Colonial Worlds of Vulnerability: Poverty, Vagrancy and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century - Talk by Professor Catharine Coleborne

Historians have used vagrancy as a window onto historical processes, including economic processes, labour and human migration, urbanisation, and responses to poverty.

This talk describes the different aspects of the profile of those more vulnerable to police surveillance and regulation in the colonies including poverty, age, disability and mobile families and tells the stories of some of those people arrested and prosecuted for being vagrants. It offers a reminder of the socio-economic factors at play in creating definitions of unauthorised mobility that are also relevant in our present moment.

The presentation also examines the entangled worlds of colonial Australia and New Zealand and movement between these places in the nineteenth century.

Catharine Coleborne is an Australian academic historian of illness, health and medicine, especially mental illness and institutions. Her career contributions include a focus on patients, asylum records and medical case book narratives in the archive, and interactions between families and medical personnel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

She has written about changing understandings of health and illness and has published numerous books, chapters and journal articles and her work is internationally recognised. She is currently leading an Australian Research Council project (with Dr Effie Karageorgos) focused on mental health aftercare in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, 1900 to 1960.

She is currently based at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales where she is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences. Her most recent book is Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840-1910 (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Image: ‘Here and there; or, emigration, a remedy’. Punch, London, 8 July 1848, reproduced courtesy of Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

REF: PUBL-0043-1848-15. Records/23241802