The Colonial Eye 
was an Interdisciplinary Conference held at The University of Tasmania from 3-6 February 1999. Questions such as these were asked: Whose are these colonial eyes? What did they see? And as we gaze at them, how do meanings emerge?

The conference incorporated a day among the convict traces at Port Arthur, focused on colonial Australia but also included papers from scholars working in colonial studies in areas including anthropology, archaeology, art, cultural studies, cultural tourism, English and literary studies, environmental studies, family history, history, and museum studies.

Settlers and Convicts was taught through the School of English and European Languages and Literatures in 1998. The unit examined the textual construction of 'Australia' in the nineteenth-century. It looked at figures whose stories were being gathered into a collective narrative of national identity; asked how and why the interests served by the figures have changed during the period since European settlement; and considered what happened to the representations of those figures (including the indigenous people, women, the Chinese and other non-English settlers) who did not play central roles in the project of creating a definable 'Australian' identity. Follow the links below to find online resources relating to the following texts:

Barbara Baynton, Bush Studies

Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life

Lucy Frost, No Place for a Nervous Lady

Henry Lawson, The Penguin Henry Lawson: Short Stories

A unit reader which was available through the University Bookstore included extracts from poetic and journalistic accounts about the bushranger Dan Morgan, and similar supplementary material. You may like to link through to an image of "Morgan, the bushranger"* by the engraver Samuel Calvert and/or "Morgan sticking up the navvies, burning their tents, and shooting the chinaman"* (a wood-engraving by Robert Stewart) both of which are held online by the State Library of Victoria's Picture Collection. Stewart's wood-engraving relates to an incident involving Daniel Morgan and Chinese in Kyamba, New South Wales in around 1830-1865. The wood engraving was published in The illustrated Melbourne post. USE YOUR BROWSER'S BACK BUTTON TO RETURN TO THIS SITE. If you wish to SEARCH the State Library of Victoria's Picture Collection, follow this link* and select the Multimedia Catalogue.