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Research note: The founders and survivorsprojectJames Bradley a , Rebecca Kippen a , Hamish Maxwell-Stewart b , JanetMcCalman a & Sandra Silcot aa Centre for Health and Society, School of Population Health, University ofMelbourne , Level 4, 207 Bouverie St, Victoria 3010, Australiab School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania , Private Bag 81,Hobart Tasmania 7001, AustraliaPublished online: 03 Jan 2012.

To cite this article: James Bradley , Rebecca Kippen , Hamish Maxwell-Stewart , Janet McCalman & SandraSilcot (2010) Research note: The founders and survivors project, The History of the Family, 15:4, 467-477

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hisfam.2010.08.002

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Research note: The founders and survivors project

James Bradley a,⁎, Rebecca Kippen a, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart b,Janet McCalman a, Sandra Silcot a

a Centre for Health and Society, School of Population Health, University of Melbourne, Level 4, 207 Bouverie St, Victoria 3010, Australiab School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 81, Hobart Tasmania 7001, Australia

Abstract

This paper describes the multidisciplinary project Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context.Individual life courses, families and generations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are being reconstituted from a widerange of data including convict records; birth, death and marriage registrations; and World War I service records. The project willresult in a longitudinal study of Australian settlement, the long-run effects of forced labour and emigration on health and survival,family formation, intergenerational morbidity and mortality, and social and geographic mobility.Crown Copyright © 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Australia; Convicts; Longitudinal; Life course; Historical; Cohort

1. Introduction

Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses inHistorical Context is a major long-term project which isbuilding a longitudinal study of a key founderpopulation of modern Australia: Tasmanian convictsand their descendants. The project is reconstitutingAustralian life courses, families and generations in thehistorical context, using a wealth of data from thenineteenth and twentieth centuries. Research topicsinclude fertility and household formation, life-courseand intergenerational health and mortality, social andgeographic mobility, and behaviour under stress. Theresearch team includes historians, demographers, epi-demiologists and information technologists from theuniversities of Tasmania, Melbourne, Flinders, New

South Wales, Oxford and the Australian NationalUniversity, and the Tasmanian Archives and HeritageOffice. Funding comes from the Australian ResearchCouncil.

2. Background

Between 1803 and 1853, at least 72,500 convictswere transported to the British colony of Van Diemen'sLand (renamed Tasmania in 1856). From the point oftheir arrest, in the British Isles and other parts of theempire, to the date of their release in Australia, theseindividuals were the subjects of intense documentation:a ‘Paper Panopticon’.1 We know the colour of theireyes, how tall they were, where they were born, where

History of the Family 15 (2010) 467–477

⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: +61 3 8344 0716.E-mail address: jbradley@unimelb.edu.au (J. Bradley).

1 The original panopticon was a prison designed by the utilitarianJeremy Bentham. In principal it allowed for the constant surveillanceof prisoners.

1081-602X/$ - see front matter. Crown Copyright © 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2010.08.002

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they were sent to work, how many days they spentlabouring on the roads or in penal stations, who was sickon the voyage to Australia and who died under sentence(see Fig. 1 for one of the many elements of the ‘PaperPanopticon’). The records are the most detailednineteenth century source anywhere in the world forfamily history, bodies and the behaviour of ordinarymen and women. In 2007 the Australian convict recordswere inscribed onto the UNESCOMemory of the WorldRegister in recognition of their ‘world significance andoutstanding universal value’ (UNESCO, 2009).

