November 7, 2024 • 52 mins
Can crime narratives truly be told without causing harm or voyeurism? Join us for a compelling discussion as we bring together the insights of Dr. Meg Foster and Dr. Rachel Franks, led by chair, Nerida Campbell. With their extensive expertise in crime-related history and collections, we navigate the ethical tightrope historians must walk when recounting crime stories. Learn how these experts balance the need for intellectual integrity with the empathy and respect owed to those whose stories they tell. What does the selective heroism historically granted to figures like Ned Kelly, and not to Sam Poo ('Australia's Only Chinese Bushranger') tell us about Australian crime history?
What are the ethical implications of the ubiquitous presence of crime in media? And what about the implications of histories that exclude crime? There's much to learn and to think with in crime history, as Meg, Rachel and Nerida will explore.
Nerida Campbell is a curator with over 20 years experience working in collections, sites and stories related to crime, policing and the courts. She has a particular interest in the historical experience of female criminals within the New South Wales justice system. Campbell is currently working with the Harbour Trust on a series of interpretation projects for Cockatoo Island, which, as we know, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that has a complex past that includes convict, juvenile justice and prison histories.
Meg Foster is a historian of banditry, settler colonial, and public history. She is a Chancellor's Research Fellow at the University of Technology in Sydney and was recently an ABC Top 5 Media resident for the humanities and previously a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Meg has a passion for connecting academia with the contemporary world and has appeared in diverse outlets such as ABC, BBC and SBS, as well as Mianjin, Overland and the Australian Book Review. Her latest book, published by New South, is Boundary Crossers: the Hidden History of Australia's Other Bush Rangers.
Rachel Franks is the coordinator of scholarship at the State Library of New South Wales. She holds PhDs in Australian crime fiction and in true crime texts. A qualified educator and librarian, her extensive work on crime fiction, true crime, popular culture and information science has been presented at numerous conferences, as well as on radio and television. An award-winning writer, her research can be found in a wide variety of books, journals, magazines and online resources. She is the author of An Uncommon Hangman: the Life and Deaths of Robert Nosey Bob Howard, published in 2022.
History Now seminars explore current and compelling issues affecting the practice of contemporary history. It is a long-running series of public talks and discussions, bringing new perspectives to all aspects of historical practice.
This year History Now is a collaboration between the History Council of NSW (HCNSW), the State Library of NSW and the Australian Centre for Public History (ACPH) at UTS.
History Now 2024 is programmed by Jesse Adams Stein (Vice President of HCNSW / Member of ACPH).
History Now is short and sweet. The tone is conversational and the format is two speakers, each talking for 15-20 minutes, followed by a Q&A facilitated by a chairperson.
#hcnsw #historynow #truecrimehistories #historytalks
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jesse Adams Stein (00:09):
My name is Jesse Adams Stein and I am the
Program Director for History Now2024, and I represent both the
History Council of New SouthWales and the Australian Centre
for Public History at UTS.
Today's topic is the ethics ofcrime histories, and I'm
delighted that we are joined byDr Meg Foster, Dr Rachel Franks
(00:31):
and tonight's chair is NeridaCampbell, who I will introduce
shortly, and Nerida will thenintroduce our speakers.
Before that, I'd like to startby acknowledging the country on
which we are holding this event.
We are on Gadigal country,standing here at the State
Library of New South Wales.
We are on Gadigal country,standing here at the State
Library of New South Wales.
We are on the top of the hillclose to Warrane, Sydney Cove,
and Woccanmagully, Farm Cove.
(00:52):
I'd like to acknowledge thatthe Gadigal are the traditional
custodians of this country andpay my respects to elders and
acknowledge that we are onstolen land.
Before we dive into the ethicsof crime histories, I would like
to give just a little bit ofbackground about History Now as
a series, particularly for thosewho haven't attended one of
these events recently.
(01:13):
History Now is, in fact, along-running public history talk
series with the always had theaim to bring excellent
historical research into publicdiscourse.
We feature professional andacademic historians, as well as
experts who use historicalresearch in their practice.
History Now has had varioushomes and iterations over the
(01:35):
years, different organisers,different groups running it, and
this year, in 2024, history Nowwas a collaboration between the
History Council of New SouthWales, the Australian Centre for
Public History and, with venuesupport from the History Council
of New South Wales, theAustralian Centre for Public
History, and with venue supportfrom the State Library of New
South Wales, and we thank themfor the use of this space.
We have been really fortunatethis year.
If you'll indulge me a minute,I actually am going to read out
(01:57):
the names of all the wonderfulspeakers we've had at History
Now in 2024.
It's been such a fabulous groupand we were really lucky, with
everyone's generosity, to givetheir time and time to deliver
papers and chair, so I'll justquickly read this for the
purposes of our recording aswell.
Frances Flanagan, AlisonBashford, Jarrod Hore, Mike
Beggs, Hannah Forsyth, SophieLoy Wilson, Cara Cross, Heidi
(02:20):
Norman, John Maynard, Linda JuneCoe, Effie Karag eorgos,
Catherine Colborne, James Dunk,Nancy Cushing, Lorena Allan,
Dirk Moses, Umit Kurt, LiviaRezende, Isabel Rousset, Jessie
Adams Stein - don't know who puther in! - Warwick Anderson,
Emily O'Gorman, Taylor Coyne,Nerida Campbell, Meg Foster and
(02:42):
Rachel Franks.
Let's give them all a clap,please.
And look, I will have a wholelist of people to thank for
History Now in general at theend of the session, but I will
save that for the event at theend of the event.
For now, I'd like to introduceour chair for today, Nerida
Campbell, and Nerida willintroduce our speakers and the
(03:04):
topic.
Nerida is a curator with over20 years experience working in
collections, sites and storiesrelated to crime, policing and
the courts.
She has a particular interestin the historical experience of
female criminals within the NewSouth Wales justice system.
Campbell is currently workingwith the Harbour Trust on a
series of interpretationprojects for Cockatoo Island,
(03:26):
which, as we know, is a UNESCOWorld Heritage Site that has a
complex past that includesconvict, juvenile justice and
prison histories.
Please join me in welcomingNerida.
Thank you.
Nerida Campbell (03:44):
Thank you, Jesse.
Authors of crime history areconstantly questioning and being
questioned about what storiesthey have the right to tell, how
they can tell them in a mannerthat combines rigorous,
respectful and relevantstorytelling.
Those of us who work with thesedarker histories must
(04:04):
constantly field queries aboutwhether our work is voyeuristic,
salacious and a little bitgrubby.
In turn, we question ourselvesis that detail necessary?
Is this story relevant?
Is this narrative too intrusive?
Will my work cause secondaryharm to a consumer?
Am I censoring the content andtreating my audience like
(04:26):
children?
It is a fraught space in whichto work, and a rewarding one.
It provides an opportunity toshine a light into dark places,
tell stories that were onceconsidered untellable and, by
reviewing the hidden, theshameful, the distasteful, gain
a better understanding of thepast.
(04:47):
To write about what society hasvalued, what it finds abhorrent
, and how these boundaries morphover time, reveals a broader
spectrum of experiences, a morenuanced view of the past.
The ideal of authoring worksthat create empathy and
understanding of difference ishaving a moment in scholarly
(05:08):
discourse, and crime historieshave an interesting, if
contested, role to play in thisspace.
Writers of crime histories havebecome better attuned to
reminding themselves and theiraudiences that the narratives
involve real people, real hurtand real scars.
Successfully navigating thespace between detached
(05:32):
theorising and salaciousscandal-mongering takes care,
heart, intellect and integrity.
Both of tonight's speakers havesuccessfully navigated the
nuances of writing ethical crimehistories and investigating
some of the more difficult areasof true crime and storytelling.
(05:54):
They have succeeded in writingworks that have great
intellectual gravitas and appealto general readers who debate,
appreciate and buy their works.
Their success lies in theirability to treat both the
challenging subject matter andtheir audiences with deepest
(06:14):
respect.
It is now my pleasure tointroduce our two speakers for
tonight.
Dr Meg Foster is a historian ofbanditry, settler colonial, and
public history.
She is a Chancellor's ResearchFellow at the University of
Technology in Sydney and wasrecently an ABC Top 5 Media
resident for the humanities andpreviously a Junior Research
(06:38):
Fellow at the University ofCambridge.
Meg has a passion forconnecting academia with the
contemporary world and hasappeared in diverse outlets such
as ABC, BBC and SBS, as well asMianjin, Overland and the
Australian Book Review.
Her latest book, published byNew South, is Boundary Crossers:
the hidden history ofAustralia's other bush rangers.
(07:07):
The next speaker after Meg willbe Dr Rachel Franks, and she is
the coordinator of scholarshipat the State Library of New
South Wales.
She holds PhDs in Australiancrime fiction and in true crime
texts.
A qualified educator andlibrarian, her extensive work on
crime fiction, true crime,popular culture and information
science has been presented atnumerous conferences, as well as
(07:28):
on radio and television.
An award-winning writer, herresearch can be found in a wide
variety of books, journals,magazines and online resources.
She is the author of AnUncommon Hangman the Life and
Deaths of Robert Nosey BobHoward, published in 2022.
Would you please join me inmaking our first speaker, Dr Meg
(07:51):
Foster, welcome.
Meg Foster (07:57):
I'd like to echo Jessie by acknowledging the
Gadigal people of the EoraNation, on whose lands we meet
today.
I'd like to pay my respects toelders, past and present, and
recognise that Aboriginalsovereignty was never ceded.
This has been a site of richhistory and storytelling for
millennia and I feel privilegedto speak here today.
