Archivist Anna Jacobs gives a fascinating insight into how Tasmanians engaged in the search for Sir John Franklin between 1848 and 1854. Anna will bring together evidence from the Tasmanian Archives and several regional UK archives, to examine how news of Franklin (or rather, the lack thereof) filtered back to the colony from the Arctic regions through correspondence networks, far-flung friendships, and print culture. She will also explore some of the ways in which the search for the missing Erebus and Terror came to be intertwined with some of the key Tasmanian political questions of the era.
Dr. Annaliese Jacobs Claydon is an archivist at the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office. She received her PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. Her dissertation traced how the family of Sir John Franklin engaged with networks of imperial knowledge in the nineteenth century, especially indigenous intelligence during the search for Franklin’s missing Northwest Passage Expedition.