These records, from New South Wales, Tasmaniaand Western Australia, capture two populations: a broadspectrum of British and Irish men, women and juvenileswho fell foul of the law; and a smaller sub-set who

survived penal servitude to establish lineages thatbecame a significant part of the foundational populationof these settler colonies. What these sources reveal, andwhat makes them especially significant, is the varyingimpact of the system on men and women. Our initialforays into the sources have revealed, for example, thatwhile approximately 90 percent of convict womenmarried (or remarried) in the Australian colonies, thefigure for men was significantly lower. Only one in fourof the 259 men transported on the convict transportDuncan (1841), for example, could be traced to acolonial marriage. Nevertheless the overall numbers oftransported convicts (until the 1850s they made up thebulk of the colonial settler population), and the relativeshortage of women who arrived as free settlers, ensured

Fig. 1. A page from a conduct register (Archives Office of Tasmania CON 33), giving a vast amount of detail about Thomas Newton's life, vitalstatistics and crimes. This document was an integral part of the Paper Panopticon. Note Newton's unfortunate demise dying from over-indulging instrong spirits.

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that the convicts had a significant impact on thedemography of colonial Australia. As the nineteenthcentury progressed, however, the stigma associated withconvict descent encouraged many Australians toobfuscate details of their family past. This has made itdifficult to quantify the long-term demographic impactof convict transportation, although these effects havebeen partially reversed by the huge upsurge in thepopularity of family history following the bicentenary ofEuropean settlement in 1988. For most Australiansconvict descent is now considered something of whichto be proud. Two immediately past Prime Ministers areamongst the large numbers who have discovered thatthey have convict ancestry, and at least Kevin Rudddelights in his six convict ancestors as an ‘absolutepedigree’ (Barrowclough, 2008). Thus the convictrecords tell two important stories beyond that of theconvict experience itself: firstly of the societies andregimes that exiled them; secondly of the society that aminority contributed to demographically.

Founders and Survivors began in 2007 and is now inits fourth year of building a longitudinal database thatwill enable demographic and historical analysis of theTasmanian convicts, their origins, their experiences andtheir descendants. Having captured the record set indigital images, over 1 million lines of data have beenentered that provide critical indicators of the vitalstatistics and life courses of the Tasmanian convicts (seebelow, Section 4). The richness of the biological andbehavioural data in the convict records offers even

greater potential for longitudinal life-course researchacross the social and medical sciences than datasets builtfrom parish records. The high quality of Australian civilregistration (births, deaths and marriages) means that wecan trace convicts' descendants through the nineteenthand into the twentieth century. Using Australian servicerecords from the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF),we can compare the experiences and traits of convicts tothose of their direct descendants who enlisted duringWorld War I (see below, Section 8).

The database is an exercise in prosopographicaldemography; that is, individual life histories aresynthesised from a variety of sources for an entirepopulation to enable the study of that population.Diverse historical sources will provide ‘sightings’ ofindividuals at many different stages of the life course.Where possible, these sightings will be located inhistorical time and place using Geographic InformationSystems (GIS). Among other things, these will yieldsome measure of likely exposures to variations in foodsupply, to dislocations from urbanisation, and familyfortunes. Their very richness, the vast amount ofindividual micro-level data they contain, and the scopefor linking them to other data sets outside of the penalsystem, provides us with the ability to reconstruct thelives and families of thousands of individuals born inBritain and elsewhere during the critical period of socialand economic transition at the beginning of thenineteenth century (for an overview of the scope ofthe sources, see Fig. 2).

Surgeons’ journals

Physical descriptions

Indents Confessions Free arrivals

Local offences

Musters Abscondings/ recaptures

Tickets of leave, pardons, certificates of freedom, police promotions/demotions, labour

category shifts

Deaths under sentence

Burials Birth, death and marriage registrations

Invalid depot and pauper institution admissions

Departures

Fig. 2. Schema of sources for Founders and Survivors, and the relationship between those sources.

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3. Historical cohort studies

Longitudinal population and cohort studies are nowcentral to the understanding of population health, socialand economic analysis and policy formation. Untilrecently, historical, multi-generational datasets werefewer and more difficult to construct due to lack of pastrecords. However, the International Commission forHistorical Demography reveals that there are now atleast twenty projects, from Europe and Scandinavia, toNorth America and Australasia, all attempting to createthis type of database. Some of the great historical andcontemporary datasets of the world are from Sweden, inparticular the Umeå Population Database constructedfrom Swedish annual parish registers kept from the1700s (Edvinsson, 2000). The Umeå Database provideslong-run demographic and socio-economic data, whichenables investigations into multi-generational effects ofexternal stressors such as climate change, periodicfamine, economic stress and infectious diseases. Theunique identifier given each Swedish citizen allowslinkage between historical records and more contempo-rary records, providing (under strict protocols ofprivacy) data that are used by researchers from aroundthe world.