When Jesse asked me if I hadany ideas for a History Now talk
(08:20):
, I volunteered this topicbecause it's one I'm passionate
about, but also one I strugglewith.
For those of you who don't knowmy work, as Nerida said, I'm an
Australian of banditry and Ispecialize in Australian bush
ranging, especially bush rangers, who are people of color and
women.
So at a base level, I look atcriminals, but ones who are
unique in our country for notonly drawing mass sympathy but
(08:44):
being celebrated as Australianicons so long as they were white
guys.
You'd be hard-pressed to findmany Australians who have no
idea who Ned Kelly is, and theseare some of the reasons why,
for the purpose of the audio,we're looking at lots of popular
images of Ned Kelly.
But how to balance competingpopular narratives about these
figures (09:11):
Of bushrangers as heroic colonial Robin Hoods who
pushed back against an unjustsystem; and a minority yet
passionate view of them asgreedy thieves, murderers and
cop killers.
How to balance the interests ofdescendants of both criminals
and victims, how to recognisethat the average Australian has
(09:33):
deeply felt opinions about thisfacet of our shared past?
And what to do with thebushrangers?
I look at the ones who weren'twhite men and didn't fit the
mould, the people who wererarely remembered on a national
stage and certainly nevercelebrated in the mythic light
we're used to.
There are a lot of questionsthere, so I thought I'd start
(09:57):
with a vignette from my researchbefore trying to tackle some of
these very thorny questions.
okay.
So in 1865 in central west NewSouth Wales, a police officer
named John Ward was travelingfrom Mudgee to Coonabarabran.
He received reports of aChinese bushranger in the area.
(10:22):
Near present-day Dunedoo, hespied a Chinese man who he
called on to surrender, butinstead of going quietly, this
man shot the officer, who laterdied of his wound.
After several weeks ofsearching for the culprit of
this crime, Sam Poo was captured.
He was tried and found guiltyof Ward's murder and hanged at
Bathurst Jail.
Over the last 40 years, Poo'sstory has been revived in the
(10:46):
local community, where he'sremembered as Australia's only
Chinese bushranger.
Now this is a very condensedversion of the supposed criminal
career of Sam Poo and it'swhere most references to him
really start and stop.
As one local told me recently,Sam Poo just came on the scene
when he decided to murder JohnWard, and that was about it for
(11:08):
me.
So if we're reading straightfrom the court records and
newspaper articles from the time, it seems like a pretty
uncomplicated story.
There's a clear victim, Ward,and a clear villain, Poo, and
Poo only really exists from thatmoment in 1865 when he
supposedly chose to engage incrime.
(11:32):
Many popular public-facinghistories take this sort of
matter-of-fact approach.
They view crime records,especially court verdicts, as
accurate depictions of a finiteyet factual and knowable past.
In other words, they read therecord straight.
An historical source is takenat face value, its authors,
(11:55):
believed unquestioned and copiedinto history, sometimes
verbatim.
But viewing historical sourcesin isolation and believing their
contents without testing them,placing them in context and
unveiling their agendas isproblematic.
It's not only bad history.
In many cases it's unethical,marginalised and elevates the
(12:27):
voices of a small yet powerfulelite, casting their opinions as
historical fact, somethingsolid, unrelenting and true.
In this way, many issues facingcrime history are issues for
history as a field, as Neridavery beautifully introduced,
historians are trained to askthemselves who gets to speak for
the past?
Whose voices are privileged andwhose are silenced?
(12:50):
How do we recreate past timesfrom necessarily fragmentary and
skewed records?
How do we balance ourresponsibility to the past, to
representing the past's ownpresent, with our responsibility
to our present and to thefuture?
These questions are especiallypressing for crime history.
(13:13):
This is because crime involvesboth punishment and power.
Crime is seen as a threat tosociety.
It's a breach of law that isalso meant to be, a breach of
social mores, protocols andexpectations, a breach that is
(13:38):
so severe it must be corrected,redressed and deterred through
punishment.
In colonial times, severecrimes could result in
imprisonment, corporalpunishment, labour or even
state-sanctioned execution.
So the stakes were really high.
But my emphasis on crime andsociety here is important.
Crime isn't natural.
To engage in crime is to breakthe law.
(13:58):
But who makes the law?
It's also created by elites andused to ensure the established
order remains the same.
Now this might sound like quitea grandiose statement, but many
of us have experienced timeswhen something defined as crime
at law doesn't seem like a crimeto us.
It doesn't threaten our moralframework.
(14:20):
It doesn't breach our socialmores.
Since the 1970s, many of us havetaken this view when it comes
to understanding convictancestors.
From about that time, a convictinheritance has largely been
repositioned from one of shameand secrets to one of pride and
(14:41):
celebration.
Many descendants see themselvesas having a special tie to the
nation because their colonialroots run deep.
But the way they do this is notto deny their criminal
inheritance but to explain andcontextualise it to minimise its
deviancy.
This takes many forms.
(15:01):
So understanding the crime ofwhich their ancestor is accused,
so blasphemy or robbery.
The legal definition of crimebecomes specific and softened to
stealing a handkerchief, takinga loaf of bread.
When the inheritance is our own, even more severe crimes can be
explained by looking at thebigger picture.
(15:23):
An ancestor convicted ofassault was pushing aback
against those who oppressed them.
A highway robber had few otheroptions when their farm was
taken away to make way for afactory, or their cattle could
no longer graze on common land.
These same sorts of specifics,context and empathetic
(15:44):
understanding are often appliedto white bush ranging men, the
most prolific of which is NedKelly.
Kelly and his family arerepeatedly depicted as hunted
and persecuted by theauthorities.
Ned's turn to crime cast as anoble quest to defy his
oppression.
White bush ranging men providesomething of a national
(16:05):
inheritance for our country, animagined community where
rebellious underdog traitsrepresent those of the typical
Australian.
But it's harder for many of usto identify with the oppressed
if they're not white men.
So take my example of Sam Poo.
People I spoke to recognisedthat they knew very little about
(16:27):
Poo but still believed he was avillain who killed Senior
Constable Ward.
Many of these same people sawNed Kelly as a hero.
One even had a statue of him inhis front yard, which he had
carved himself, and it was rightnear his Australian flag.
So Poo was cast as a cop killer.
(16:48):
Ned Kelly, who, to be clear,killed far more police than Sam
Poo was ever alleged to havedone, remains a national hero.
To make things more complicated,I've actually gone back and
accessed court records,depositions and newspaper
articles from the time and to methere are glaring holes in the
(17:11):
historic case against Sam Poo.
I believe there's reasonabledoubt that he killed Ward and
it's likely the wrong man wasexecuted for this crime.
But Sam Poo did resist arrestand this was something several
locals and one reviewer of mybook used to show Poo's guilt.
(17:31):
Surely he wouldn't resistarrest if he had nothing to hide
.
So this is where context isimportant.
When you look at racial attacksagainst Chinese by Europeans at
the time, resisting arrestmakes a lot of sense, especially
in a situation where enragedlocals and police posses are
(17:51):
actively searching for a Chinesesuspect.
Besides, Poo was actually triedseparately for this offence of
shooting with intent to killwhile resisting arrest, and he
was sentenced to 14 yearsimprisonment.
So it wasn't a death sentence.
Now, I should probably pausehere and clarify that I'm not
saying real crime doesn't exist.
(18:13):
I'm not saying that historicconvictions were all a ploy by
the elite or that victims ofcrime never saw justice through
the law.
This is only to say that, whenit comes to crime history, we
can't take the official recordfor granted.
We need to look at who haspower, understand people's
actions on their own terms andwork to situate them in context.
(18:37):
We need to do this not onlywhen we're trying to justify our
own criminal ancestors.
We need to apply this care,specificity and nuance across
the board.
Okay, so, since colonisation1788, crime in Australia and law
in Australia has been gearedtowards a white male settler
(18:59):
subject, in my view an ethicalcrime.
History recognises this,denaturalises it and asks how it
might be otherwise, forinstance from a First Nations
perspective.
Crime history in Australia didnot begin with sentencing
British convicts back in England.
Not only do Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander
(19:20):
communities have their ownsystems of law, governance and
crime that have developed overmillennia.
The first crime in Australiancolonial history was that of
Indigenous dispossession, theillegal seizure of land by a
foreign power and the violentcolonisation that followed.
This is a foundational crime,so naturalised in our history
(19:45):
it's rarely seen in this lightas a crime.
But when we recognise thatterra nullius was a lie and we
look at settler atrocitiescommitted to take land and shore
up colonial rule, it can hardlybe seen as anything but crime.
In fact, british law anddefinitions of crime were also
used to control First Nationspeople and remove them from
(20:05):
their country.
We need only look at the numbersof Aboriginal deaths in custody
today to see this criminalinheritance continue into the
present.
The William Faulkner quote thepast is never dead, it's not
even past, is clear here.
In instances such as these,historians have an ethical
responsibility to highlight theway this fraught colonial
(20:28):
foundation manifests in both thepast and continues to live in
the present.
Only then can we hope toovercome it.
Now this might soundstraightforward, but recently
professional historians havestarted to ask some pretty
thorny questions.
Do we have the right to usereal people's lives to make a
(20:51):
broader point about crime?
Do we have the right to recovercriminals at all?
Now this might seem a bitjarring.
Since the 1960s and 70s there'sa strong tradition of history
designed to bring back themarginalized from the past.
This was not only championed tomore fully people past worlds,
(21:14):
so not only looking at the elitebut the broad swathe of
humanity.
It was also importantreparatory work to bring stories
from the margins back into thecentre.
Julia Late, a British historian, is among scholars who have
criticised well, she'scriticised her own past work on
this score.
