The Launceston History Society holds the John West Memorial lecture every March around the anniversary of the founding of Launceston's newspaper with Rev. John West its first editor.

This lecture is given by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, a professor of heritage and digital humanities at the University of New England and also an associate member of staff at Menzies Institute for Medical Research, University of Tasmania.

In the early 1830s there were a series of strikes, go slows, mass escapes and attacks on overseers in Notman’s gang tasked with completing a road just south of Launceston. Collectively these form the largest protest by convicts in Australia since the Castle Hill Rebellion of 1804.

It puts the turmoil within Notman’s gang into the wider context of convict transportation to Van Diemen’s Land in the early 1830s, especially between the closure of Macquarie Harbour and the opening of the Port Arthur penal colony.

Using digitisation to cross reference a mass of convict and court records, Professor Maxwell-Stewart identifies the ring leaders at the heart of this mass collective protest as well as the magistrates and other officials charged with bringing the gang to heel.

Content for this talk comes from a larger body of work co-authored with Monika Schwarz (Monash) and Michael Quinlan (UNSW).

https://launcestonhistory.org.au/