1008 Introduction

A Personal History of Family History & its wider contribution My current project about the female convicts has caused me to think deeply about the historiography on this topic. To realise how famiily history put flesh and blood on the skeleton of writing 'history from below'. I'll use my ten minutes to ponder the significant methodological shift this caused. How focus on the personal and the ordinary also produced changes in interpretation and perspective. Family history has led to the discovery of new sources. It has influenced the digitisation of existing sources. Family history's role in Australia has been significant beyond the personal for more than thirty years. It is at its best when combined with academic scholarship. Now Aboriginal historians are also researching their family history, academic and family historians can potentially play a vital role towards Reconciliation between the Aboriginal people and other Australians.

(REVISED 18 Feb. 2018 to incorporate discussion on academia.edu prompted by Dr Kristyn Harman) A Personal History of Family History & its wider contribution My current project about the female convicts has caused me to think deeply about the historiography on this topic. To realise how famiily history put flesh and blood on the skeleton of writing 'history from below'. I'll use my ten minutes to ponder the significant methodological shift this caused. How focus on the personal and the ordinary also produced changes in interpretation and perspective. Family history has led to the discovery of new sources. It has influenced the digitisation of existing sources. Family history's role in Australia has been significant beyond the personal for more than thirty years. It is at its best when combined with academic scholarship. Now Aboriginal historians are also researching their family history, academic and family historians can potentially play a vital role towards Reconciliation between the Aboriginal people and other Australians.

Australian Journal of Biography and History, 2020

Morgan had two extraordinary disciples in Lorimer Fison and Alfred Howitt in Australia. They were inspired by Morgan's kinship schedule and were profoundly engaged in the method and theory of the collection of kinship data and its interpretation. Fison began using the schedule in Fiji in 1869. Soon after his first contact with Howitt, in 1873, they changed the method of collection of kinship terminologies. This paper traces the shift from tabulated kinship lists to family trees and the use of sticks to represent relationships (nearly twenty years before Rivers' celebrated 'genealogical method'), as well as efforts to find new means of representing kinship through experimentation with ' graphic formulae' inspired by chemical equations. These innovations first occurred through the gathering of kinship data about the Kŭnai of Gippsland, Victoria, and crucially involved close collaboration between Howitt and his Kŭnai consultant Tulaba. What was revealed in this process was an indigenous kinship system quite different from that found in other parts of colonial Australia known at the time. Fison and Howitt explained this system as transitional between two stages in terms of Morgan's evolutionary scheme, but at the same time challenged the assumption that the general scheme could be applied to Australia. While the details of Morgan's evolutionary stages have faded from view, the methods of collection, representation, transmission, comparison and interpretation of kinship data are still live issues in anthropology today. The kind of kinship system discovered in Gippsland involved neutralisation of the cross-parallel distinctions, distinctions that are otherwise typical of Australia. Such neutralisation can now be shown to occur elsewhere in Australia. There does indeed seem to have been a transition from a Dravidianate system with cross-parallel distinctions to 'overlays' of cross-parallel neutralisation, and finally a complete loss in some generations of such distinctions in the terminology. These discoveries open up possibilities of rebuilding a diachronic theory of kinship change and evolution, incorporating some of the insights of Fison and Howitt, though without their specific hypotheses, either of local developments in Gippsland or the grand scheme of Morgan. Lewis Henry Morgan and the Kinship Schedule Lewis Henry Morgan, who is credited with the 'invention of kinship' in the midnineteenth century (Trautmann 1987), moulded much of the early study of Australian Aboriginal kinship through the work of intellectual descendants Lorimer Fison and Al

Australian journal of biography and history, 2023

The transportation of convicts to Australia was a substantial bureaucratic undertaking. From 1788 to 1868, some 163,000 people were transported to its shores. Underpinning this mass movement of people were various processes for documenting individuals that amounted to what convict historians have termed a 'paper panopticon', so called because of the variably immense and detailed nature of the information recorded about convicts and their lives. 1 These data ranged from essential biographical information, such as the age, native place and occupation of convicts, to descriptions of their physical characteristics. As the historian Janet McCalman has recently written, the 'men, women and children in the Tasmanian convict records are arguably the most carefully described and recorded ordinary people of the nineteenthcentury world'. 2 The convicts transported to New South Wales and Western Australia were not far behind them. While the surviving archives for those colonies are in some ways less varied and detailed than their Van Diemen's Land counterparts, they nonetheless offer promising opportunities for detailed reconstructions of individual lives. Complementing, supplementing and enriching convict records has been the ongoing digitisation of archival material-including vital life records, newspapers, gaol and immigration records-most relevant to tracing the lives of these people. What emerges from the consolidation of these sources is, in McCalman's words, the 'demographic contours of lives'. 3 Recognising the existence of this rich and growing archival base, historians of convict Australia have had to grapple with how best to interrogate and analyse it. Perhaps the most productive approach to date for understanding the convict system generally and its impact on transportees has been prosopography. Yet it has been employed loosely by historians of convict Australia, the term often being used synonymously for collective or group biography. One of the clearest definitions of prosopography was offered by Lawrence Stone in 1971, who wrote that the method constitutes 'the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in

This article explores the origins of the genealogical method of kinship collection and the remembering and forgetting of Indigenous and settler contributors to early anthropology. While W. H. R. Rivers' development of the genealogical method from the expedition to the Torres Strait in 1898 has iconic status as a foundation moment in the history of anthropology, there is irrefutable evidence that a gene-alogical method for kinship collection was employed in the Australian colonies from the early 1870s, developed by Gunnai/K urnai 2 man Tulaba with magistrate A. W. Howitt. The article tracks the origins and dissemination of both genealogical methods and the crucial role of Indigenous agency in the development of field practices. It concludes with an analysis of the place of colonial ethnographers and Indigenous authorities in the historiography of British anthropology.

