Reflecting on the Landscapes of Production and Punishment Project

This special volume of the Journal of Australian Colonial History presents work produced under the aegis of the 2017-2020 Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project, Landscapes of Production and Punishment: The Tasman Peninsula 1830-1877. The project brought together a team of historians, archaeologists and criminologists from the Universities of New England (Martin Gibbs, David Andrew Roberts and Richard Tuffin), Tasmania (Hamish Maxwell-Stewart) and Liverpool (Barry Godfrey), with industry partners at the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority (David Roe, Jody Steele and Susan Hood).1 Over the last two decades this core group has worked together in various collaborative combinations, at the same time as individually having their own track record in convict research. A chief inspiration for the project was the possibility of collaborating as a multi-disciplinary group to develop new questions, approaches, methods and interpretation which might allow us to better understand the convict past.