Table of contents for Edition 7, 2019 in Traces

Developed by the Healing Foundation in consultation with stolen generations members, teachers, parents and curriculum writers, these new educational resources aim to promote greater understanding about an often overlooked part of Australia’s history in a safe and ageappropriate way. The Healing Foundation’s Chair, Professor Steve Larkin, says that sharing the truth of Australian history is an important part of healing for the thousands of children who were forcibly removed from their families between 1910 and the 1970s. ‘Despite the traumatic impact that the stolen generations policies continue to have on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities, very little about this chapter of our history has been taught in schools – particularly from an Indigenous perspective,’ says Larkin. The kit includes professional learning tools for teachers, along with suggested…

The Dampier Archipelago and the Murujuga (Burrup Peninsula) in Western Australia is home to at least one million works of rock art that are intrinsically linked to the culture of the area’s traditional owners. The state government and the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC) have recently begun pursuing World Heritage listing for the ancient site. If successful, Murujuga will be only the second Australian site listed for rock art (after Kakadu National Park). ‘We are currently working on our submission in conjunction with the Western Australian Government,’ says Peter Jeffries, the Chief Executive Officer of MAC, which jointly manages Murujuga National Park with the state government. In order to be considered for World Heritage listing, a place must demonstrate ‘outstanding universal value’, and experts at the Centre for Rock Art Research…

Taught 100 per cent online, Introduction to Family History is part of an online suite of units that enables flexible study. It is one of five foundation-level units available in the Diploma of Family History. Students must complete four foundation-level units and four 100-level units to complete the diploma. Course teacher Associate Professor Penny Edmonds says she has a fascination with where she comes from, who her ancestors were and the varied lives they led, noting that studying family history provides greater understanding about ourselves. Edmonds has a museum and public history background, is a trained historian in Australian history, and Australian settler and Indigenous relations. We asked Edmonds for a little more information about studying family history at the University of Tasmania. Who is this course best suited to?…

llan Hackett has spent five decades of his life passionately researching, recording and collecting bricks from the early years of British settlement. Among his thousands of bricks, Hackett has English bricks dating back to the late 1700s, as well as bricks that came with the First Fleet that were used to build the first kiln, which enabled the colony to start making bricks. The collection has now been passed on to Th or Dorsett, a young brick enthusiast with a passion for Australian convict bricks, who plans to open a museum for the public. ‘He has a driving passion to look for new finds and is deeply interested in research,’ says Hackett. ‘We regularly discuss bricks and their heritage.’ In taking up the mantle to continue Hackett’s work for the…

MyHeritage Norway • Norway Census: more than 6.8 million census records from 1891, 1900 and 1910 Visit www.myheritage.com FamilySearch Australia • South Australian Immigrant Ship Papers, 1849–1940: more than 49,000 indexed records added to an existing collection United Kingdom • Northumberland Parish Registers, 1530–1950: more than 6000 indexed records added to an existing collection• England and Wales National Register, 1939: more than 42 million indexed records added to a new collection United States • Colorado Statewide Divorce Index, 1900–1939: more than 2000 indexed records added to an existing collection• Connecticut, World War I Military Census of Nurses, 1917: more than 100 indexed records added to an existing collection• Florida, World War I Navy Card Roster, 1917–1920: more than 100 indexed records added to an existing collection• Georgia Deaths, 1928–1942: more…

From violent riots to peaceful sit-outs, Fremantle Prison’s new exhibition ‘Protest and Unrest at Fremantle Prison’ explores the reasons why prisoners felt the need to protest, and the ways in which they voiced their dissatisfaction. Examining the conditions and regime under which prisoners lived, the exhibition covers over 90 years of Fremantle Prison’s history. Several protests are examined in detail, using personal accounts from prisoners, officers and the administration. The rotten food, appalling living conditions, and accusations of torture and abuse were all used as justification by prisoners for pushing back against authority. Showing objects never displayed before, such as improvised weapons from the 1988 riot, an electric battery box and prisoner graffiti, the exhibition presents a confronting view of life inside. Visitors will be challenged by the question: in…

The humidity here in Queensland is nudging 80 per cent and despite being a fourth-generation banana bender, I’m struggling. In an undoubtedly cooler Scottish summer, 156 years ago, my great-great-grandfather sat with other members of the Paisley Emigration Society and debated the relative merits of emigration to Queensland and Canada. Like many of the members of the society, John Johnstone Higgins was a weaver down on his luck. In the 19th century, the town of Paisley became synonymous with the paisley design and Paisley was, for many years, a centre for textile manufacturing. In the middle of the century, economic conditions were grim and much of the population was unemployed or underemployed. Naturally, the minds of some turned to emigration. The Paisley Emigration Society had existed in the 1820s and…

began compiling Torres Strait Islander genealogies in 1981, in order to understand the contribution made by 19th-century immigrants and their descendants to the history of the region. Genealogy is a collaborative endeavour, and I have been generously supported by hundreds of Torres Strait Islanders and Cape York Aboriginal people, local officials, and the Community and Personal Histories section at the Queensland State Archives. Oral and written accounts are complementary, each of them necessary but not sufficient on their own. Not all material is available online, and useful (though sometimes inaccurate) information is held by the national and Queensland libraries, archives, museums and historical societies, as well as church archives and the online Queensland register of birth, deaths and marriages. In the past, people who had died without issue, who had…