Other studies include Projet Balsac (Bouchard,2010), a reconstitution of the Quebecois populationbased on the French settlers' parish registers. TheHistorical Sample of the Netherlands was established tocreate a representative dataset of individual level datacollected from ‘birth certificates, death certificates,personal cards, marriage certificates and populationregisters’. The sample of 78,000 individuals from thebirth period 1812–1922 not only offers a resource toscholars for their own research, but also provides acontrol group against which other studies can bemeasured and compared (Mandemakers, 2000). Morerecently Mandemakers and his team have instituted theLINKs project which aims to provide a tool allowing theenrichment and linkage of data from the GENLIASproject, which is digitising 32 million Dutch birth, deathand marriage certificates from 1811 to the earlytwentieth century (Mandemakers, 2008). In the UnitedKingdom, the Cambridge Population Group used parishregisters and volunteer genealogists to reconstitute asample of the English population in the eighteenthcentury, before civil registration began in 1837(Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, & Schofield, 1997). GeorgeDavey Smith and Steven Frankel have resuscitated theBoyd-Orr cohort first studied in Scotland in the late1930s (Martin, Gunnell, Pemberton, Frankell, & DaveySmith, 2005). More recently Schürer and Higgs, at the

University of Essex, have been funded to produce theIntegrated Census Microdata project, which aims tostandardise UK census micro-data producing a longitu-dinal database of individuals and households between1851–1911 (Higgs, 2010). This will be the first stage ofthe Victorian Panel Study as envisaged by Schürer(Schürer, 2007).

In the United States, datasets include the UnionArmy Sample–used by Robert Fogel, for the investiga-tion of ageing (Fogel, 2004), and by Dora Costa andmany others for a wide range of studies (Costa, 1993;Costa & Kahn, 2008; Hacker, 2009)–and the UtahPopulation Database, which covers up to elevengenerations and is used to research genetic diseasepropensity, links between fertility and longevity andearly-life impacts on later-life mortality (Mineau, 2009).The United States is also home to the biggestlongitudinal micro-data project, the University ofMinnesota's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series,which has standardised census data from 55 countries,covering 158 censuses, in the process creating 325 mil-lion records relating to individuals and households.

Founders and Survivors is thus part of a wider groupof studies that seek to track the life courses of ordinarypeople and their descendants in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. The research team collaborates withand draws on the expertise of colleagues associated withthese other projects, especially the Umeå PopulationDatabase.

4. Data

In the first year of Founders and Survivors, 354volumes of convict records–a total of over 68,000images–were digitally captured for research purposes.Copies of these are now available through theTasmanian Archives and Heritage Office website andcan be accessed on line (http://www.archives.tas.gov.au/generic/convict-records-online).

To date, the following data have been collected:

1. 9,000 deaths for convicts under sentence; 7,000burials for the colonial population as a whole (for theperiod 1803–38); 195,000 births, 93,000 deaths and51,000 marriages registered in Tasmania for theperiod (1838–99).

2. 12,000 records for convicts, crew, soldiers and theirfamilies treated by ships' surgeons during the voyageto Australia (1818–53).

3. 37,900 physical descriptions of the convicts (c. 50%of the men, and c.100% of the women), includingheight, and distinguishing features; 37,000 indents

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(out of c. 70,000) listing, amongst other things,places of trial, sentence, occupations and literacy;38,700 confessions (including a few protestations ofinnocence), including details of prior offences andbehaviour under sentence prior to disembarkation inTasmania (all covering 1816–53).

