Rebecca Read, Urban Assignment: the allocation of convicts in Hobart Town, 1830 - 1835

With the advent of COVID-19, THRA was unable to hold its April meeting. However, our speaker, Rebecca Read, recorded her presentation for our SoundCloud page. Rebecca grew up in Sydney in the 1960s and early 1970s knowing very little about convicts. In late 1988, she moved to Tasmania and discovered that virtually everyone in Tasmania had at least one convict ancestor. In the early 2000s, she completed an Advanced Diploma in Local, Family and Applied History at the University of New England and, over the past twenty or so years, has helped hundreds of people in Tasmania research their family histories. In the process she developed a fascination with the remarkable Tasmanian convict archive. She graduated with an Honours degree in history in 2014, then undertook research for a PhD, submitting her thesis, 'Convict Assignment and Prosecution Risk in Van Diemen’s Land, 1830-1835' in November 2019. This presentation is based on her doctoral research.