Commemorating Convicts: Grangegorman to Tasmania

Grangegorman Histories is delighted to welcome Professor Hamish Maxwell Stewart who will deliver a public lunchtime lecture on Wednesday 7 August.

Between 1787 and 1868 around 40,000 convicts were transported from Ireland to Australia, including 3,200 women and about 500 girls transported from the Richmond Penitentiary at Grangegorman. There they were joined by others of Irish descent convicted in courts across the British empire. Over the last two decades many of the records documenting this forced labour migration have been digitised, coded and linked to tackle questions as diverse as the impact of solitary confinement on convict life expectancy, levels of reoffending and patterns of convict resistance. A spinoff of this research has been the creation of the largest and most complicated historical dataset assembled in Australia to date. This is now being used to drive new heritage interpretation initiatives. This includes an interactive exhibition unveiled in March 2024 in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (Unshackled: The True Convict Story) and a digital Convict Memorial in the Hobart Penitentiary unveiled in November 2023. Grangegorman Histories is delighted to welcome Australian Professor Hamish Maxwell Stewart to Grangegorman where his lecture will explore some of Ireland’s transportation history and the ways in which cutting edge digital humanities research using the latest AI techniques is being used to tell the story of Irish and British convict transportation to Australia and how this might develop in the future.

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart is a professor of heritage and digital humanities at the University of New England. The author of over a hundred books and articles, Hamish has long been an advocate of the necessity of connecting cutting edge research with heritage interpretation. His previous heritage collaborations have included the Lottery of Life visitor gallery at the Port Arthur Historic Site, viewed by over 2,000,000 visitors, and the Digital Panopticon website.

On Wednesday 7th August 2024 at 13:00 – 14:300Grangegorman Histories is hosting a lecture by Prof Hamish Maxwell Stewart ‘Commemoration Convicts: Grangegorman to Tasmania’. This event will take place in Room EQ117, which is on the first floor of the East Quad building on the TU Dublin Grangegorman Campus.

Tickets are this event are now available