Books & edited collections by Alana J Piper
In 2015, the Australian federal government proclaimed that violence against women had become a na... more In 2015, the Australian federal government proclaimed that violence against women had become a national crisis. Despite widespread social and economic advances in the status of women since the 1970s, including growing awareness and action around gender violence, its prevalence remains alarming. A third of all women in Australia have been assaulted physically; a fifth of all women have been assaulted sexually. Intimate partner violence is significantly more prevalent in Australia than in Western Europe or North America. One woman each week is murdered by an intimate partner, and recent research suggests that nearly forty per cent of all women who suicide have a history of domestic or family violence. Domestic violence is a precipitating factor in a third of all homelessness. The resulting strain on government services and lost productivity means that family violence has been estimated as costing the Australian economy around $13.6 billion a year. The histories presented in this collection indicate exactly where these violent behaviours come from and how they have been rationalised over time, offering an important resource for addressing what amounts to a widespread, persistent, and urgent social problem.
This volume of fourteen papers explores the fascinating history of disease in Brisbane and its su... more This volume of fourteen papers explores the fascinating history of disease in Brisbane and its surrounded, and in particular explores the social panics and controversies that arose from urban contagions and attempts to cure them.
Articles & book chapters by Alana J Piper
Teaching History - Journal of the History Teachers’ Association of NSW, 2024
Women’s Criminalisation and Offending in Australia and New Zealand, 2024
Underworld is a contested term; a key argument of this chapter is that it is a term that elides e... more Underworld is a contested term; a key argument of this chapter is that it is a term that elides easy definition, or a fixed criteria as to whom belongs to it. Historically, the underworld was considered a social and spatial milieu in which individuals not only committed crimes, but adopted the identity of criminals. In order to tease out the types of factors that were seen as signifiers of such an identity, this chapter offers a brief tour of Melbourne’s historical underworlds. In doing so, it follows in the footsteps of many late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century contemporaries, who explored these subcultures vicariously through the writings of journalists or social investigators, or sought to experience Melbourne’s less salubrious areas for themselves, sometimes with a policeman to act as tour guide. Such explorations might take visitors to an opium den in Little Bourke Street’s Chinese Quarter, where Asian and European alike were described indulging the habit; to a low assignation-house in Little Lon where for a few shillings you could spend time with a companion picked up in the surrounding streets; to nearby Lonsdale Street, where Madame Brussels’ more upmarket brothel offered piano-playing to accompany the debauchery; to a slum in Fitzroy where thirteen people shared one room, whiling away their nights by heavy drinking; or to the law courts and gaol cells, where the inhabitants of the former locations often ended up.
Policing Women: Histories of the Western World, 1800 to 1950, 2023
This chapter explores recent research trends and questions that have emerged in regards to how Au... more This chapter explores recent research trends and questions that have emerged in regards to how Australian women have historically been policed. Using as a springboard the most substantive work on the policing of women in Australia so far - Judith Allen’s seminal 1990 monograph Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880 - three important issues that have started to receive more attention from researchers are identified: the policing of offences not explicitly “gendered”; the policing of women across different race and class backgrounds; and the use of more data-driven and life-course approaches to understanding women’s contacts with police. The importance of these research trajectories are argued for by drawing on a wide range of source material, including large-scale quantitative data made available by recent digitisation projects, as well as qualitative sources such as police memoirs, correspondence, and newspaper articles. In particular, the chapter demonstrates how new research on these topics provides support but also clarifications to Allen’s influential thesis that the low representation of women in official crime figures was the result of selective policing influenced by the connection of women’s crimes to the historically secretive world of sexual intimacy.
A Global History of Crime and Punishment in the Age of Empire, 2023
The nineteenth century saw a plethora of cultural representations of criminals and criminality in... more The nineteenth century saw a plethora of cultural representations of criminals and criminality in Britain and its colonies. Newspapers, memoirs, autobiographies, scientific and pseudo-scientific treatises, and writings from new experts such as police detectives and social reformers expressed consternation and fascination with criminality. These writings presented various theories on crime and criminality’s prevalence in society, its causes, and its challenges. Many authors proposed that criminals were distinguishable from the regular population. The criminal was ‘knowable’ in various ways: distinct in their bodies, background and behaviour from other people. This body of thinking, however, rested uneasily with other aspects of criminal theories that were popular at the time. It was also postulated that criminals were deceitful, could conceal their identities, and were thus unknowable and outwardly unrecognisable. And further, some thought criminality was not a definite state, but one capable of change through the reformative possibilities offered by the new penal state. In our chapter we analyse the relationship between these contrasting strands of nineteenth-century thought on criminal cultures, examining the known, unknown and transformable criminal in nineteenth-century thought.
