Crime Scene

This work turns the back room at Articulate Project Space into a crime scene standing for the tiny town of Longford (on what were called the Norfolk Plains) in northern Tasmania, itself a colonial crime scene in which some of the artists’ ancestors were entangled in different ways and to different ends. It comprises four short films each addressing a particular crime story from the colonial period.

The European invasion of lutruwita brought about the dispossession of Traditional Owners from their land, the destruction of local ecologies and the devastation of the local population. It created a frontier world of hardship and shortage where intercultural violence meshed with the violence of the English class system. Not all the occupiers were willing migrants to the island. Many of the earliest European arrivals in 1813 were reluctant evacuees from the first penal settlement on Norfolk Island: a mix of ‘free’ settlers, convicts and soldiers in which men massively outnumbered women and whose relationships with each other were already largely defined by the violent imposition of English law and its regime of corporal and capital punishment. This regime was sometimes violently resisted as escapees (both convicts and free men) took up bushranging and robbery as a way of life, but a culture of everyday violence was also fuelled by alcohol, as the extraordinarily high number of European deaths from drunken drownings, accidents, brawls and murders makes clear.

European numbers were massively swelled during the 1820s by the arrival of wave after wave of an opportunist class seeking land and money, and the many more convicts whose labour would support them. The new occupiers and their convict labourers clashed violently with Traditional Owners defending their land and resources, and fighting for food and survival.

This made Longford and its surrounds a hotspot for the crimes of the colonial invasion, and a rich source for the understanding of what happened and its impacts into the present, as well as a key site of acknowledgement of trauma and of active truth-telling.

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This project is supported by
Northern Midlands Council, University of Tasmania and the Bundanon Trust.