4. 25,900 offences for which convicts were tried beforemagistrates benches in Tasmania between 1816–80(recording all the offences of a 1:25 systematicsample of the male convicts), including the punish-ments awarded.

5. All surviving 49,000 muster records providing thelocation to which each convict was assigned (1830–35).

6. All 68,700 of the absconding and recapture noticespublished in the government Gazette, a weeklypublication that printed and distributed officialnotices and information; all 220,000 Gazette notifi-cations of tickets of leave, pardons, certificates offreedom and promotions and demotions from thepolice; and all 23,700 Gazette probation classnotifications recording the movement of prisonersbetween different labour categories.

7. 42,000 free arrivals to Tasmania and 114,500departures for free people, including convicts freeby servitude, in the period to 1860.

8. 20,000 admissions to invalid depots and pauperinstitutions, 1880–1920.

This totals 1,044,400 records collected, cleaned, andtranscribed. Because transcriptions are linked in manycases to images of the original source, the data aretextual, visual and numerical. The next task will belinkage of these records, internally, and to othercollections including the civil registration records ofother colonies, United Kingdom census data, and theOld Bailey records. This linkage will allow us toreconstitute life courses, families and generations.

Future steps include transcribing and linking to theservice records of descendants who served in the FirstAustralian Imperial Force (World War I) and theirveteran medical records (under strict medical-ethicsprotocols).

5. Text encoding initiative and data handling

A core technology for Founders and Survivors is theText Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI schema forencoding information about individuals and socialcontexts is being used to encode and aggregate all ofthe diverse historical sources about Tasmanian convictsand their descendants. The TEI is a collaborative project

that has evolved over twenty years into an internationaland interdisciplinary standard, based on XML (Exten-sible Markup Language). TEI is widely used bylibraries, museums, publishers, and individual scholarsto represent all kinds of textual material for onlineresearch and teaching. The TEI consortium is aninternational non-profit organisation of TEI userswhose mission is to develop and maintain guidelinesfor the digital encoding of literary and historical texts(see http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml).

In recent years the TEI standard has evolved toenable the encoding of persons, places, events, dates,complex personal and social relationships, and dataabout populations. The decision to use the TEI has thefollowing important implications for this project:

• all data is stored in an open, non-proprietary, non-binary, accessible (computer and human-readable)standard format using XML, which can be easilypresented by web-browsers;

• all the TEI files incorporate metadata and semanticdescription of the encoded data, meaning thatdocumentation and metadata are always availablewith the core data;

• reuse in other contexts is enhanced because TEIperson, organisation, place, event, state and traitelement encodings are powerful enough to act as ageneric ‘normalised’ format (that is, common and re-usable);

• TEI enables data to be mapped to facsimiles (images)in flexible ways, even enabling zones within imagesto be associated with data transcribed from them;

• the project benefits from the wealth of freelyaccessible tools for the processing of XML and TEIdata (e.g. visualisation tools such as BaseX http://www.basex.org/, TEI transformation scripts andstylesheets);

• data content and presentation are separated, againfacilitating reuse (Liu, 2004; Spurger-McQueen &Burnard, 2003).

This last point is critical. By separating the data fromits presentation we are able to overcome one of thefundamental problems faced by projects constructinghistorical databases: the conflict between retaining thestructural integrity of the original source, with the needto restructure the original source in such a way thatinformation may be transformed into data and data intowell-founded conclusions. Thus, in historical computingit has long been a trope that a database should replicatethe original source as closely as possible, recordingmisspellings, data out of place, and all the other messes