Basically she's been criticalof where she started from and
(21:34):
where she wants to be Looking atthe criminalisation of sex work
.
Her first book used individualsas illustrative examples of
this broader trend at work.
Her next book looked at thelife circumstances and choices
of one New Zealand woman who wastrafficked to the UK via South
America, named Lydia Harvey Forlate.
(21:57):
There are issues with distillinga real person into a handy
quote or passing reference.
It erases their humanity and itrepresents them in ways that
they wouldn't have seenthemselves, making us strangers
to historical figures' own senseof their experience.
Now, when you're surrounded byreams of very exciting
(22:18):
documentation and you feel likeyou've got a direct access point
into the past, it's actuallyalso very easy for us to forget
that we're often encounteringpeople at some of the worst
moments of their lives ratherthan moments that represent the
entirety of them.
A friend of mine recently asked, kind of tongue-in-cheek,
(22:39):
whether it was like if a parkingfine was all your descendants
had to know you by.
But stories that are left to usin crime archives are often a
good deal worse than a parkingfine.
To overcome these issues,leight and I are kind of similar
in seeing crime as an entrypoint into a larger story rather
than just the end of it.
(23:00):
So in my work I look at peopleof colour's encounter with bush
ranging but also try to seetheir lives before and after
their supposed turn to crime.
I seek to challenge the kind ofBritish colonial crime frame of
reference too British colonialcrime frame of reference too.
(23:22):
So in Sam Poo's case, forinstance, it's likely he would
have seen the bushranging crimesof which he was accused in
relation to a Chinese traditionof banditry that actually goes
back to the 12th century, orperhaps even in relation to the
banditry of his own hometown ofAmoy in the Fujian province of
China.
He didn't necessarily see beingaccused of being a bushranger.
It's like being a colonial.
(23:42):
Ben Hall, scholars of colonialAfrica, Catherine Bruce Lockhart
and Tololope Akande haverecently taken this actually one
step further.
So they raised the issue ofconsent in colonial crime
archives.
Incarcerated people didn'tconsent to have documentation
(24:08):
about them be made or to beshared.
Crime carries with it stigma,prejudice and dehumanisation for
both criminalised people andoften for their descendants.
In colonial context, theimprisonment of colonised
subjects was used to reinforcetheir status as deviant, and
that in turn served tolegitimise British colonisation.
(24:28):
These issues also continue intothe present.
Historians must seek full andinformed consent when conducting
oral history interviews withliving respondents.
Bruce Lockhart and Akande askwhy this same consent isn't
asked for when it comes to thedead.
Their solution isn't just todestroy or crime archives.
(24:50):
I should say that from theget-go.
They propose that we speakabout incarcerated people's
experiences anonymously, if thesituation kind of suits that or
that.
We use minimal identifyinginformation unless consent can
be sought from incarceratedpeople themselves, their
descendants or their community.
Historical recovery isn'talways reparative.
(25:12):
We're not always fixingsomething by trying to bring
back marginal voices from thepast, and this is something we
need to be aware of.
The Indigenous Data SovereigntyMovement speaks to similar in
kind of similar terms aboutmaterial created by and about
Indigenous people.
There's a long and painfulhistory of non-Indigenous people
(25:33):
taking, looting, recording andotherwise documenting Indigenous
people without their full andinformed consent.
This material was often used tocriminalise and dehumanise
Indigenous people and justifyoppressive colonial policies.
Worimi scholar Kirsten Thorpeis among researchers who work to
(25:54):
ensure First Nations people,their descendants and
communities have sovereigntyover this material.
Non-indigenous scholars do nothave an automatic moral right to
use this material because it'sfreely accessible in an archive.
The issue of consent is reallyalive here too.
This was a lot of informationto cover, so thank you for
(26:16):
sticking with me.
But in conclusion, the ethicsof crime history are difficult.
They're messy and fraught andthe stakes are really high.
There's not a one-size-fits-alland it's really a constantly
shifting landscape.
Although this is history, ithas a direct bearing on the
present.
Writers of crime history havean ethical responsibility to ask
(26:39):
tough questions of historicalmaterial, be reflective and
recognise the power inherent inany attempt to capture this
aspect of the past.
Basically, I think that if westop questioning and start
feeling comfortable aboutwriting this sort of history,
we're probably doing it wrong.
(27:10):
Thanks, Meg.
I'd like you to join me inwelcoming Dr Rachel Franks to
the stage.
Rachel Franks (27:14):
I begin by acknowledging that we meet and
learn on country.
I pay my respects to theGadigal people on whose lands I
live, work and write.
We might be reconciled to deathand to taxes, but crime is
different.
Crime, despite its ubiquity, issomething we can work to avoid
(27:37):
becoming a victim of, something,as politicians are fond of
saying, that we can control,that we can be tough about that,
we can even declare war on.
Crime is timeless and universal, and my purpose here is to
(28:01):
highlight how nestled tightlyalongside criminal events are
the dual desires to tell andconsume stories about those who
would do us harm.
As criminologist Philip Rawlinshas explained, crime is
everywhere.
Everyone has been both victimand offender, but the most
frequent contact with crime isthrough newspapers, books,
(28:23):
television, film, video,computer games, political
speeches and the rantings ofdrunks in pubs.
Drunken arguments aside, theethics around criminal acts that
challenge the legal and moralparameters that we set for
ourselves, and which we do editover time, are relatively clear.
(28:46):
For example, especially heinousoffences such as murder, rape
and arson are comprehensivelycondemned by those who would
consider themselves law-abidingcitizens.
Yet the telling of thesestories is never black and white
, even when writers of truecrime and I will be focusing on
(29:08):
published true crime alignthemselves with ideals of
reporting the facts and tellingan engaging tale, there are
challenges for writers,publishers and readers.
This murkiness is exacerbatedby who stands to profit with
crime histories, unable to avoidits own rap sheet when it comes
(29:32):
to taking crime and reimaginingit as a mercantile enterprise.
As the British magazine Punchpointed out in 1842, we are a
trading community, a commercialpeople.
Murder is doubtless a veryshocking offence.
Nevertheless, as what has beendone cannot be undone, let us
(29:59):
make our money out of it.
Hereupon, we turn a murdererinto a commodity and we open an
account with homicide.
One way to try and push thepursuit of profit to one side in
considering the ethics of crimehistories is to look at these
works through the lens of EmileDurkheim's idea of the
conscience collective.
(30:22):
A French sociologist born in1858, durkheim was a man who one
biographer described asretaining an exacting sense of
duty and a serious, indeedaustere, view of life.
He could never experiencepleasure without a sense of
remorse.
So a serious bloke and spoileralert, not unproblematic.
(30:47):
His first significant work wasthe Division of Labour in
Society, published in 1893.
And in this book he positedthat we become more connected to
each other in line with theincreasing compartmentalisation
of our labour.
So by concentrating on onespecific sort of labour, we
(31:09):
connect to those who perform allthe other types of labour that
we need to function.
These connections inspirecomfort and camaraderie,
encouraging us to trust that ourefforts fit neatly with the
labours of others andconsolidate social structures.
Now you don't have to be asociologist to see some of the
(31:32):
flaws in his grand idea.
Most of us here haveexperienced the anonymity and
the isolation of modern workpractices, while his focus on
solidarity does not addressissues of oppression of the many
by the few.
But if we narrow our focus tothe absolute centre of
(31:55):
Durkheim's argument, thedivision of labour with its
specialisations pushed not asfar as possible, as the
capitalists would have, butmerely as far as necessary, as
the sociologists would like,then what we have is the source
(32:15):
of social solidarity and itbecomes at the same time the
foundation of the moral order.
If we incorporate into thisfoundation for a more moral
society some of the ideas aroundthe processes of punishment,
the conscience collective allowsfor the demonstration of group
(32:36):
norms and the strengthening ofmoral boundaries.
In summary, crime, andspecifically our shared response
to crime, stabilises society.
Now, in some instances, ourcollective attitude towards
punishment also charts oursocial progress, and the
(32:58):
abolition of the death penaltybeing the most obvious
illustration of this evolution,and I will return to the history
of judicial execution in amoment.
Now I'm not going to try andexplore the main theories of
crime that have been rehearsedelsewhere, but it is vital to
note that Durkheim believedcrime events are necessary.
(33:22):
Breaches of laws offeropportunities to bond through
shared responses to those events, while pointing out fractures
in society.
Basically, crime events drawour attention to issues
requiring rectification,simultaneously providing the
occasion for a more or lessdramatic display of social
(33:46):
solidarity in punishment.
Although these responses arenot always reasonable and often
the noise of the responseovershadows suggested solutions
to what was the obvious problemin the first place.
(34:07):
Val McDermid, in her 2019 crimenovel how the Dead Speak, put
these ideas a little bit morebluntly when she wrote societies
get the crimes they deserve.
Build a society based on greed,for example, and robbery will
(34:29):
become your default crime.
Turn sex into a commodity andbingo, sex crimes soon spawn
like tadpoles.
So if that's the underlyingcause of crime, logically the
remedy must be in our own hands.
If we change the script peoplelive by, then surely we should
(34:52):
be able to alter our outcomes.
Basically, one of the majorpoints in my second doctorate in
a single paragraph.
But I'm fine and recoveringwell Now.
What does some random andslightly awkward French guy who
died in 1917 have to do withtelling true crime tales today?
(35:15):
And, and perhaps moreimportantly, why should
historians care?
The answers to these questionsare found in the genre of true
crime.
David Schmid, who is the guy inthis space in my opinion, has
written that the precise originsof true crime are obscure, but
(35:43):
the meaning of true crime isvery simply, according to Jean
Murley, the story of real eventsshaped by the teller and imbued
with his or her values andbeliefs about such events, with
claims to truth and this is aninteresting point unchallenged
by its audience.
