gives a researcher such as myself the space to do the research. Um, because I work full-time, uh, having this fellowship allows me to sort of buy myself out from the work I would otherwise do to do this research that really, really interest me.
The main focus of my research is looking at a particular aspect of the convict system in Tasmania. And that particular aspect is called the probation system, because in the 1840s, what happened was they completely changed the way in which men and women convicts were administered in the colony at the time. So there was a huge change of how infrastructure was administered. So instead of convicts sort of being assigned out to free settlers, they’d actually on arrival in the colony be put in all these stations. And that, of course, has this huge implication for the infrastructures that’s required and therefore, that has a impact upon the colony as well.
And so if you think about all those new stations going in, we also have a vast array of new convicts coming through the system, so the system peaks at the time. And just as all this is happening, you have a depression hits the colony as well. And so probation gets blamed often for the parlous state of the colony at the time, but I’m really, really interested because what probation actually does is set the template for the modern Tasmania that we know. So this particular project is looking at these stations and these road gangs, uh, places where these convicts were in the landscape, so using the maps and plans of the archives and then understanding how they have changed the modern landscape that we’re looking at today.
And this fellowship, I thought, is a really interesting opportunity to further that research by looking at all these amazing maps and plans that are available online, uh, because the archives have done this wonderful job of putting all of those. Maps and plans used to be scored away in the land titles office. They’re now digitised and really easy and accessible for us to look at. And so I thought I can take that opportunity to use these plans or this cartographic material and just expand my area of research into probation.
One of the main outputs from this project is called GIS, so Geographic Information System. And what I can do is take spatial records, like the maps and plans which are held in the archives office and put them into this system. So the maps are digital often and what I can do is georeference them to the modern landscape and that allows us to see where buildings were with reference to the modern landscape. Uh, through that process of georeferencing, we can see where convict places were. And where we can see those convict places, we can turn them into containers for information.
So one of the things I can do is begin to link non-spatial information such as population records, correspondents, um, people that went through there, so the names of convicts who came through these places. I can actually begin to link them into the spatial record. And what that does, it puts people it place. And as an archaeologist, I love putting people in place and I want to do this for all of the stations around Tasmania from the probation period to sort of understand where the station was in the landscape, but also how these convicts interacted with these places and a system like GIS is brilliant for doing that.
I can then put that out there through an online mapping portal and then people can interact with the maps that I create and all the interpretation because there’s no point in me doing research like this if people can’t access it and benefit from it. So it’s just a really nice way for other people to sort of understand the convict system. So, I’m hoping to do all this hard work and then sort of people can hopefully reap the benefits of that research.
I would definitely recommend people to go for the fellowship, it’s a nice easy application process. And what it does is it gives you that space to do the research, but it also allows you to interact with the materials of the archives. So, for me, often I will interact with materials that are on microfilm or, you know, things like that digitally, but what I can do through this fellowship is actually look at the actual records, like go down there, um, and with an archivist have a look at the actual originals. And there’s nothing better than looking at the original records and seeing that handwriting or seeing the inked maps and plans and it just gives you that sort of connection to the past.
And there’s just something amazing about being able to call upon, you know, these people here. I know a lot about the archives, but the people that work here know a heck of a lot more than me, and so being able to draw on that expertise, um, you know, I’ve had cases where I’ve just talked about some of my research and then they’ve been able to point me in other directions that I perhaps haven’t thought about or new avenues of research. So that’s really, really handy, being able to have that direct connection to these, um, yeah, very skilled people that work here.