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that we associate with historical sources: or as Mande-makers and Dillon put it, ‘the data-entry process shouldpreclude the necessity of further inspection of theoriginal primary source’, in other words ‘literaltranscription’ (Mandemakers & Dillon, 2001). It ismaintained that this proximity to the source allows formore effective error checking, but more importantlymakes the data re-usable (Harbor, 2008). However,because it is hard to replicate the complexities of anarchival document the temptation has always been toenclose the data within a structure that allows for easyanalysis; often the more structured a database was thefurther from the original source it had travelled. TheXML-based TEI gives these types of projects a newmodel, where the document can be closely replicatedusing mark-up that identifies not only the data entities,but also the attributes of those entities. Furthermore,because mark-up provides bounded-fields, it is possibleto copy, rather than extract, those fields into a RelationalDatabase Management System, allowing for traditionaldata analysis. Thus by maintaining the source'sintegrity, while opening up the source to structuredanalysis, we effectively address many of the importantparts of the ‘life-cycle of historical information’(Boonstra, Breure, & Doorn, 2004). This model hasbeen advocated and trialled by a number of scholars(Spaeth, 2004; Bradley, 2005; Bradley & Short, 2005),and the award-winning website, Old Bailey Online,implemented such a system. Indeed, the Old Bailey'spublicly available statistical functions are based upon anXML-to-RDBMS system. The technical developers ofFounders and Survivors have designed and piloted amore advanced system, and demonstrated its feasibilityfor handling vast amounts of data.

6. Linkage

Linkage of data about the same person, andintergenerational linkage (family trees), is managed byhighly specialised link-management software (Holman,Bass, Rouse, & Hobbs, 1999). Through use of thissoftware, the project's researchers can access aggregat-ed data about individuals and populations without losingtrack of the diversity of sources from which the data arederived. Keeping link-management separate from thedata enables straightforward corrections and additions tolinks to be made. By enabling full transparency andretaining a history of the matching/linking process, teammembers can clearly trace and detect any potentialbiases or censorings introduced as the nominal matchingand genealogical linkage progresses. This level of

absolute transparency is required to support defensiblegeneralised interpretations of population data.

Various strategies are being employed to automatenominal data linkages. This process involves theconsistent handling of the naming of identities acrosssources by using standardised TEI formats for proso-pographical representations of names, dates and places.TEI easily allows for flexible but common representa-tions of multiple names and name parts, and allowsrecording at source for soundex codes (or other namestandardisation software routines), known aliases andother normalised spelling/stemming of names. Matchingsoftware will be specifically designed to process theseTEI standardised names and name parts.

Linkage of convict data within the system isstraightforward. The paper Panopticon used a rigorouslyapplied identification system, which allowed the linkageof convicts between the different records: each convictwas given a unique identifying police number that wasused as the primary index. Outside of the paperPanopticon, convict names (first, middle and family),ship name and date of arrival were the most commonlyused identifiers, and form the principal basis for linkingconvicts to their descendants in the colonial birth, deathand marriage records. Using these, with the addition ofother variables (like occupation) to ensure a highconfidence in the links, the process has nowcommenced.

Australian governments may have been poor custo-dians of census returns–almost none remain from thenineteenth and twentieth centuries (Hull, 2007)–but thecolonial governments, especially in Tasmania andVictoria, were advanced for their time in the adminis-tration of civil registration of births, deaths andmarriages. Tasmanian civil registration began in 1838,just a year after it did in England and Wales, and thesystem instituted in Victoria in 1853 remains among themost detailed registration system in the world. Thesewill allow us to reconstruct rich family histories.

Previous historical cohort studies have incorporatedthe voluntary research of family historians. This projectlikewise offers opportunities for a meaningful collabo-ration between university researchers and the commu-nity. Family historians can provide access to familybirth, death and marriage records, and will enable us toidentify retrospectively many convicts who changedtheir names. Such collaboration will also provide anopportunity to test the results of automated recordlinkage against a large sample of manually linkedrecords, a process that will enable the project to estimatethe proportion of false positives achieved under variousautomated linkage procedures.

