First Ernest Scott Prize lecture of 2022:

‘Damaged Goods from Scotland: The long arm of traumatic childhood in convict history’

Presented by Emeritus Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor

Janet McCalman AC

Date:  Thursday 15 September 2022

Time:  6:15pm – 7:30pm

Venue:  Kathleen Fitzpatrick Theatre, Basement, Arts West Building

Australia is unique among settler-colonies in having detailed physical and behavourial records of many of its original settlers—the convicts. We can know our European past more intimately than can Canadians or New Zealanders. We may think that we know these stories and what they mean, but when we look at our convict ancestors as a population using the tools of historical demography, there are surprises. Above all that childhood remained the most significant determinant of these troubled lives, not the trials of the convict system nor the tribulations of adulthood.

Janet McCalman AC is Emeritus Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Professorial Fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of four award-winning social histories—Struggletown, Journeyings, Sex and Suffering, and most recently Vandemonians: the repressed history of Colonial Victoria, Miegunyah Press 2021. In 2020, with Emma Dawson, she co-edited What Happens Next: Reconstructing Australia after COVID-19. For twenty years she taught interdisciplinary history in both the faculty of Arts and in the Melbourne School of Population & Global Health.

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The Ernest Scott Prize is awarded annually for the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand, or the history of colonisation. Part II of the 2022 Ernest Scott lecture prize will be presented by the joint winner, Lucy Mackintosh on the evening of 13 October 2022.

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