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Past histories charting interactions between British healthcare and Aboriginal Australians have tended to be dominated by broad histological themes such as invasion and colonization. While such descriptions have been vital to modernization and truth telling in Australian historical discourse, this paper investigates the nineteenth century through the modern cultural lens of mental health. We reviewed primary documents, including colonial diaries, church sermons, newspaper articles, medical and burial records, letters, government documents, conference speeches and anthropological journals. Findings revealed six overlapping fields which applied British ideas about mental health to Aboriginal Australians during the nineteenth century. They included military invasion, religion, law, psychological systems, lunatic asylums, and anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in Melbourne, including the papers in this volume, has shed new light on the archaeology of this major nineteenth-century urban center. But how does Melbourne compare to other important contemporary cities, particularly those outside the British Empire? This paper compares “Marvellous Melbourne” against the “Paris of South America,” Buenos Aires, with a focus on exploring consumer behavior and transnational trade. Two case studies are considered, Casselden Place (Melbourne) and La Casa Peña (Buenos Aires) and while some differences are encountered, the overall similarity in results points to the interconnectedness of the world during the period under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Melbourne branch of the Royal Mint officially opened in 1872. Built on a site that had previously accommodated Melbourne’s original Exhibition Hall, the complex comprised the extant Administration Building and flanking Guardhouses and substantial “operative departments” to the rear. The latter were demolished in the early 1970s but recent investigations have revealed that substantial remains survive. This paper discusses our new appreciation of the Mint’s archaeology – one of an increasing number of Melbourne archaeological sites where subsurface deposits are supplementing our knowledge of places long acknowledged for the importance of their built heritage. The remains reveal important evidence relating to the minting process and responses to industrial urban air pollution in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Langlands Iron Foundry was an early and significant industrial operation in Victoria, responsible for assembling the first iron paddle steamer and making the first locomotive boiler in the colony. Remains of the foundry were uncovered in June 2014 during an archaeological program preceding development of a site in Flinders Street in Melbourne. The site was located on the remains of a garden created by John Batman, one of the two “founders” of Melbourne in 1835 and was superseded by a commercial shipping butcher in 1864. In this paper we present archaeological and historical evidence relating to the garden and iron foundry to illuminate important aspects of working life and conditions in early Melbourne. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English-speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the 'White Australia policy', minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely-reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an 'alien' race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp's view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English-speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp's articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous 'white' settler society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The introduction of the convict system in 1850 into the Western Australian (WA) economy resulted in a large injection of capital into the colony, the dissemination of which cannot be overlooked when considering the transformative effect of the convict system. This injection resulted from the purchase of goods and services by the penal system that ultimately transferred money from the British Crown into the local market. For this paper, historical and archaeological data was used to develop an understanding of the breakdown of spending by the penal system, and to consider how the circumstance of individual aspects of the penal system impacted purchasing choices, and subsequently benefitted the local market. Using artefacts recovered from two sites within Fremantle Prison, one representing institutional purchases and the other relating to a wage earner, it was possible the test the variation in economic impact of spending given institutional circumstance. By considering whether purchases represented local commodities or imports, it was possible to see how capital transferred into the local economy and how much of that spending leaked out through imports. In doing this, the analysis highlighted the varying benefit of the capital injected by the penal system related to circumstance and the value of considering the penal system as an elaborate entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first use of bone collagen stable isotope analyses for the purpose of reconstructing historical animal husbandry and trade practices in Australia. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of 51 domesticate and commensal specimens demonstrate that meats consumed at the mid to late nineteenth-century Commonwealth Block site in Melbourne derived from animals with a diverse range of isotopic signatures. Potential factors contributing to this diversity including animal trade and variability in local animal husbandry practices are discussed. From these results we suggest that stable isotope-based paleodietary reconstructions have significant potential to illuminate a variety of human-animal relations in Australia's historical period as well as other New World contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ralph Tate (1840-1901), the foundation Professor of Natural Science at the University of Adelaide, proved to be a remarkable scientist and naturalist with outstanding achievements in several fields. Tate was selected for the Chair in Adelaide, despite having no previous university experience, mainly on the recommendation of T. H. Huxley. This paper examines Tate's background in some detail and establishes that, in fact, as a respected geologist and palaeontologist with interests in conchology and botany, he was particularly well qualified to fill the post. He had had years of teaching practice, a long list of research publications and even experience in exploring new territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion and spirituality have often been neglected by historical archaeologists, in spite of the importance of religious devotion in public and private life. Recent investigation of artifacts from the Hyde Park Barracks Destitute Asylum in Sydney, Australia, however, has begun to shed new light on the role of spirituality in an institutional context. An extensive underfloor collection from the asylum includes many paper fragments from the Bible and from religious tracts, along with rosaries and devotional medals. This material suggests that while visiting clergymen and missionaries distributed large quantities of "improving" literature, the inmates expressed their own religious feelings in more personal, private ways. The archaeological and historical evidence also indicates that Catholic inmates were separated from Anglicans and others, mirroring the wider sectarian division in 19th-century Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dictionary of Scottish Architects attracts users from all over the world. In 2010 information sent from Darwin, Australia led to new research being undertaken on the life and career of the Dundee architect George Mathewson who disappeared from records in Dundee in the early 1850s and was thought to have died young: however, the information from Australia proved otherwise. Mathewson's story is linked to the history of Dundee in the nineteenth century: the growth of the town, its importance as a port and the development of its railway links. When the Dictionary of Scottish Architects became available online in 2006, noone anticipated how many times the database would be interrogated (now over seven million times) and how many professional researchers and academics, genealogists and local historians, planners, museum curators, journalists and other users from all over the world would send in new information, corrections and questions. This paper shows how an enquiry received from the other side of the world helped make sense of the fragmentary information the Dictionary previously held on one Dundee architect, George Mathewson, suggesting new lines of research and thus enabling a re-assessment of his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the Western Australian colonial authorities' attempts at defining and categorising a "politically relevant" Aboriginal population from first settlement in 1829 until 1850. Studies of colonial enumeration allow us to understand how colonial authorities viewed the spaces and boundaries of settlement and beyond, and who would be included as part of the community inhabiting that space. Enumeration of Aboriginal people in this period mirrored the Western Australian colonial authorities' conception of their sovereignty: the territory which they could effectively control was not the entire western third of the continent, as the map dictated, but rather the surveyed country, within the "limits of settlement." While other studies of colonial census making reveal enumeration as an instrument of control, this paper identifies colonial census making about Indigenous Western Australians in this period as an instance of state incapacity to govern and control. While "control" was the colonial authorities' key objective in their enumerations, the census reports reveal their inability to know the Aboriginal population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]