This event is organised by the Descendants of Convicts Group Inc (DOCS) together with the RHSV.

Conviction Politics is an international digital history project exploring the impact of radicals and rebels transported as political convicts to Australia on their place of exile, and the patterns of collective resistance by the mass of unfree convict women and women to the exploitation of their forced labour.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of democratic reformers, rural labour protestors, Irish freedom fighters and revolutionaries were exiled as political prisoners to Britain’s Australian colonies, where Indigenous people opposing dispossession joined them as prisoners. As convicts, they resisted exploitation through inventive solidarity in the face of coercion, and in turn changed the political direction of the colonies.

Conviction Politics traces how these convicts and their ideas helped lay the foundations of egalitarianism, political and social democracy, unions and workers rights and national self-determination in Australia and the UK. Through archival research, data analysis and visualisation, documentary, animation and song, the project is producing an innovative suite of digital content exploring these stories and their contemporary resonance.

Based at Monash University, Conviction Politics collaborates with researchers from universities in Australia, the UK and Ireland, and is partnered with a range of museums, archives, and unions. Join us for the documentary screening and panel discussion afterwards

Project leader, Associate Professor Tony Moore from Monash University, will take us through the project’s discoveries, media and exhibition, including screening a selection of short documentaries. Tony will explain how Conviction Politics overturns the orthodoxy of how we think about convict Australia. The project reveals how Australia’s first ‘unfree’ workforce resisted exploitation and subordination through inventive solidarity in the face of coercion, while a vanguard of rebels, liberal pamphleteers, industrial protestors and radical agitators changed the political direction of the Australian colonies.

Tony Moore is author of Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788-1868 (2010), adapted as a television documentary of the same name (2015), Dancing with Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians since 1860 (2012) and The Barry McKenzie Movies (2005). Tony has had previous careers as a documentary maker at the ABC and academic commissioning editor at Pluto Press and Cambridge University Press.

Afternoon tea will be served at 3pm.

On booking you will be sent an automatically-generated confirmation email – these sometimes go astray so please check your Junk Mail or Spam Mail folder. For those attending on ZOOM you will be sent the ZOOM log-in details 24 hours before the event.