These tales, usually of murder,are about real crimes and the
(36:05):
real people entangled, byaccident or design, in those
criminal cases.
Some commentators have observedthat the use of the word true to
classify true crime isoffensive, and Charles Graber,
author of the criticallyacclaimed the Good Nurse, which
came out in 2013, pointed outthat you will find no section in
(36:31):
your bookseller's store fortrue history or true memoir or
true politics but perhaps youshould.
Only crime gets treated like acriminal.
It's as if the unethicalsubject matter has rubbed off on
the writer and their writing.
This focus on the truth and theprovision of information is
(36:56):
seen in references to eventswhich have actually happened,
citing date, time and place.
True crime, traditionallyconsumed through newspaper
columns or thin volumes printedon cheap paper with
blood-stained covers, can bepresented as diversionary
storytelling to satisfyvoyeuristic interests of
(37:19):
prurience and indulging inschadenfreude in criminal
activities, problematising thegenre but also its audience.
These works also, as ChristopherWilson has noted, present as
information, for true crime is adeeply news-dependent genre,
(37:40):
with violent crime and storiesof grossly brutal or cruel
criminal acts considered themost newsworthy.
But true crime's status asuseful information source is
continually supported by howpeople, usually women, return to
these texts again and again tolearn survival tips and
(38:03):
strategies.
So, despite the ease with whichtrue crime is routinely
dismissed, these texts play aneminent role in society because,
to a far greater extent thanmany other genres and other
types of printed material, theydetail the punishment of
(38:24):
wrongdoers, as explained byDavid Garland, the eminent
scholar of history, law andsociology.
Although the modern state has anear monopoly of penal violence
and controls the administrationof penalties, a much wider
population feels itself to beinvolved in the process of
(38:48):
punishment and supplies thecontext of social support and
valorisation within which statepunishment takes place.
In emphasising punishments fromfines through to executions,
true crime works present andreiterate the core morals and
standards of the market forwhich they are published.
(39:11):
This is evidenced in how thegenre is extraordinarily
flexible and has reinventeditself over and over across
hundreds of years to fitseamlessly in with the needs of
new generations of readers.
There is one element in thesestories which is, though,
(39:31):
incredibly stable In true crime,the killers are usually
incarcerated or executed at theend of the story, reassuring us
with a good old-fashionedreordering of the chaos wrought
by crime.
Engaging with these historiesassists us in meeting the strong
emotional and social needs tobear witness to the punishment
(39:56):
of criminals of all kinds.
To bear witness to thepunishment of criminals of all
kinds.
This in part explains ourfascination with cold cases and
the need for a satisfactoryconclusion, regardless of the
amount of time that has passed.
The point of true crimedelivering educational texts or
of offering facts to readers isroutinely debated.
(40:19):
For example, jack Miles haswritten, somewhat
melodramatically, that the mosttrue crime writers identify as
informal intelligence agents.
Ours is a nasty job, they imply, but somebody has to do it.
Someone has to stare the horrorin the eye so that we may know
(40:40):
what it looks like.
Society would be content tolive in a fool's paradise were
it not for the messages that webring from hell.
True crime narratives, fromperfunctory reportage offering
news as it happens through tofull-length texts that study
convoluted criminal cases, areoften treated as simple
(41:03):
artefacts of popular culture.
Descendants of ballads andbroadsides that have written on
the occasion of the unusual, thequirky or the puzzling.
In a field where ethics areignored by some and a near
(41:42):
constant concern for others, itis the historian who adds
validity to the genre of truecrime texts via various
disciplines, includingphilosophy, sociology or
criminology, or genres such asbiography, memoir or history.
The benefits of an historicalapproach have become so obvious
we now see some journalistsdiscarding much of their primary
training to emulate the workpractices of historians.
For example, Dave Cullen spentnearly a decade writing and
(42:04):
researching his award-winningbook Columbine of 2009, with
pretty much every single reviewof that book noting the detailed
endnotes and bibliography.
So true crime induces us tomeditate on matters profound and
fraught, with Mark Seltzersuggesting such histories form
(42:27):
part of our contemporary woundculture, a culture, or at least
cult, of commiseration.
If we cannot gather in the faceof anything other than crime,
violence, terror and trauma orthe wound, we can at least
commiserate.
As noted, most true crime talesreassure readers with details
(42:50):
of punishment, but we areburdened with the knowledge that
the victim was real, a person,someone we might have known,
someone that we might be able toidentify with, was robbed or
raped, was a victim ofmanslaughter or murder.
Circumstances may bring about ajudicial resolution for the
(43:10):
perpetrator, but there arerarely real resolutions for the
victims, their families or theirfriends.
In some instances, there is noresolution for anyone involved
in a criminal event, with, asnoted, cold cases continuing to
intrigue and mesmerise.
True crime is always aboutpeople Victims, perpetrators,
(43:35):
investigators, prosecutors,punishers and sometimes the
storytellers.
True crime is also about us.
There is a widespread need,from casual to obsessive, to
know victims and understandtheir killers.
In addition, the direrepetitiveness of some types of
(43:57):
criminal offences and thecommitting of particularly
horrific crimes that serve asflashpoints for action give us
evidence to fight for a societythat is better or at least
marginally safer.
Durkheim knew that a crime-freesociety was a fantasy.
It was a society of saints Withexpectations tempered by this
(44:22):
knowledge.
Consumers of crime stories canreject an attitude towards
society that is completelypessimistic and, though not
naively optimistic about theworld around them, can take some
solace in the idea that theconscience collective encourages
a more moral community.
(44:42):
In Australia we have producedvast libraries of crime stories.
To avoid labels of cheap andtrashy, we have caught many of
these volumes' history.
Each piece of criminal evidencecreated and collected, each
investigation and court processdocumented, each true crime
story published contributes tothe complex puzzle that tells
(45:06):
the grand narrative of crime inAustralia, disputing ideas of a
single monolithic convict eraera.
It is interesting to note thatAustralia's beginnings as a
penal colony coincided withtechnological developments that
allowed for the greater andspeedier distribution of crime
(45:27):
stories, which is seen in howcrime is central to our first
non-fiction book, our firstnewspaper, our first major
pamphlet and our first novel.
Like any historical project,crime histories are challenging.
In my own work on theexecutioners of New South Wales,
(45:47):
I spent many hours grapplingwith the truth.
Specifically, how much of thetruth to include?
Do I gloss over crimes,implying a vengeful state happy
to hang someone because wehadn't dropped anybody from a
gallows for at least a week?
Or do I provide too muchinformation, too much truth, and
(46:09):
so spark ideas in readers thatmaybe the death penalty is not
such a bad idea after all?
To be clear, in the arsenal tofight crime, capital punishment
is the worst idea in the box.
Make no mistake, the role ofhistorians was essential to the
abolition of capital punishmentand although New South Wales was
(46:33):
a little slow, with the firstcolony to embrace the hangman's
tools in 1788, being the laststate to finally abolish the
remnants of the death penalty in1985.
While Violet Oldfield was rapedby Joseph Campbell in 1901, the
accused questioned the victimin court - a barely tolerated
(46:59):
practice then, that seemsabsolutely shocking now.
The nine-year-old victim wasso small they put her on a chair
on a table so that everybody inthe courtroom could hear her
and see her as she gave evidence.
Decades of lobbying, inconjunction with the works of
(47:22):
historians on sex crimes, sawthe law eventually changed, but
not until 2003.
Perhaps Jack Miles was notexaggerating, after all, when he
chastised crime writers.
Maybe many of our messages arefrom hell.
(47:46):
To conclude, writing,publishing and reading true
crime tales facilitates a senseof engagement with processes of
punishment and allows for thedemonstration of a group's norms
and the strengthening of asociety's moral boundaries.
Crime histories from thedistant through to the recent
past reinforce our shared socialvalues and reiterate our
commitment to respond tocriminal acts through
(48:07):
punishments and sanctions.
Despite the many and variedsocial forces separating us,
including class, gender,ethnicity, race and religion, we
are bound to try and protectour communities from numerous
threats, such as the threat ofcrime.
If we accept that crime servesas a barometer for the health of
(48:32):
society, the impacts of thepast on the here and now are
immediately apparent.
Crimes against women, forexample, tell us of a misogyny
that still needs to be addressed, whilst financial crimes feed
debates about implementing auniversal basic income.
We want all of us want to haveconversations around crime, but
(48:57):
often we just don't know how tostart them.
In a vacuum, we will seek outfast and flashy headlines or
crimes that have been repackagedas quick exposés.
Yes, journos are keyinterlocutors in dialogues on
crime, but they are overtlydriven by circulation numbers
(49:21):
and sales figures.
And while an historian, to myknowledge, has never knocked
back a royalty payment, historynever appears on lists for side
hustles or get-rich-quickschemes.
The motivations are clearlydifferent.
Sure, historians are alsopeddlers of truth, but we add
(49:41):
value to the recitation of facts.
We can correct errors in therecord, we can restore victims
names and voices in powerfulways, we can contextualise and
critique and we can argue forchange where that is not within
(50:02):
the journalist's remit.
Historians also benefit fromgood training and a collegiate
community placing us in aprivileged position to write
these histories.
I am not advocating that everyhistory should be exclusively a
crime history, but I am askingthat if we are writing history,
(50:23):
any type of history, and ifcrime makes an interjection,
that we address it.
We will always quibble aboutthe ethics of the how we do this
work, but I propose it is moreunethical to deny or ignore our
many criminal paths.
As criminal behaviour definessome in society as 'other', our
(50:48):
participation in a sharedresponse to crime events defines
us as human.