Women were present in almost every theatre of war. More than 66,000 of them enlisted in a branch of the women’s services during the war, and thousands more served as nurses, doctors and allied health professionals all over the world. At home in Australia, more than 5000 women answered the call to ‘do it for the boys’, replacing the male farm workers who’d gone off to fight, or those who’d left farms to take up essential war work. It’s not an exaggeration to say that through the efforts of these women, Australia was able to keep its citizens and its troops fed. When the Commonwealth put out a call for women to fill these jobs, thousands and thousands of them walked away from offices, factories, shops and typing pools to…

Nestled between Sydney Harbour and the city skyscrapers is a cluster of sandstone buildings known today as the Justice & Police Museum. The museum, managed by Sydney Living Museums, cares for an eclectic collection of material relating to Sydney’s criminal and policing history. Th is includes the remarkable New South Wales Police Forensic Photography Archive, made up of approximately 130,000 negatives created between 1910 and 1964. An extraordinary section of this archive contains the mugshots known as the ‘Specials’, providing a snapshot of the Roaring Twenties. Today, the 1920s conjures up visions of Art Deco glamour, jazz and socialites dancing the charleston. Yet lurking beneath the surface of this sophisticated society was a world of gangs, guns, vice and violence, as criminals around the globe moved into new markets, including…

Budj Bim Indigenous eel trap site on verge of World Heritage listing A sophisticated 6600-year-old aquaculture system developed by the Gunditjmara people in Victoria is being considered for listing as a UNESCO World Heritage site. If successful, the site will be the first in Australia listed exclusively for its Aboriginal cultural value. The Gunditjmara people constructed an advanced system of rock channels and weirs to control water flows from Lake Condah, which allowed them to trap and farm migrating eels. It is one of the oldest aquaculture systems in the world. The 200 recorded stone house sites in the area prove that people were living a sedentary life, challenging the idea that all Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers. A master plan for sustainable tourism, which includes boardwalks and viewing platforms, has…

THEN The original Brown’s Mart building, on the corner of Smith Street and Harry Chan Avenue, was designed by architect and government secretary JG Knight, who also designed the Town Hall and Courthouse. Built in 1885 using Chinese labour, the building was first opened as Solomon’s Emporium (for Vaiben Louis Solomon, who later became premier and treasurer of South Australia). It was said to be the finest stone store in Darwin (then known as Palmerston) at that time. The structure is 80 feet by 30 feet by 17 feet (24 metres by 9 metres by 5 metres), with a corrugated-iron roof, and is built of porcellanite stone, a hard, dense rock that looks similar to unglazed porcelain. Solomon operated his emporium here for two years, and then from 1887 to…

magine being a 16-year-old apprentice on your first long voyage, 106 days out from Hamburg, Germany, in 1891, and just one day from the shelter of Port Phillip bay. Th is was young Welshman Louis Evans, part of a 25-man crew aboard the 1400-tonne, three-masted barque, skippered by the experienced William Vickers. The cargo comprised pianos, sewing machines, toys, coiled wire, dynamite and hundreds of crates of bottled liquor. Just after midnight on Sunday 6 September, the Fiji ran aground just west of Moonlight Head in Victoria, a prominent landmark in the notorious Bass Strait. Evans and his colleagues attempted a lifeboat escape across the 200 metres to the shore, but rough seas and heavy swell smashed the little crafts before they could be boarded. The men were in absolute…

I knew from immigration records and the stories of my Dad’s cousin that the Higgins family came to Maryborough on the Montmorency. Using both Ancestry and ScotlandsPeople websites, I was able to view census records, and birth, death and marriage records, and I started to get a picture of the family’s life in Paisley, Scotland. Knowing a bit about how the industrial revolution impacted manufacturing jobs in Europe, I guessed that disappearing work and poor living conditions influenced the decision to migrate. When I started to delve into digitised newspapers on the National Library of Australia’s Trove website, I learned more about their life in Queensland and about Higgins’s character. He seemed like someone who didn’t mind an argument for the sake of what he thought was right and that…

people often develop strong connections to their homes and find leaving them to be difficult, so it’s fascinating to learn about the people who lived in your home before you did. Whether you’ve lived in a house for years and are curious about those who lived there previously, or you’re keen to find out what an ancestor’s home was like, here are some tips on where to begin your research. Figuring out the resources As is the case with many research projects, it can be difficult to figure out where to start. Today, we are lucky to have many research resources at our disposal – with libraries, historical societies and online databases, there is so much information at our fingertips. Sometimes, however, this can mean that it is difficult to…

Answer: A transit telescope This portable brass telescope has a 3.25-inch aperture and a 42-inch focus. It was made by Troughton & Simms in London, circa 1850, and was the primary transit instrument used in Victoria’s first government observatory, the Williamstown Observatory, in 1854, before an instrument with a five-inch aperture was acquired in 1861. Th is telescope was used in the Geodetic Survey of Victoria under the supervision of Robert Ellery, the government astronomer. It was also used by Charles Todd at the Adelaide Observatory in 1867 to measure the longitude difference between the Melbourne and Adelaide observatories. He also used the tool to establish the boundary between New South Wales and South Australia. If you have an interesting ‘thingamajig’ to share, email us at traces@executivemedia.com.au!…