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7. Community involvement, ethics and privacy

To maintain and encourage public participation, theproject has a high level of community engagement. Thisis achieved through newspaper articles (Barlow, 2009;Farouque, 2009), national radio coverage (Maxwell-Stewart & McCalman, 2010), presentations to Austra-lian family history groups, articles in family historypublications (McCalman, 2009a,b,c), the project website(www.foundersandsurvivors.org), and a quarterly projectnewsletter Chainletter (www.foundersandsurvivors.org/newsletter). Thus far, recognising the unique skills baseand experiences of family historians, the project hasrecruited more than 400 volunteers to aid the work oftracing convicts and their descendants.

Nevertheless, the involvement of family historians,particularly as the donors of detailed family trees, hasrequired the development of privacy protocols. Thework of Founders and Survivors is by necessityconducted according to the ethics protocols of theparticipating universities, the Australian ResearchCouncil and the National Health and Medical ResearchCouncil. The genealogies and other family informationdonated to the project can only be used for the databaseand not passed on to any third party, even another familymember or government authority. The data is stored insecure and confidential data storage along with themany databases held by the University of Melbourneand the Menzies Research Institute at the University ofTasmania. The data is stored in two databases: one withnames and contact details that can be accessed only bycertified researchers under strict access conditions forthe purposes of linking names and entering the coredata. The second has every individual converted to anumber, and this is the database that will be used byresearchers for population, medical and social analysis.Equally, as the Australian Research Council requirespublicly funded databases to become nation resourcesopen to researchers outside the project team, it is onlythe second, de-identified data, that will be madeavailable in the public domain (for more informationsee http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org/plans).

8. Research questions

There are two critical research questions that can andwill be investigated. The first relates to life-courseanalysis, and focuses upon human resilience and theimpact of insults suffered at critical periods of the life-course upon survival and human social performance.This question is developed from the work on sickness byRiley, Davey Smith, Kuh and others (Riley, 1989; Kuh

& Davey Smith, 1993; Galobardes, Lynch, & DaveySmith, 2004; Lynch & Davey Smith, 2005). The secondconverges upon the intergenerational effects andinfluences of the convict experience. While historicallife-course analysis is perforce limited to humanmeasurement in height, life span, fertility, socio-economic status, causes of death, it has the potential tocomplement life-course analysis that has access togenetic data. All these human measurements can beplotted against historical exposures: epidemics, famine,war trauma and socio-economic change. Nutritionalstatus in childhood can be inferred from adult heightcalibrated against historical geographic data when thetime and location of birth and childhood are known andthere is an adequate denominator population for acohort (Bygren, Edvinsson, & Brostrom, 2000;Bygren,Gunnar, & Edvinsson, 2001). In the case of the convictsand their AIF-descendants (colloquially referred to as“diggers”), sufficient data may be obtained by linkingconvict indents to census data, and military attestationpapers with civil registration, to assess family ‘integrity’in childhood and adolescence, particularly absence ofparents, homelessness, destitution, siblings, and socio-economic status. The study of intergenerational effectsis possible because we can construct cradle-to-gravestudies of a sample of soldiers who served in World WarI from their military and pension/health records. Theycan then be linked back to direct male and femaleconvict ancestors. Our partner in this research is theMenzies Centre for Population Research at the Univer-sity of Tasmania, which already has an intergenerationalgenetic database built from 10,000 founding families ofthe 1840s (Dwyer, 2001). Founders and Survivors willbe able to provide the Menzies' genetic database with anidentified sub-population that can be traced backwardsto their descriptions in the convict archive and forwardsto the diggers' records. We are collecting data on eye-colour, for instance, for the Menzies researchers.

There are distinctive characteristics about thisconvict population and their experience. First, the vastmajority of convicts were poor; second, their experienceand stressors were minutely recorded; third, their carewas under medical superintendence that left a record;fourth, unlike slaves, their servitude could result infreedom and rehabilitation; fifth, their behaviour inresponse to stress was recorded; and finally, if they didnot suffer the privations of secondary punishment (whicha majority did not), the penal system invested in thembiologically with high-calorie working diets, and in themcognitively with the teaching of literacy and skills, inparticular to the young. Here we have individuals whowere often under-nourished in childhood, only to be

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better fed than their free siblings back home, while underservitude. Did that later-in-life biological investment ofcalories enable them to live longer than their siblings orequivalents back home? Our community genealogistsare already producing data andwewill eventually be ableto compare the convict experience and outcomes withthose of slaves (Steckel, 2009). Thus the interdisciplin-ary nature of the research team, and the richness of thedata, means that a wide spectrum of research questionswill be investigated over the course of the project. Webegin with the following schema.

