Tasmania’s colonial history is a bloody one.
It includes tales of wars between Aboriginal Tasmanians and the settlers, hangings and people rebelling against the way things were.
Van Diemen’s Land had one of the highest rates of armed resistance across the British Empire in colonial times, according to University of Tasmania Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart.
“There were 400 armed convicts that were labelled bushrangers during the transportation period,” he told Helen Shield on 936 ABC Hobart.
Professor Maxwell-Stewart moved to Tasmania after he got hooked studying the state’s convict history.
He said he had originally wanted to study the slave trade, but while at the University of Edinburgh it was suggested he look at Australian history.
“Because, quite frankly, everybody works on slave trade and remarkably few people work on Tasmania,” he said.
“I’d never been to Tasmania, I hardly knew about Tasmania, so I started working on rebellions in convict Tasmania from Edinburgh.”
Professor Maxwell-Stewart said studying history in Tasmania gave him access to “one of the world’s great archives” in the form of convict records.
The records of convicts who escaped into the bush and became known as bushrangers give an insight into rebellion as for some it was about more than just escaping a prison camp.
Read the full fascinating article, ABC HERE
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