Margaret Strike, PhD candidate, supervised by David Andrew Roberts, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Matthew Allen (funded by an Australian RTPS Scholarship).

This project examines the pivotal role played by magistrates in the establishment of British law and the maintenance of convict discipline in Van Diemen’s Land between 1804-1860. It is concerned in part with the peculiar legal machinery of the colony, and with key aspects of the local governance entrusted to magistrates such as the administration of the constabulary and the maintenance of good order and discipline amongst convicts.

But the core focus is on the elite individuals themselves. Who were the magistrates of Van Diemen’s Land? What were their backgrounds? What were their pursuits? How did they seek their fortunes? Who did they marry? What familial relationships did they forge? How did they, collectively and individually, deal with the vast, complicated and changing powers and responsibilities that were vested in them? What do their careers and characters tell us about elite colonial lives in the nineteenth century? 

The first phases of the project involves preliminary research into the genealogies of the magistrates to facilitate basic demographic observations and to identify familial and social links. This platforms a consideration of how magisterial behaviour and decision-making may have been influenced by familial connections and a sense of belonging to a shared and emerging social class. Simultaneously, the magistrates will be ‘located’, with their residences and workplaces identified and mapped in order to construct a geography of colonial courts, so that we might explore the spatial dimensions of magisterial work within local communities.

The research is supported by a dataset, titled The Magistrates of Van Diemen’s Land, 1804-1860: Identified and Coded, which records every individual commissioned as a Justice of the Peace in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in this period. The methodology is explained in D. A. Roberts and M. Strike, ‘Counting and Coding the Magistrates: A Report on a Project to identify the Justices of the Peace of Van Diemen’s Land, 1804-1860’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 23, 2021.