8.1. Meta-questions

What are the most significant factors in early-lifeexposures influencing survival, family formation, andthe foundation of robust lineages?

How significant are early-life exposures in creatingresilience in later-life stress and infection exposures?

8.2. Behaviour, morbidity and mortality under stress

Was there a relationship between ‘starter’ character-istics–native place, place of conviction, and socio-economic status (convicts) and native place, place ofenlistment, and socio-economic status (diggers)–andsickness on voyage, death under sentence, morbidityunder sentence (convicts) and sickness in the AIF?

Were starter characteristics predictive of the conductand the psychological distress of convicts (insanity,alcohol abuse, violence, breach of rules and regulations)and diggers (war neurosis/shellshock, alcohol abuse,violence, desertion, venereal disease), or can suchbehaviour be better explained by wider environmentalcircumstances such as the operation of colonial labourmarkets or the intensity of combat experience?

Was there an association between life expectancyand childhood nutrition as expressed through informa-tion about adult height?

What impact did transportation have on life expec-tancy? Were the lives of convicts shorter than equivalentage cohorts in the British Isles?

What was the impact of initial landing conditions ofconvicts and settlers on future socio-economic andhealth outcomes? Did those landed before the onset ofthe 1840s colonial depression, for example, fair betterthan subsequent cohorts?

What impact did various punishment regimes(flogging, hard labour and solitary confinement) haveon morbidity and mortality?

8.3. Immediate and generational family formation

Is there evidence of dysfunctional behaviour thatimpacted upon the success of family formation, such asconvictions, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, highinfant mortality, and later child mortality?

What was the impact of changing socio-economicconditions; opportunities and bottlenecks; acquisition ofproperty and land; access to entitlements of education,welfare support, housing and health care on familyformation and intergenerational household integrity?

Is there a relationship between colonial familyformation and life expectancy? Did male convicts whomarried live longer than their fellow transportees wholived to survive a sentence but failed to find a marriagepartner?

8.4. Social and geographic mobility

How many convicts never left the penal system andhow many died in state care?

Who stayed in the colonies and which colonies, whoreturned ‘home’, and who disappeared from records?

How socially mobile were the convicts after sentenceand did this differ between male and female convicts?

What degree of intergenerational geographical/socialmobility had occurred by the digger generation?

Did the digger generation own land/urban property?If so, when did the family obtain land?

Did the descendants of convicts become stuck inpoverty traps?

8.5. Intergenerational anthropometrics

What differences were there in convict heightsaccording to year of birth, season of birth, nativeplace, childhood food supply and infection exposure,place of conviction, parents alive, father dead, motherdead, both dead, siblings named, literacy, andoccupation?

What differences were there in AIF heights/bodymass index according to year of birth, season of birth,birthplace, childhood food supply and infection expo-sure, place of enlistment, parents alive, father dead,mother dead, both dead, siblings named, literacy,education, occupation, and religion?

What differences were there between heights ofconvicts and digger descendants controlling for nativeplace of digger, socio-economic status of digger'sfamily, number of siblings, parents alive/dead, educa-tion and skill of digger?

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What relationship is there, if any, between stature andlifespan for convicts and diggers according to familialhistory of stature and socio-geographic characteristics asabove?

Was stature predictive of conduct under sentence orin AIF?

Was stature predictive of immunity to infectiousdisease on the convict voyage, in the convict system, orin the AIF?

8.6. Influenza in the AIF

Were morbidity, mortality and case-fatality ratesfrom the 1918–19 influenza pandemic in the AIF higherthan those of the non-combatant Australian populationof the same age?