In short, the work of thehistorian in researching and
writing about crime will nevernot be urgent.
Thank you.
Jesse Adams Stein (51:10):
We'll wrap this up now because we've gone a
little bit over time, butplease join me in very warmly
thanking Nerida Campbell, megFoster and Rachel Franks, and
I'll just close off today withjust a few very quick thank yous
in relation to history now liketo thank Catherine Shirley from
the History Council, AmandaWells and Lauren Chater.
Also the State Library,particularly the events team,
(51:33):
Lydia Tasker and Callum McLean,and the Australian Centre for
Public History.
As always, the History Councilof New South Wales thanks our
major cultural partners, inparticular, our major funder,
the New South Wales Government,via Create New South Wales.
And just before we go, this isan interesting one.
So I convened History Now 2024this year.
(51:54):
It was wonderful fun.
I enjoyed every minute of it.
I met so many wonderful peopleand it was a fantastic thing to
do.
If you or someone in yournetworks might be interested in
convening Directing History Nowfor 2025, it is a voluntary
thing please do get in touchwith the History Council or
directly with me.
There's email addresses upthere.
(52:15):
It's an absolute fantasticopportunity to meet amazing
people really rewarding thing todo.
It's not too much work really,I promise.
So please get in touch if youor someone else you know might
be interested.
And thank you very much.
Good night, thank you.
My name is Jesse Adams Stein and I am the
Program Director for History Now2024, and I represent both the
History Council of New SouthWales and the Australian Centre
for Public History at UTS.
Today's topic is the ethics ofcrime histories, and I'm
delighted that we are joined byDr Meg Foster, Dr Rachel Franks
(00:31):
and tonight's chair is NeridaCampbell, who I will introduce
shortly, and Nerida will thenintroduce our speakers.
Before that, I'd like to startby acknowledging the country on
which we are holding this event.
We are on Gadigal country,standing here at the State
Library of New South Wales.
We are on Gadigal country,standing here at the State
Library of New South Wales.
We are on the top of the hillclose to Warrane, Sydney Cove,
and Woccanmagully, Farm Cove.
(00:52):
I'd like to acknowledge thatthe Gadigal are the traditional
custodians of this country andpay my respects to elders and
acknowledge that we are onstolen land.
Before we dive into the ethicsof crime histories, I would like
to give just a little bit ofbackground about History Now as
a series, particularly for thosewho haven't attended one of
these events recently.
(01:13):
History Now is, in fact, along-running public history talk
series with the always had theaim to bring excellent
historical research into publicdiscourse.
We feature professional andacademic historians, as well as
experts who use historicalresearch in their practice.
History Now has had varioushomes and iterations over the
(01:35):
years, different organisers,different groups running it, and
this year, in 2024, history Nowwas a collaboration between the
History Council of New SouthWales, the Australian Centre for
Public History and, with venuesupport from the History Council
of New South Wales, theAustralian Centre for Public
History, and with venue supportfrom the State Library of New
South Wales, and we thank themfor the use of this space.
We have been really fortunatethis year.
If you'll indulge me a minute,I actually am going to read out
(01:57):
the names of all the wonderfulspeakers we've had at History
Now in 2024.
It's been such a fabulous groupand we were really lucky, with
everyone's generosity, to givetheir time and time to deliver
papers and chair, so I'll justquickly read this for the
purposes of our recording aswell.
Frances Flanagan, AlisonBashford, Jarrod Hore, Mike
Beggs, Hannah Forsyth, SophieLoy Wilson, Cara Cross, Heidi
(02:20):
Norman, John Maynard, Linda JuneCoe, Effie Karag eorgos,
Catherine Colborne, James Dunk,Nancy Cushing, Lorena Allan,
Dirk Moses, Umit Kurt, LiviaRezende, Isabel Rousset, Jessie
Adams Stein - don't know who puther in! - Warwick Anderson,
Emily O'Gorman, Taylor Coyne,Nerida Campbell, Meg Foster and
(02:42):
Rachel Franks.
Let's give them all a clap,please.
And look, I will have a wholelist of people to thank for
History Now in general at theend of the session, but I will
save that for the event at theend of the event.
For now, I'd like to introduceour chair for today, Nerida
Campbell, and Nerida willintroduce our speakers and the
(03:04):
topic.
Nerida is a curator with over20 years experience working in
collections, sites and storiesrelated to crime, policing and
the courts.
She has a particular interestin the historical experience of
female criminals within the NewSouth Wales justice system.
Campbell is currently workingwith the Harbour Trust on a
series of interpretationprojects for Cockatoo Island,
(03:26):
which, as we know, is a UNESCOWorld Heritage Site that has a
complex past that includesconvict, juvenile justice and
prison histories.
Please join me in welcomingNerida.
Thank you.
Nerida Campbell (03:44):
Thank you, Jesse.
Authors of crime history areconstantly questioning and being
questioned about what storiesthey have the right to tell, how
they can tell them in a mannerthat combines rigorous,
respectful and relevantstorytelling.
Those of us who work with thesedarker histories must
(04:04):
constantly field queries aboutwhether our work is voyeuristic,
salacious and a little bitgrubby.
In turn, we question ourselvesis that detail necessary?
Is this story relevant?
Is this narrative too intrusive?
Will my work cause secondaryharm to a consumer?
Am I censoring the content andtreating my audience like
(04:26):
children?
It is a fraught space in whichto work, and a rewarding one.
It provides an opportunity toshine a light into dark places,
tell stories that were onceconsidered untellable and, by
reviewing the hidden, theshameful, the distasteful, gain
a better understanding of thepast.
(04:47):
To write about what society hasvalued, what it finds abhorrent
, and how these boundaries morphover time, reveals a broader
spectrum of experiences, a morenuanced view of the past.
The ideal of authoring worksthat create empathy and
understanding of difference ishaving a moment in scholarly
(05:08):
discourse, and crime historieshave an interesting, if
contested, role to play in thisspace.
Writers of crime histories havebecome better attuned to
reminding themselves and theiraudiences that the narratives
involve real people, real hurtand real scars.
Successfully navigating thespace between detached
(05:32):
theorising and salaciousscandal-mongering takes care,
heart, intellect and integrity.
Both of tonight's speakers havesuccessfully navigated the
nuances of writing ethical crimehistories and investigating
some of the more difficult areasof true crime and storytelling.
(05:54):
They have succeeded in writingworks that have great
intellectual gravitas and appealto general readers who debate,
appreciate and buy their works.
Their success lies in theirability to treat both the
challenging subject matter andtheir audiences with deepest
(06:14):
respect.
It is now my pleasure tointroduce our two speakers for
tonight.
Dr Meg Foster is a historian ofbanditry, settler colonial, and
public history.
She is a Chancellor's ResearchFellow at the University of
Technology in Sydney and wasrecently an ABC Top 5 Media
resident for the humanities andpreviously a Junior Research
(06:38):
Fellow at the University ofCambridge.
Meg has a passion forconnecting academia with the
contemporary world and hasappeared in diverse outlets such
as ABC, BBC and SBS, as well asMianjin, Overland and the
Australian Book Review.
Her latest book, published byNew South, is Boundary Crossers:
the hidden history ofAustralia's other bush rangers.
(07:07):
The next speaker after Meg willbe Dr Rachel Franks, and she is
the coordinator of scholarshipat the State Library of New
South Wales.
She holds PhDs in Australiancrime fiction and in true crime
texts.
A qualified educator andlibrarian, her extensive work on
crime fiction, true crime,popular culture and information
science has been presented atnumerous conferences, as well as
(07:28):
on radio and television.
An award-winning writer, herresearch can be found in a wide
variety of books, journals,magazines and online resources.
She is the author of AnUncommon Hangman the Life and
Deaths of Robert Nosey BobHoward, published in 2022.
Would you please join me inmaking our first speaker, Dr Meg
(07:51):
Foster, welcome.
Meg Foster (07:57):
I'd like to echo Jessie by acknowledging the
Gadigal people of the EoraNation, on whose lands we meet
today.
I'd like to pay my respects toelders, past and present, and
recognise that Aboriginalsovereignty was never ceded.
This has been a site of richhistory and storytelling for
millennia and I feel privilegedto speak here today.
When Jesse asked me if I hadany ideas for a History Now talk
(08:20):
, I volunteered this topicbecause it's one I'm passionate
about, but also one I strugglewith.
For those of you who don't knowmy work, as Nerida said, I'm an
Australian of banditry and Ispecialize in Australian bush
ranging, especially bush rangers, who are people of color and
women.
So at a base level, I look atcriminals, but ones who are
unique in our country for notonly drawing mass sympathy but
(08:44):
being celebrated as Australianicons so long as they were white
guys.
You'd be hard-pressed to findmany Australians who have no
idea who Ned Kelly is, and theseare some of the reasons why,
for the purpose of the audio,we're looking at lots of popular
images of Ned Kelly.
But how to balance competingpopular narratives about these
figures (09:11):
Of bushrangers as heroic colonial Robin Hoods who
pushed back against an unjustsystem; and a minority yet
passionate view of them asgreedy thieves, murderers and
cop killers.
How to balance the interests ofdescendants of both criminals
and victims, how to recognisethat the average Australian has
(09:33):
deeply felt opinions about thisfacet of our shared past?
And what to do with thebushrangers?
I look at the ones who weren'twhite men and didn't fit the
mould, the people who wererarely remembered on a national
stage and certainly nevercelebrated in the mythic light
we're used to.
There are a lot of questionsthere, so I thought I'd start
(09:57):
with a vignette from my researchbefore trying to tackle some of
these very thorny questions.
okay.
