RAHS Day Lecture – Worlds of Vulnerability: Vagrancy in nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand

Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 2 July 2025 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm

Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000

Cost: Free

Event Description:

Historians have used vagrancy as a window onto historical processes, including economic processes, labour and human migration, urbanisation, and responses to poverty, such as welfare and legislation. Patterns of vulnerability were based on social difference and the politics of mobility and identity. These have become deeply entrenched in the social and cultural order over time. Using the theme of vulnerability in histories of vagrancy and the regulation of mobility helps to create a stronger relationship between law and the social institutions of the period, such as asylums, benevolent homes, immigrants’ homes, hospitals, charities and other places. This presentation describes the different aspects of the profile of those more vulnerable to police surveillance and regulation and offers a reminder of the socio-economic factors at play in creating definitions of unauthorised mobility that are also relevant in our present moment.

About the speaker:

Catharine Coleborne is a Professor of History at the University of Newcastle. Her most recent book examines the histories of colonial vagrancy across different Australian colonies and New Zealand: Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840–1910 (Bloomsbury). Her scholarly work has ranged across histories of mental illness and institutions, colonial families and health, and museums, collections and exhibitions of psychiatric histories and objects. With Dr Effie Karageorgos, she is pursuing a new history of mental health aftercare funded by the Australian Research Council. In 2025 she is a Visiting Fellow at the State Library of NSW and later in the year will be a Fellow at the National Library of Australia.