The formal study of kinship was introduced to the South Pacific Islands and the Australian colonies by Methodist missionary Lorimer Fison who distributed schedules and collected kinship data from around the region in collaboration with the founder of Anthropology in America, Lewis Henry Morgan. This article is a sequel to H. Gardner, 2008 'The origins of kinship in Oceania', Oceania, 78:2, 137-150. It traces Lorimer Fison's return to the Australian colonies from his mission post in Fiji and the subsequent spread of kinship schedules to settlers, missionaries and administrators around Australia. Based on unpublished correspondence , the article investigates Fison's gradual disillusionment with Morgan's evolution-ist hypothesis of the development of the human family and his disdain for the speculation of much metropolitan anthropology in the 1870s.

Genealogy, 2017

A genealogy is a narrative that tries to explain a cultural phenomenon by describing a way in which it came about, or could have come about, or might be imagined to have come about. (-Bernard Williams ([1], p. 20).) Genealogy is an open-access, quarterly journal that publishes original research and theory online immediately after it has completed the review process. The journal will serve as a venue for cutting edge contributions to the field of genealogy studies; making this scholarly work available to the broadest possible reading audience in a timely manner. But what exactly is genealogy studies? The journal invites a multiplicity of answers to this question, seeking to foster a dialogue about the relevance of genealogical perspectives for an interdisciplinary array of theories and research questions. The journal's inaugural issue initiates this discussion by inviting essays that explore the question "What is Genealogy?" The journal also invites proposals for guest-edited special issues which can include (but are not limited to) family lineage and family studies more broadly defined, migration studies, histories of law and state policy, medical and health studies, literary studies and philology, the narration of all types of social identities (including but not limited to racial-ethnic, gendered, religious and political identities), and the implications that recent developments in genetic/genographic research and services hold for the narration of these identities. The introductory quote by Bernard Williams encompasses all of these directions. His definition of genealogy is both succinct and suitably vague; suggesting an analytic tendency that characterizes all genealogies, while allowing for a diversity of research interests and disciplinary perspectives which are amply illustrated by the scholarship of the journal's editorial board. But perhaps the most compelling feature of Williams' definition is the implication that genealogical narratives must be understood as methods of explanation and not simply aggregations of historical data. Put another way, the thing that is most genealogical about a genealogy is the method by which its contents have been strung together. Following Williams, if all genealogies are explanations, then they can also be understood as expressions of a philosophy of knowledge; whether these are essentialist epistemologies that have informed popular ideas about blood lineage or Nietzschean genealogical distinctions that are used to decenter universalist truth claims. Although these examples describe very different perspectives on genealogy, they both shed light on the uneasy tension between genealogical narratives and the dominant epistemologies of modernity. In the former case, genealogy recalls a premodern knowledge-neofeudal lineage trees that are at odds with the egalitarian subjectivities of the modern, liberal-democratic state. While in the latter case, genealogy gravitates toward the postmodern-taking the form of an explicit assault on modernist categories of thought. In both cases, genealogy lies on the margins of the modern. It embeds things in history, mapping irreducible singularities; generating a kind of knowledge radically counterpoised to the modernist paradigm described by Anthony Giddens [2], which dis-embeds things from localized contexts and reinserts them within generalizable categories that are articulated across progressively wider tracts of time and space. When viewed in this light, the journal's scope broadens considerably. Genealogy is also a venue for rethinking the contours of modern science. This aim is not well described by the idea of critique,

Nations and Nationalism, 2003

Claiming descent from convicts who were sent to Australia during the early period of British settlement is more than just about blood ties, it is also an aspect of national identity for many Australians. Analyses of nationally representative survey data show that younger, left-leaning, working class Australians are most likely to identify as convict descendants, while older, high income, educated, city dwellers are least likely to identify. Our findings also suggest that the 'hated stain' of convict ancestry is senescent, and will diminish with intergenerational replacement. Yet claims to convict descent remain divided along status lines. Interest in convicts and claims of convict heritage may comprise an element of 'popular taste', but as a consequence of this popularity, 'convict chic' is rejected by educated elites. Embraced by 'middle Australia', but shunned by cosmopolitan elites, convict ancestry is a neglected aspect of Australian identity. Whether claims of convict ancestry are 'real' or 'imaginary', the power of foundation myths to provide shared memories is evident in the salience of convict connections in Australia.