The Port Macquarie Bicentennial Database Legacy Project

Introduction

 

 

One of the great things about conferences is the way they generate ideas and foster further collaboration. In the halcyon pre-Covid days of 2019 the AHA conference, in Toowoomba, attracted an unusual number of convict scholars. Those of us working on penal stations were particularly well represented. Accordingly, Professor Raymond Evans, Dr Richard Tuffin and I combined to present papers on Moreton Bay, Port Arthur and Newcastle respectively,  reflecting a networked academic response to a networked system of punishment. Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, the historian of Macquarie Harbour and, more lately, of Port Arthur was the obvious chair. Meanwhile, in other streams, Professor David Roberts presented on Port Macquarie and Dr Katie Roscoe outlined her new project on Cockatoo Island. Secondary punishment research prospects are looking bright.

 

The conference was also remarkable for the number of digital scholars working in the broader field of crime and punishment. Professor Mark Finnane, of the Queensland Prosecution Project, chaired a roundtable session entitled ‘Digital Histories of Crime: what they are; what they tell us and what they promise.’ With a paper from his former student, Dr Alana Piper, describing her work with citizen historians in Victoria; Professor Barry Godfrey of the University of Liverpool offering the insights of comparative criminology and finally Hamish Maxwell-Stewart bringing us up to date with his remarkable Tasmanian data, this session did exactly what it says on the tin. Before we departed Toowoomba Mark Finnane summoned the colonial and criminal justice scholars for an informal meeting on the future of digital history in Australia. I felt something of an imposter, given that my digital ability is limited to a key word search on Trove, but even I was aware of the zeitgeist in the room. Digital History is no longer an optional extra because, one way or another, it underpins all our endeavours.

 

Over the course of the sort of chats that occur in pubs, Hamish reminded David and me that the Port Macquarie Bicentennial was imminent and, we all agreed that we could and should make a contribution. I had recently visited and presented a paper at Port Macquarie so I was familiar with the impressive work of the Family History Society. Moreover, I had long been aware of the no less impressive museum and its associated historical society, with whom I had corresponded in the nineties, when we were trying to save the recently excavated site of the Commandant’s house from development (we were, of course, unsuccessful).

 

It was clear that the existence of two very active history societies and a uniquely gifted population of citizen historians, with impeccable digital credentials, made Port Macquarie the ideal place to launch a new digital history project for New South Wales and the bicentennial was surely the obvious time to do it.

 

We outlined our pitch to the societies and after many months of planning and discussion we are delighted to be staging this event under the auspices of the PMDFHS, whose efforts on our behalf have ensured we have the support of the Port Macquarie Council. We are most grateful for the committee’s hard work and local expertise. It is a privilege to collaborate with such an energetic and experienced group of family historians. By now the original academic gang of three – Hamish, David and I had expanded to include Perry McIntyre, whose scholarly interests, and familial links with Port Macquarie made her a natural choice. We all felt that the Birpai perspective was vital to the integrity and success of the event and Dr John Heath, a Birpai Elder, was accordingly invited to give the Keynote address. For many readers fiction is often the most immediate and visceral way to access the past. Meg Kenneally’s historical detective series began at the Port Macquarie penal station – and so we invited her to join us and revisit the scene and sources of her first novel (written in collaboration with her father Tom). Our final contributor is also the first. The late Dr Ian Duffield was a friend and mentor to both Hamish and I but, he was also the first academic historian to take a serious interest in the convicts of Port Macquarie. We therefore open proceedings with some of his unpublished work on a dramatic episode of convict resistance in 1825. In addition to laying the ground work for a new digital project we will each contribute a paper on aspects of our research, reflecting our various interests in the convict history of the penal station; the digital future of the convict past and the impact of European settlement on Birpai Country.