So in 1865 in central west NewSouth Wales, a police officer
named John Ward was travelingfrom Mudgee to Coonabarabran.
He received reports of aChinese bushranger in the area.
(10:22):
Near present-day Dunedoo, hespied a Chinese man who he
called on to surrender, butinstead of going quietly, this
man shot the officer, who laterdied of his wound.
After several weeks ofsearching for the culprit of
this crime, Sam Poo was captured.
He was tried and found guiltyof Ward's murder and hanged at
Bathurst Jail.
Over the last 40 years, Poo'sstory has been revived in the
(10:46):
local community, where he'sremembered as Australia's only
Chinese bushranger.
Now this is a very condensedversion of the supposed criminal
career of Sam Poo and it'swhere most references to him
really start and stop.
As one local told me recently,Sam Poo just came on the scene
when he decided to murder JohnWard, and that was about it for
(11:08):
me.
So if we're reading straightfrom the court records and
newspaper articles from the time, it seems like a pretty
uncomplicated story.
There's a clear victim, Ward,and a clear villain, Poo, and
Poo only really exists from thatmoment in 1865 when he
supposedly chose to engage incrime.
(11:32):
Many popular public-facinghistories take this sort of
matter-of-fact approach.
They view crime records,especially court verdicts, as
accurate depictions of a finiteyet factual and knowable past.
In other words, they read therecord straight.
An historical source is takenat face value, its authors,
(11:55):
believed unquestioned and copiedinto history, sometimes
verbatim.
But viewing historical sourcesin isolation and believing their
contents without testing them,placing them in context and
unveiling their agendas isproblematic.
It's not only bad history.
In many cases it's unethical,marginalised and elevates the
(12:27):
voices of a small yet powerfulelite, casting their opinions as
historical fact, somethingsolid, unrelenting and true.
In this way, many issues facingcrime history are issues for
history as a field, as Neridavery beautifully introduced,
historians are trained to askthemselves who gets to speak for
the past?
Whose voices are privileged andwhose are silenced?
(12:50):
How do we recreate past timesfrom necessarily fragmentary and
skewed records?
How do we balance ourresponsibility to the past, to
representing the past's ownpresent, with our responsibility
to our present and to thefuture?
These questions are especiallypressing for crime history.
(13:13):
This is because crime involvesboth punishment and power.
Crime is seen as a threat tosociety.
It's a breach of law that isalso meant to be, a breach of
social mores, protocols andexpectations, a breach that is
(13:38):
so severe it must be corrected,redressed and deterred through
punishment.
In colonial times, severecrimes could result in
imprisonment, corporalpunishment, labour or even
state-sanctioned execution.
So the stakes were really high.
But my emphasis on crime andsociety here is important.
Crime isn't natural.
To engage in crime is to breakthe law.
(13:58):
But who makes the law?
It's also created by elites andused to ensure the established
order remains the same.
Now this might sound like quitea grandiose statement, but many
of us have experienced timeswhen something defined as crime
at law doesn't seem like a crimeto us.
It doesn't threaten our moralframework.
(14:20):
It doesn't breach our socialmores.
Since the 1970s, many of us havetaken this view when it comes
to understanding convictancestors.
From about that time, a convictinheritance has largely been
repositioned from one of shameand secrets to one of pride and
(14:41):
celebration.
Many descendants see themselvesas having a special tie to the
nation because their colonialroots run deep.
But the way they do this is notto deny their criminal
inheritance but to explain andcontextualise it to minimise its
deviancy.
This takes many forms.
(15:01):
So understanding the crime ofwhich their ancestor is accused,
so blasphemy or robbery.
The legal definition of crimebecomes specific and softened to
stealing a handkerchief, takinga loaf of bread.
When the inheritance is our own, even more severe crimes can be
explained by looking at thebigger picture.
(15:23):
An ancestor convicted ofassault was pushing aback
against those who oppressed them.
A highway robber had few otheroptions when their farm was
taken away to make way for afactory, or their cattle could
no longer graze on common land.
These same sorts of specifics,context and empathetic
(15:44):
understanding are often appliedto white bush ranging men, the
most prolific of which is NedKelly.
Kelly and his family arerepeatedly depicted as hunted
and persecuted by theauthorities.
Ned's turn to crime cast as anoble quest to defy his
oppression.
White bush ranging men providesomething of a national
(16:05):
inheritance for our country, animagined community where
rebellious underdog traitsrepresent those of the typical
Australian.
But it's harder for many of usto identify with the oppressed
if they're not white men.
So take my example of Sam Poo.
People I spoke to recognisedthat they knew very little about
(16:27):
Poo but still believed he was avillain who killed Senior
Constable Ward.
Many of these same people sawNed Kelly as a hero.
One even had a statue of him inhis front yard, which he had
carved himself, and it was rightnear his Australian flag.
So Poo was cast as a cop killer.
(16:48):
Ned Kelly, who, to be clear,killed far more police than Sam
Poo was ever alleged to havedone, remains a national hero.
To make things more complicated,I've actually gone back and
accessed court records,depositions and newspaper
articles from the time and to methere are glaring holes in the
(17:11):
historic case against Sam Poo.
I believe there's reasonabledoubt that he killed Ward and
it's likely the wrong man wasexecuted for this crime.
But Sam Poo did resist arrestand this was something several
locals and one reviewer of mybook used to show Poo's guilt.
(17:31):
Surely he wouldn't resistarrest if he had nothing to hide
.
So this is where context isimportant.
When you look at racial attacksagainst Chinese by Europeans at
the time, resisting arrestmakes a lot of sense, especially
in a situation where enragedlocals and police posses are
(17:51):
actively searching for a Chinesesuspect.
Besides, Poo was actually triedseparately for this offence of
shooting with intent to killwhile resisting arrest, and he
was sentenced to 14 yearsimprisonment.
So it wasn't a death sentence.
Now, I should probably pausehere and clarify that I'm not
saying real crime doesn't exist.
(18:13):
I'm not saying that historicconvictions were all a ploy by
the elite or that victims ofcrime never saw justice through
the law.
This is only to say that, whenit comes to crime history, we
can't take the official recordfor granted.
We need to look at who haspower, understand people's
actions on their own terms andwork to situate them in context.
(18:37):
We need to do this not onlywhen we're trying to justify our
own criminal ancestors.
We need to apply this care,specificity and nuance across
the board.
Okay, so, since colonisation1788, crime in Australia and law
in Australia has been gearedtowards a white male settler
(18:59):
subject, in my view an ethicalcrime.
History recognises this,denaturalises it and asks how it
might be otherwise, forinstance from a First Nations
perspective.
Crime history in Australia didnot begin with sentencing
British convicts back in England.
Not only do Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander
(19:20):
communities have their ownsystems of law, governance and
crime that have developed overmillennia.
The first crime in Australiancolonial history was that of
Indigenous dispossession, theillegal seizure of land by a
foreign power and the violentcolonisation that followed.
This is a foundational crime,so naturalised in our history
(19:45):
it's rarely seen in this lightas a crime.
But when we recognise thatterra nullius was a lie and we
look at settler atrocitiescommitted to take land and shore
up colonial rule, it can hardlybe seen as anything but crime.
In fact, british law anddefinitions of crime were also
used to control First Nationspeople and remove them from
(20:05):
their country.
We need only look at the numbersof Aboriginal deaths in custody
today to see this criminalinheritance continue into the
present.
The William Faulkner quote thepast is never dead, it's not
even past, is clear here.
In instances such as these,historians have an ethical
responsibility to highlight theway this fraught colonial
(20:28):
foundation manifests in both thepast and continues to live in
the present.
Only then can we hope toovercome it.
Now this might soundstraightforward, but recently
professional historians havestarted to ask some pretty
thorny questions.
Do we have the right to usereal people's lives to make a
(20:51):
broader point about crime?
Do we have the right to recovercriminals at all?
Now this might seem a bitjarring.
Since the 1960s and 70s there'sa strong tradition of history
designed to bring back themarginalized from the past.
This was not only championed tomore fully people past worlds,
(21:14):
so not only looking at the elitebut the broad swathe of
humanity.
It was also importantreparatory work to bring stories
from the margins back into thecentre.
Julia Late, a British historian, is among scholars who have
criticised well, she'scriticised her own past work on
this score.
Basically she's been criticalof where she started from and
(21:34):
where she wants to be Looking atthe criminalisation of sex work
.
Her first book used individualsas illustrative examples of
this broader trend at work.
Her next book looked at thelife circumstances and choices
of one New Zealand woman who wastrafficked to the UK via South
America, named Lydia Harvey Forlate.
(21:57):
There are issues with distillinga real person into a handy
quote or passing reference.
It erases their humanity and itrepresents them in ways that
they wouldn't have seenthemselves, making us strangers
to historical figures' own senseof their experience.
Now, when you're surrounded byreams of very exciting
(22:18):
documentation and you feel likeyou've got a direct access point
into the past, it's actuallyalso very easy for us to forget
that we're often encounteringpeople at some of the worst
moments of their lives ratherthan moments that represent the
entirety of them.
A friend of mine recently asked, kind of tongue-in-cheek,
(22:39):
whether it was like if a parkingfine was all your descendants
had to know you by.
But stories that are left to usin crime archives are often a
good deal worse than a parkingfine.
To overcome these issues,leight and I are kind of similar
in seeing crime as an entrypoint into a larger story rather
than just the end of it.
(23:00):
So in my work I look at peopleof colour's encounter with bush
ranging but also try to seetheir lives before and after
their supposed turn to crime.
I seek to challenge the kind ofBritish colonial crime frame of
reference too British colonialcrime frame of reference too.