My Darlinghurst. Edited by Anna Clark, Gabriella Kemmis, Tamson Pietsch. Published by NewSouth., 2023
Australian Historical Studies, 2023
Digital history started to flourish in Australia and New Zealand in the 2000s and early 2010s. Bu... more Digital history started to flourish in Australia and New Zealand in the 2000s and early 2010s. But some of this momentum has since been lost due to ageing technologies, a lack of supporting infrastructure, funding issues, discontinued projects, and limited teaching and training opportunities. This 'state of the field' article on digital history seeks to encourage greater reflexivity in the discipline by providing a detailed overview of the local context. It highlights some of the longstanding projects that continue to dominate the digital history landscape, while also exploring newly emerging innovations, opportunities and challenges. Examining such topics as infrastructure and tool development, digital archives and repositories, big history, public history, digital methods, and teaching, the authors conclude that additional investment is required to support progress in the field, and to ensure that past projects and data remain accessible into the future.
Journal of Family History, 2023
The Second World War saw a sharp rise in bigamy prosecutions in Australia. A variety of factors c... more The Second World War saw a sharp rise in bigamy prosecutions in Australia. A variety of factors contributed to this phenomenon, from the whirlwind nature of romances contracted during wartime to increased detection resulting from investigations into military spousal support. This article explores the connections between bigamy prosecutions, war and military enlistment through archival records and media coverage of 159 cases committed for trial across 1914 to 1945 that involved active or returned servicemen as either bigamy defendants or victims of bigamous spouses. These cases also reveal shifting attitudes towards and experiences of bigamy, marriage and gender in twentieth-century Australia.
International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2023
Crime history was a pioneer in the digital arena, democratising access to the past by engaging la... more Crime history was a pioneer in the digital arena, democratising access to the past by engaging large public and academic audiences with primary datasets online. This article traces the evolution of digital crime history from 2003 to 2021 in the United Kingdom and Australia. It charts a shift from catering to a passive audience towards projects that actively engage public audiences through crowdsourced transcriptions, interactive data visualisations and other aural, visual and multimedia forms. It has never been easier to access these nations' criminal pasts online, but we must pause to reflect on what the aims of public engagement are. What kinds of digital public pedagogy do we want to build, and how can they be critical, reflective and widely representative? We conclude by considering the challenges to this endeavour, including what roles academics and commercial gatekeepers might play, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the uneven geographies of digitisation within the Southern Hemisphere.
Life Writing, 2022
This article uses a collaboration between an academic historian and a family historian as a case ... more This article uses a collaboration between an academic historian and a family historian as a case study for the importance of acknowledging the role of authorial subjectivity within biographical life writing. In particular, it considers the different lensesfrom feminist to familial-that can be used to view the rags-to-riches tale of Sydney fortuneteller Mary Scales (1863-1928). By foregrounding our own positionality towards the subject matter our hope is not to avoid subjectivity, but rather expose its influence in shaping our readings of the historical sources through which Mary's life can be (partially) known.
A History of Crime in Australia: Australian Underworlds, 2023
In 1887 an inquiry into Queensland's prison system reflected on the difference between the prevai... more In 1887 an inquiry into Queensland's prison system reflected on the difference between the prevailing conception of crime as the province of a distinct criminal class, and the ordinariness of most of the offenders that entered the colony's gaols, observing that: Criminal population is here used in its widest signification as embracing all persons who have brought themselves within the grasp of the police or prison authorities. These may not, and very probably do not, all come within the category of persons making a profession of crime; the majority, in all likelihood, are the victims of a sudden accession of passion, a momentary succumbing to strong temptation, a temporary lapse from an honest and upright course of life.1 Of Queensland's women prisoners it was stated that while repeat offending among them was especially high, most of these recidivists could be classed as 'confirmed drunkards rather than professional criminals'.2
The Cambridge Legal History of Australia, 2022
Journal of Criminal Justice Education , 2023
Inspired by the longer established citizen science, citizen social science projects in the classr... more Inspired by the longer established citizen science, citizen social science projects in the classroom can have positive effects on student engagement and learning outcomes. This article reports on the incorporation of a citizen social science assessment task requiring students to undertake the transcription of digitised historical prisoner records in Criminology and History courses at two Australian universities in 2020. Analysis of student responses (Criminology n = 42 and History n = 6) found that students were highly engaged by the exercise and gained new insights into change in criminal justice systems, the impact of social inequality on criminalisation and understandings of offender motivation. We conclude that the incorporation of citizen social science into the criminology classroom can lead to significant benefits in terms of student engagement, deep learning and enhancing the teaching-research nexus.
