Join us for the premier screening of five short documentaries produced by the Conviction Politics project. 

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

About Conviction Politics

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

In the 18th and 19th centuries, thousands of democratic reformers, rural labour protestors, Irish freedom fighters and revolutionaries were exiled as political prisoners to Britain’s Australian colonies, where Indigenous people opposing dispossession joined them as prisoners.

As convicts, they resisted exploitation through inventive solidarity in the face of coercion, and in turn changed the political direction of the colonies. Conviction Politics traces how these convicts and their ideas helped lay the foundations of egalitarianism, political and social democracy, unions and workers rights and national self-determination in Australia and the UK.

Through archival research, data analysis and visualisation, documentary, animation and song, the project is producing an innovative suite of digital content exploring these stories and their contemporary resonance.

Explore the multimedia Conviction Politics Hub and more about the project on the Monash website.

About the panellists

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

Dr Tim Causer is senior research associate of the Bentham Project of University College London. Tim Causer's research interests include the life and thought of Jeremy Bentham, and the histories of convict transportation, crime and punishment, and colonial Australia.

Dr Katherine Roscoe is a historical criminologist with research interests centred on global mobilities, unfree labour and racial inequalities, with a particular focus on mid-nineteenth century crime and punishment in Britain and its former empire (Australia, Bermuda and Gibraltar). Dr Roscoe is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based in University of Liverpool.

Chair: Dr Agnieszka Sobocinska, Director, Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London.