(23:22):
So in Sam Poo's case, forinstance, it's likely he would
have seen the bushranging crimesof which he was accused in
relation to a Chinese traditionof banditry that actually goes
back to the 12th century, orperhaps even in relation to the
banditry of his own hometown ofAmoy in the Fujian province of
China.
He didn't necessarily see beingaccused of being a bushranger.
It's like being a colonial.
(23:42):
Ben Hall, scholars of colonialAfrica, Catherine Bruce Lockhart
and Tololope Akande haverecently taken this actually one
step further.
So they raised the issue ofconsent in colonial crime
archives.
Incarcerated people didn'tconsent to have documentation
(24:08):
about them be made or to beshared.
Crime carries with it stigma,prejudice and dehumanisation for
both criminalised people andoften for their descendants.
In colonial context, theimprisonment of colonised
subjects was used to reinforcetheir status as deviant, and
that in turn served tolegitimise British colonisation.
(24:28):
These issues also continue intothe present.
Historians must seek full andinformed consent when conducting
oral history interviews withliving respondents.
Bruce Lockhart and Akande askwhy this same consent isn't
asked for when it comes to thedead.
Their solution isn't just todestroy or crime archives.
(24:50):
I should say that from theget-go.
They propose that we speakabout incarcerated people's
experiences anonymously, if thesituation kind of suits that or
that.
We use minimal identifyinginformation unless consent can
be sought from incarceratedpeople themselves, their
descendants or their community.
Historical recovery isn'talways reparative.
(25:12):
We're not always fixingsomething by trying to bring
back marginal voices from thepast, and this is something we
need to be aware of.
The Indigenous Data SovereigntyMovement speaks to similar in
kind of similar terms aboutmaterial created by and about
Indigenous people.
There's a long and painfulhistory of non-Indigenous people
(25:33):
taking, looting, recording andotherwise documenting Indigenous
people without their full andinformed consent.
This material was often used tocriminalise and dehumanise
Indigenous people and justifyoppressive colonial policies.
Worimi scholar Kirsten Thorpeis among researchers who work to
(25:54):
ensure First Nations people,their descendants and
communities have sovereigntyover this material.
Non-indigenous scholars do nothave an automatic moral right to
use this material because it'sfreely accessible in an archive.
The issue of consent is reallyalive here too.
This was a lot of informationto cover, so thank you for
(26:16):
sticking with me.
But in conclusion, the ethicsof crime history are difficult.
They're messy and fraught andthe stakes are really high.
There's not a one-size-fits-alland it's really a constantly
shifting landscape.
Although this is history, ithas a direct bearing on the
present.
Writers of crime history havean ethical responsibility to ask
(26:39):
tough questions of historicalmaterial, be reflective and
recognise the power inherent inany attempt to capture this
aspect of the past.
Basically, I think that if westop questioning and start
feeling comfortable aboutwriting this sort of history,
we're probably doing it wrong.
(27:10):
Thanks, Meg.
I'd like you to join me inwelcoming Dr Rachel Franks to
the stage.
Rachel Franks (27:14):
I begin by acknowledging that we meet and
learn on country.
I pay my respects to theGadigal people on whose lands I
live, work and write.
We might be reconciled to deathand to taxes, but crime is
different.
Crime, despite its ubiquity, issomething we can work to avoid
(27:37):
becoming a victim of, something,as politicians are fond of
saying, that we can control,that we can be tough about that,
we can even declare war on.
Crime is timeless and universal, and my purpose here is to
(28:01):
highlight how nestled tightlyalongside criminal events are
the dual desires to tell andconsume stories about those who
would do us harm.
As criminologist Philip Rawlinshas explained, crime is
everywhere.
Everyone has been both victimand offender, but the most
frequent contact with crime isthrough newspapers, books,
(28:23):
television, film, video,computer games, political
speeches and the rantings ofdrunks in pubs.
Drunken arguments aside, theethics around criminal acts that
challenge the legal and moralparameters that we set for
ourselves, and which we do editover time, are relatively clear.
(28:46):
For example, especially heinousoffences such as murder, rape
and arson are comprehensivelycondemned by those who would
consider themselves law-abidingcitizens.
Yet the telling of thesestories is never black and white
, even when writers of truecrime and I will be focusing on
(29:08):
published true crime alignthemselves with ideals of
reporting the facts and tellingan engaging tale, there are
challenges for writers,publishers and readers.
This murkiness is exacerbatedby who stands to profit with
crime histories, unable to avoidits own rap sheet when it comes
(29:32):
to taking crime and reimaginingit as a mercantile enterprise.
As the British magazine Punchpointed out in 1842, we are a
trading community, a commercialpeople.
Murder is doubtless a veryshocking offence.
Nevertheless, as what has beendone cannot be undone, let us
(29:59):
make our money out of it.
Hereupon, we turn a murdererinto a commodity and we open an
account with homicide.
One way to try and push thepursuit of profit to one side in
considering the ethics of crimehistories is to look at these
works through the lens of EmileDurkheim's idea of the
conscience collective.
(30:22):
A French sociologist born in1858, durkheim was a man who one
biographer described asretaining an exacting sense of
duty and a serious, indeedaustere, view of life.
He could never experiencepleasure without a sense of
remorse.
So a serious bloke and spoileralert, not unproblematic.
(30:47):
His first significant work wasthe Division of Labour in
Society, published in 1893.
And in this book he positedthat we become more connected to
each other in line with theincreasing compartmentalisation
of our labour.
So by concentrating on onespecific sort of labour, we
(31:09):
connect to those who perform allthe other types of labour that
we need to function.
These connections inspirecomfort and camaraderie,
encouraging us to trust that ourefforts fit neatly with the
labours of others andconsolidate social structures.
Now you don't have to be asociologist to see some of the
(31:32):
flaws in his grand idea.
Most of us here haveexperienced the anonymity and
the isolation of modern workpractices, while his focus on
solidarity does not addressissues of oppression of the many
by the few.
But if we narrow our focus tothe absolute centre of
(31:55):
Durkheim's argument, thedivision of labour with its
specialisations pushed not asfar as possible, as the
capitalists would have, butmerely as far as necessary, as
the sociologists would like,then what we have is the source
(32:15):
of social solidarity and itbecomes at the same time the
foundation of the moral order.
If we incorporate into thisfoundation for a more moral
society some of the ideas aroundthe processes of punishment,
the conscience collective allowsfor the demonstration of group
(32:36):
norms and the strengthening ofmoral boundaries.
In summary, crime, andspecifically our shared response
to crime, stabilises society.
Now, in some instances, ourcollective attitude towards
punishment also charts oursocial progress, and the
(32:58):
abolition of the death penaltybeing the most obvious
illustration of this evolution,and I will return to the history
of judicial execution in amoment.
Now I'm not going to try andexplore the main theories of
crime that have been rehearsedelsewhere, but it is vital to
note that Durkheim believedcrime events are necessary.
(33:22):
Breaches of laws offeropportunities to bond through
shared responses to those events, while pointing out fractures
in society.
Basically, crime events drawour attention to issues
requiring rectification,simultaneously providing the
occasion for a more or lessdramatic display of social
(33:46):
solidarity in punishment.
Although these responses arenot always reasonable and often
the noise of the responseovershadows suggested solutions
to what was the obvious problemin the first place.
(34:07):
Val McDermid, in her 2019 crimenovel how the Dead Speak, put
these ideas a little bit morebluntly when she wrote societies
get the crimes they deserve.
Build a society based on greed,for example, and robbery will
(34:29):
become your default crime.
Turn sex into a commodity andbingo, sex crimes soon spawn
like tadpoles.
So if that's the underlyingcause of crime, logically the
remedy must be in our own hands.
If we change the script peoplelive by, then surely we should
(34:52):
be able to alter our outcomes.
Basically, one of the majorpoints in my second doctorate in
a single paragraph.
But I'm fine and recoveringwell Now.
What does some random andslightly awkward French guy who
died in 1917 have to do withtelling true crime tales today?
(35:15):
And, and perhaps moreimportantly, why should
historians care?
The answers to these questionsare found in the genre of true
crime.
David Schmid, who is the guy inthis space in my opinion, has
written that the precise originsof true crime are obscure, but
(35:43):
the meaning of true crime isvery simply, according to Jean
Murley, the story of real eventsshaped by the teller and imbued
with his or her values andbeliefs about such events, with
claims to truth and this is aninteresting point unchallenged
by its audience.
These tales, usually of murder,are about real crimes and the
(36:05):
real people entangled, byaccident or design, in those
criminal cases.
Some commentators have observedthat the use of the word true to
classify true crime isoffensive, and Charles Graber,
author of the criticallyacclaimed the Good Nurse, which
came out in 2013, pointed outthat you will find no section in
(36:31):
your bookseller's store fortrue history or true memoir or
true politics but perhaps youshould.
Only crime gets treated like acriminal.
It's as if the unethicalsubject matter has rubbed off on
the writer and their writing.
This focus on the truth and theprovision of information is
(36:56):
seen in references to eventswhich have actually happened,
citing date, time and place.
True crime, traditionallyconsumed through newspaper
columns or thin volumes printedon cheap paper with
blood-stained covers, can bepresented as diversionary
storytelling to satisfyvoyeuristic interests of
(37:19):
prurience and indulging inschadenfreude in criminal
activities, problematising thegenre but also its audience.
These works also, as ChristopherWilson has noted, present as
information, for true crime is adeeply news-dependent genre,
(37:40):
with violent crime and storiesof grossly brutal or cruel
criminal acts considered themost newsworthy.
But true crime's status asuseful information source is
continually supported by howpeople, usually women, return to
these texts again and again tolearn survival tips and
(38:03):
strategies.