Australian Historical Studies 51, no.3 (2020): 282-298., 2020
The interrelationship between masculinity and crime has been recognised when it comes to violent ... more The interrelationship between masculinity and crime has been recognised when it comes to violent or explicitly ‘gendered’ offences. The role of gender in property offending has received less attention. This article draws on letters to judges and police character reports – items that went from being intermittent to almost standard inclusions in Australian legal briefs between the 1920s and 1950s – to examine the changing ideals of masculinity evident in men’s attempts to contextualise their property offending. These sources demonstrate that the conceptions of masculinity that men expressed were structured in relation to a range of changing social factors, from the evolution of the Australian economy and family unit to the psychological impact of war on the nation’s men. It will be argued that three models of masculinity – the tough man, working man and family man – influenced the ways in which male thieves presented themselves to Australian courts across the interwar period.
Making Histories, Paul Ashton, Tanya Evans and Paula Hamilton eds. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. 199-212., 2020
Health & History , 2020
Investigations of women's offending have, in historical as well as criminological literature, byp... more Investigations of women's offending have, in historical as well as criminological literature, bypassed women who are labelled as "old". While female offenders have traditionally been a blind spot of the criminal justice system, especially prisons, older women are victims of "double invisibility"-not only their sex but their age has rendered them invisible to authorities and the public as offenders. With prisons being built with healthy, young men in mind (which young women may have been able to navigate), the physical health and medical needs of older incarcerated women was ignored, and this has continued to today. Using the Central Register of Female Prisoners from Victoria across a six-decade period from 1860 to 1920, this paper presents an analysis of the 684 prison records of women who first entered the prison system after fifty years of age and considers the physical and mental health issues faced by this prisoner cohort and responses from state and criminal justice authorities when dealing with older women's health needs and issues. We argue that feminist historical criminology offers an opportunity to shine light on those women who have often been invisible in historical and contemporary prison policies and concerns.
History Australia, 2020
Criminal Characters is a research project examining both who criminals actually were, and who the... more Criminal Characters is a research project examining both who criminals actually were, and who they have been imagined to be, in order to deconstruct historical and contemporary understandings of ‘the criminal’ as a form of social identity. In particular, it aims to deepen public and academic understandings of the characteristics of historical offenders by using crowdsourcing to transcribe the detailed biographic and criminal career information held in Victoria’s prison registers from the 1850s to 1940s. This paper will use Criminal Characters as a case study for discussing the challenges and opportunities presented by engaging public volunteers to perform research tasks. It will question the degree that the terms ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘citizen science’ can be considered interchangeable, and how digital history projects can be designed to incorporate crowdsourcing in ways that facilitate volunteers becoming ‘citizen historians’ who gain greater historical literacy as a result of their contributions. The benefits of such collaborative processes and knowledge exchange for criminal justice history will be explored.
History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and Praxis, 2020
This chapter explores how feminist historical analyses are understood in a post-truth framework, ... more This chapter explores how feminist historical analyses are understood in a post-truth framework, with a particular focus on gender violence. Given that gender violence – and gender inequality more generally – is rooted in pervasively accepted societal myths, feminists and feminist historians have long been confronted with the challenge of how to overcome ideas that are underpinned by emotional rather than evidence-based understandings. Furthermore, the tendency to dismiss feminist knowledge production about gender violence as mere myth has long preceded the post-truth age. Current modes of history, such as quantitative and digital approaches, can reinforce feminist interpretations of the past yet themselves remain open to challenges. How, then, do the politics of believing women relate to gendered approaches to truth and post-truth for historians?
Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914, 2020
Employing a mixed-method approach to quantitative data from the Queensland Police Gazette and qua... more Employing a mixed-method approach to quantitative data from the Queensland Police Gazette and qualitative evidence from newspaper archives and government reviews of women’s gaols, this chapter studies women’s imprisonment in Queensland, Australia, at the end of the nineteenth century. It describes the profiles of men and women committed to prison in Queensland from 1880–1899, and the extent to which men and women recidivated. In spite of a number of methodological caveats, women were more likely to be (chronic) recidivists than men during the late nineteenth century in Queensland. This chapter argues that this can be explained in terms of their different social and economic disadvantages and vulnerabilities, related to their stigmatization, policing and institutionalization.
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Books & edited collections by Alana J Piper
Articles & book chapters by Alana J Piper
The events of the First World War drew renewed attention to the practice. The uncertainty of wartime meant more people than ever wanted a glimpse of the future, which in turn led to an increased number of people offering such omniscience – for a price. According to Truth, the war had proved ‘almost as great a windfall to fortunetellers’ as it had ‘to the food profiteers and munition-makers’. The vitriol directed against fortune-tellers for such profiteering went deeper than a simple concern about protecting families left on the homefront. In various ways, the figure of the fortune-teller was constructed as the antithesis of the national values being defended overseas, as well as of the image of the ideal citizen that the war was helping to shape. As a result, 1917 would see a nation-wide crackdown against fortune-tellers, one undertaken at the urging of Prime Minister Billy Hughes himself.