Preliminary Programme

Prosopographical sources frequently consist of semantically rich unstructured or semi-structured text, such as descriptions of locations, physical appearance, diseases, life events and so on. Researchers will often wish to classify or categorise this text in a way which reflects some underlying or 'natural' structure. We describe a general purpose tool based on the growing self-organised map (GSOM) and its application to Founders and Survivors semi-structured textual data. GSOM is a data mining algorithm which allows the analyst to determine the specificity or generality of the categories derived, and also potentially derive hierarchical categories. This tool may be used in conjunction with a markup language such as the Text Encoding Initiative to make the text source available for systematic prosopographical analysis. (Show less)

We use World War I Attestation Papers to explore differences in stature of British and native born enlistees in the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) and Canadian Expeditionary Forces (CEF). Results suggest important differences with respect to the growth path these two former colonies followed. Australia followed a biological standard of living growth path best characterized as non-changing in the later half of the 19th century, while the biological standard of living amongst Canadian born CEF enlistees fell during the same period. In contrast the biological standard of living for British born troops in the AIF and CEF suggest a varied and somewhat idiosyncratic growth path. Important socio-economic status effects captured through occupation, as well as religious affiliation, suggest a differential effect of social status in shaping stature of AIF and CEF enlistees, as well as a complex milieu between country of birth, and occupation and religion. Lastly, we note the stature advantage held by the Irish born persist in the context of enlistment in colonial forces. (Show less)

One of the unexpected findings of Founders and Survivors is that around 30,000 freed and escaped convicts went to Victoria. Their role in the Gold Rush story has been restricted to the “Vandemonian” crime wave in the early years of the Diggings. But the fate of men and women carrying the stigma of convictism and the physical and mental scars, was more various and complex. How did they fare in the gold economy? What were the characteristics of those who successfully remade their lives and those who remained marginal people? And what of the possibility that former convicts who got to the Diggings early had the skills and bush craft to get to the gold before the inflow of diggers from overseas? The Gold Rush provided a laboratory of opportunity where great prizes were on offer, and failure was even more common. And that laboratory enables us to glimpse the long-term impact of transportation and the convict system on mind and body. (Show less)

Convict transportation to Australia is often thought of as particularly harsh form of punishment. Contrary to its representation in the popular literature, however, death rates for male convicts under sentence in Australia were comparable to those for the equivalent age cohorts in the British Isles. Perhaps surprisingly those for their female counterparts were even lower, reversing the British trend between the genders. While some forms of punishment, especially hard labour in road and chain gangs and penal stations appear to have elevated colonial death rates, this excess mortality appears to have been offset by the relatively benign conditions encountered by convicts employed in less coercive locations. This paper will examine the impacts of punishment, nutrition, accommodation and medical treatment on mortality. In doing so it will pay particular attention to the factors which lay behind the very low death rates recorded for convict women. It will argue that this may have resulted from restrictions that were imposed upon female convicts. To put this another way, regulations which cut down on the social rights of transported prisoners conversely enabled a greater number to survive to the point where they gained their freedom. The paper will also explore some of the long-run implications of this apparent paradox. (Show less)