So, despite the ease with whichtrue crime is routinely
dismissed, these texts play aneminent role in society because,
to a far greater extent thanmany other genres and other
types of printed material, theydetail the punishment of
(38:24):
wrongdoers, as explained byDavid Garland, the eminent
scholar of history, law andsociology.
Although the modern state has anear monopoly of penal violence
and controls the administrationof penalties, a much wider
population feels itself to beinvolved in the process of
(38:48):
punishment and supplies thecontext of social support and
valorisation within which statepunishment takes place.
In emphasising punishments fromfines through to executions,
true crime works present andreiterate the core morals and
standards of the market forwhich they are published.
(39:11):
This is evidenced in how thegenre is extraordinarily
flexible and has reinventeditself over and over across
hundreds of years to fitseamlessly in with the needs of
new generations of readers.
There is one element in thesestories which is, though,
(39:31):
incredibly stable In true crime,the killers are usually
incarcerated or executed at theend of the story, reassuring us
with a good old-fashionedreordering of the chaos wrought
by crime.
Engaging with these historiesassists us in meeting the strong
emotional and social needs tobear witness to the punishment
(39:56):
of criminals of all kinds.
To bear witness to thepunishment of criminals of all
kinds.
This in part explains ourfascination with cold cases and
the need for a satisfactoryconclusion, regardless of the
amount of time that has passed.
The point of true crimedelivering educational texts or
of offering facts to readers isroutinely debated.
(40:19):
For example, jack Miles haswritten, somewhat
melodramatically, that the mosttrue crime writers identify as
informal intelligence agents.
Ours is a nasty job, they imply, but somebody has to do it.
Someone has to stare the horrorin the eye so that we may know
(40:40):
what it looks like.
Society would be content tolive in a fool's paradise were
it not for the messages that webring from hell.
True crime narratives, fromperfunctory reportage offering
news as it happens through tofull-length texts that study
convoluted criminal cases, areoften treated as simple
(41:03):
artefacts of popular culture.
Descendants of ballads andbroadsides that have written on
the occasion of the unusual, thequirky or the puzzling.
In a field where ethics areignored by some and a near
(41:42):
constant concern for others, itis the historian who adds
validity to the genre of truecrime texts via various
disciplines, includingphilosophy, sociology or
criminology, or genres such asbiography, memoir or history.
The benefits of an historicalapproach have become so obvious
we now see some journalistsdiscarding much of their primary
training to emulate the workpractices of historians.
For example, Dave Cullen spentnearly a decade writing and
(42:04):
researching his award-winningbook Columbine of 2009, with
pretty much every single reviewof that book noting the detailed
endnotes and bibliography.
So true crime induces us tomeditate on matters profound and
fraught, with Mark Seltzersuggesting such histories form
(42:27):
part of our contemporary woundculture, a culture, or at least
cult, of commiseration.
If we cannot gather in the faceof anything other than crime,
violence, terror and trauma orthe wound, we can at least
commiserate.
As noted, most true crime talesreassure readers with details
(42:50):
of punishment, but we areburdened with the knowledge that
the victim was real, a person,someone we might have known,
someone that we might be able toidentify with, was robbed or
raped, was a victim ofmanslaughter or murder.
Circumstances may bring about ajudicial resolution for the
(43:10):
perpetrator, but there arerarely real resolutions for the
victims, their families or theirfriends.
In some instances, there is noresolution for anyone involved
in a criminal event, with, asnoted, cold cases continuing to
intrigue and mesmerise.
True crime is always aboutpeople Victims, perpetrators,
(43:35):
investigators, prosecutors,punishers and sometimes the
storytellers.
True crime is also about us.
There is a widespread need,from casual to obsessive, to
know victims and understandtheir killers.
In addition, the direrepetitiveness of some types of
(43:57):
criminal offences and thecommitting of particularly
horrific crimes that serve asflashpoints for action give us
evidence to fight for a societythat is better or at least
marginally safer.
Durkheim knew that a crime-freesociety was a fantasy.
It was a society of saints Withexpectations tempered by this
(44:22):
knowledge.
Consumers of crime stories canreject an attitude towards
society that is completelypessimistic and, though not
naively optimistic about theworld around them, can take some
solace in the idea that theconscience collective encourages
a more moral community.
(44:42):
In Australia we have producedvast libraries of crime stories.
To avoid labels of cheap andtrashy, we have caught many of
these volumes' history.
Each piece of criminal evidencecreated and collected, each
investigation and court processdocumented, each true crime
story published contributes tothe complex puzzle that tells
(45:06):
the grand narrative of crime inAustralia, disputing ideas of a
single monolithic convict eraera.
It is interesting to note thatAustralia's beginnings as a
penal colony coincided withtechnological developments that
allowed for the greater andspeedier distribution of crime
(45:27):
stories, which is seen in howcrime is central to our first
non-fiction book, our firstnewspaper, our first major
pamphlet and our first novel.
Like any historical project,crime histories are challenging.
In my own work on theexecutioners of New South Wales,
(45:47):
I spent many hours grapplingwith the truth.
Specifically, how much of thetruth to include?
Do I gloss over crimes,implying a vengeful state happy
to hang someone because wehadn't dropped anybody from a
gallows for at least a week?
Or do I provide too muchinformation, too much truth, and
(46:09):
so spark ideas in readers thatmaybe the death penalty is not
such a bad idea after all?
To be clear, in the arsenal tofight crime, capital punishment
is the worst idea in the box.
Make no mistake, the role ofhistorians was essential to the
abolition of capital punishmentand although New South Wales was
(46:33):
a little slow, with the firstcolony to embrace the hangman's
tools in 1788, being the laststate to finally abolish the
remnants of the death penalty in1985.
While Violet Oldfield was rapedby Joseph Campbell in 1901, the
accused questioned the victimin court - a barely tolerated
(46:59):
practice then, that seemsabsolutely shocking now.
The nine-year-old victim wasso small they put her on a chair
on a table so that everybody inthe courtroom could hear her
and see her as she gave evidence.
Decades of lobbying, inconjunction with the works of
(47:22):
historians on sex crimes, sawthe law eventually changed, but
not until 2003.
Perhaps Jack Miles was notexaggerating, after all, when he
chastised crime writers.
Maybe many of our messages arefrom hell.
(47:46):
To conclude, writing,publishing and reading true
crime tales facilitates a senseof engagement with processes of
punishment and allows for thedemonstration of a group's norms
and the strengthening of asociety's moral boundaries.
Crime histories from thedistant through to the recent
past reinforce our shared socialvalues and reiterate our
commitment to respond tocriminal acts through
(48:07):
punishments and sanctions.
Despite the many and variedsocial forces separating us,
including class, gender,ethnicity, race and religion, we
are bound to try and protectour communities from numerous
threats, such as the threat ofcrime.
If we accept that crime servesas a barometer for the health of
(48:32):
society, the impacts of thepast on the here and now are
immediately apparent.
Crimes against women, forexample, tell us of a misogyny
that still needs to be addressed, whilst financial crimes feed
debates about implementing auniversal basic income.
We want all of us want to haveconversations around crime, but
(48:57):
often we just don't know how tostart them.
In a vacuum, we will seek outfast and flashy headlines or
crimes that have been repackagedas quick exposés.
Yes, journos are keyinterlocutors in dialogues on
crime, but they are overtlydriven by circulation numbers
(49:21):
and sales figures.
And while an historian, to myknowledge, has never knocked
back a royalty payment, historynever appears on lists for side
hustles or get-rich-quickschemes.
The motivations are clearlydifferent.
Sure, historians are alsopeddlers of truth, but we add
(49:41):
value to the recitation of facts.
We can correct errors in therecord, we can restore victims
names and voices in powerfulways, we can contextualise and
critique and we can argue forchange where that is not within
(50:02):
the journalist's remit.
Historians also benefit fromgood training and a collegiate
community placing us in aprivileged position to write
these histories.
I am not advocating that everyhistory should be exclusively a
crime history, but I am askingthat if we are writing history,
(50:23):
any type of history, and ifcrime makes an interjection,
that we address it.
We will always quibble aboutthe ethics of the how we do this
work, but I propose it is moreunethical to deny or ignore our
many criminal paths.
As criminal behaviour definessome in society as 'other', our
(50:48):
participation in a sharedresponse to crime events defines
us as human.
In short, the work of thehistorian in researching and
writing about crime will nevernot be urgent.
Thank you.
Jesse Adams Stein (51:10):
We'll wrap this up now because we've gone a
little bit over time, butplease join me in very warmly
thanking Nerida Campbell, megFoster and Rachel Franks, and
I'll just close off today withjust a few very quick thank yous
in relation to history now liketo thank Catherine Shirley from
the History Council, AmandaWells and Lauren Chater.
Also the State Library,particularly the events team,
(51:33):
Lydia Tasker and Callum McLean,and the Australian Centre for
Public History.
As always, the History Councilof New South Wales thanks our
major cultural partners, inparticular, our major funder,
the New South Wales Government,via Create New South Wales.
And just before we go, this isan interesting one.
So I convened History Now 2024this year.
(51:54):
It was wonderful fun.
I enjoyed every minute of it.
I met so many wonderful peopleand it was a fantastic thing to
do.
If you or someone in yournetworks might be interested in
convening Directing History Nowfor 2025, it is a voluntary
thing please do get in touchwith the History Council or
directly with me.
There's email addresses upthere.
(52:15):
It's an absolute fantasticopportunity to meet amazing
people really rewarding thing todo.
It's not too much work really,I promise.
So please get in touch if youor someone else you know might
be interested.
And thank you very much.
Good night, thank you.
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