Do morbidity and mortality patterns indicate pre-existing immunity for sub-groups of the population,particularly for those born before 1891, those raised inurban areas, and those whose families experiencedinfluenza mortality in the 1890–91 pandemic?

Is there evidence of short-term deferred effects ofinfection, including depression, and cardiovascular,respiratory and all-cause morbidity and mortality?

What does timing of epidemic waves, and incidenceand timing of infection and re-infection, tell us about theprevalence of pre-existing immunity, and susceptibilityto re-infection by time since initial infection?

Did recent seasonal influenza infection provideprotection against the 1918–19 epidemic?

9. Conclusion

The ‘paper Panopticon’ was designed to see all, andrecord it in black and red ink. Of course, no system ofsurveillance is perfect, but the convict's record setreveals an extremely efficient technology of discipline.We can count how many times a convict was punishedfor insolence, for drunkenness, for absconding, fordisobedience. We can count the number of lashessuffered, how many days in chains, on short rations, insolitary confinement. We can hear their voices in courtrecords or statements; we can read their hopes and fearstattooed on their bodies and recorded and bound withinlarge leather-backed volumes. We can follow theconvicts in sickness and health, and even into theouter reaches of madness. We can reconstruct thefamilies and the life experiences they left behind. Withthis information we can construct measures of temper-ament, physical and mental insults and early-lifeinfluences.

For the majority of convicts who survived thesystem, the decades following their release or, in someinstances escape, have been largely unrecorded. Thestories of the most infamous or the most successful havebecome part of the official record; but little systematicresearch has been done on those who quietly survivedand stayed put, those who returned to their native place,those that continued roving around the world, or,indeed, those who became the founding mothers andfathers of modern Australian society. We have, forexample, discovered through this project that manymore convicts absconded and disappeared than had beenpreviously suspected, particularly after the discovery ofgold in Victoria in 1851. Between 1846 and 1852,16,000 former Tasmanian convicts were officiallyrecorded as leaving the colony. Almost certainly manyother departures went unrecorded–and some of thesewere still under sentence–a demographic deficit that leftthe penal system and the economy it supported, in somedisarray (British Parliamentary Papers, 1854).

Looking backwards, the convict indents includesufficient detail to reconstruct convict lives and familiesbefore transportation. In the case of Irish convicts, theseare among the very few systematic records in the worldproviding household composition and size. Since thenumber transported, especially of Irish birth, expandedin the 1840s and concluded in 1853, it may be possibleto reconstitute samples for the study of pre- , intra- andpost-famine households.

A long-term goal of this project (not currentlyfunded) is to link Australian World War I servicepersonnel to their children and grandchildren who weremedically examined and measured for service in WorldWar II and the VietnamWar. Using linked data from theconvicts through to Vietnam, nineteenth- and twentieth-century trends in life-course health can be explored withan unrivalled level of detail about family history,childhood and historically specific experience. In total,this presents the opportunity to explore life-courseeffects of various stressors, intergenerational effects anddifferential effects analysed according to body size,literacy and skills (human capital), family formation andtemperament. Thus, we can envision a socio-demo-graphic and epidemiological dataset that stretches overseven generations in more than 200 years.

It is the scale of this endeavour, with its ability to linkgenerations, building a composite picture of health andillness, in combination with family formation, whichmakes Founders and Survivors such an exciting project.But more than that, we believe that Founders andSurvivors will produce a legacy that will outlast theproject's funded-life. Our database will be a resource for

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this and future generations researching in a vast array ofareas. While we may predict some of these future uses,we are sure that many others will be both unpredictableand culturally significant. That is why it has been soimportant to refine our data handling strategies, for weare acutely aware that the success of our project will notbe measured merely by the published work of teammembers', but by the legacy it leaves for futureresearchers.

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the AustralianResearch Council. We would like to also acknowledgethe kind assistance of the Tasmanian Archives andHeritage Office.

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