 

A further defining feature of this event is the active collaboration between local and family historians and university academics (and novelists). We all have a strong sense of community engagement and have a great deal of respect for the archival expertise of family historians—expertise that we have all, at times, relied on. In the last few decades family history has become an acknowledged and enriching theme in Australian historiography. Moreover, digital projects such as Founders and Survivors in Tasmania and The Prosecution Project in Queensland would have been impossible without them.

 

In preparing for this event I have also been reflecting on that earlier bicentennial. Tall ships with billowing sails and nary a convict in site and yet here we are, almost 30 years later, positively wallowing in our convict past and much of that generational shift in attitude is a consequence of the endeavours of family historians. The 1988 event was inevitably marked by controversy as the state and federal authorities attempted to navigate their way through histories of invasion on one hand, and histories of achievement on the other, and this remains our colonial conundrum. Prime Minister Bob Hawke was deliberately sensitive to the mood of indigenous Australians, while the historian Geoffrey Blainey railed against the erasure of British history. For others it was all about cricket and World Expo. How disconcertingly familiar all this sounds as we continue to grapple with these questions of colonial erasure and remembrance. Our event claims to offer no resolution to these complex questions, but we are ever conscious and respectful of this contested history. It is our simple aim to enrich community understanding of the beginnings and endings attached to Port Macquarie’s penal station past. More ambitiously, we also hope to respond to this bicentennial moment by launching a new digital research project and thus meet the challenge set by Mark Finnane in Toowoomba 2019.

 

We welcome your attendance in person (COVID willing) or via zoom on Saturday 10th April. But most of all we hope to forge a lasting spirit of community collaboration. The difficult questions raised by this landmark moment of remembering serve to emphasise the continuing importance of historical inquiry. The aim is not so much to celebrate or condemn, but rather to interrogate and acknowledge the past in all its painful and fascinating complexity. The revered historian Greg Denning, writing in the Australian Book Review in May 1996, characterised history not as memory but as remembering. “[It] is in the present participle. It is an action, something in process. The noun is closed down, defined. One has memories; one goes on remembering…. returning to the past in its own present moments - letting a world, petrified by hindsight, dance, sing, weep, tremble, doubt, believe.” In other words, he is exhorting us to approach such moments with an open-minded curiosity.

 

Hamish is fond of saying – “The past is a crime scene and it’s time to get forensic”! It is in this, facetiously apt, spirit of inquiry that we invite you to join us in the continuing adventures of CIS Port Macquarie! Together we can lay the ground work for a collaborative and creative research project, eventually encompassing the whole state.  This is a fitting Bicentennial legacy by any measure. After all, as the American philosopher William James observed, "The great use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it."

 

As further inspiration Hamish asked me to leave you with this—a verse by the French poet and philosopher Paul Valery on the magical possibilities of entering the archive….

 

It depends on those who pass

Whether I am a tomb or a treasure

Whether I speak or am silent

The choice is yours alone.

Friend do not enter without desire.

(Inscribed on the wall of a Parisian library & archive).

 

We look forward to your company at our bicentennial workshop and during the treasure hunt ahead!

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Tamsin O’Connor 2021

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Digital technologies provide a way of making sense of our history. The colonial archive is enormous and it is all too easy to get lost in a maze of leads, many of which prove to be dead ends or red herrings. Relational databases and other software solutions enable us to make sense of the past by joining together long lost pieces from the same puzzle, or on occasion, disconnecting information that has been incorrectly linked. In order to get the best out of these tools, however, we need to organise. Archivists, family and local historians and academics  need to work together to create a common set of guidelines for the way we handle information about the past. Without these it will be impossible to see the wood for the trees and we will risk creating a plethora of different data resources which don’t talk to each other. The rewards for developing a set of shared protocols are enormous. They provide an opportunity to improve the provenance of the nation, creating new archival and library research engines. They will also enable us to create stunning heritage visualisations and improve the quality of educational resources. The Port Macquarie Bicentenary offers an opportunity to look at ways in which we can develop the historical tools we need for the future.

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Hamish Maxwell-Stewart 2021

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