Dr Shurlee Swain is a professor at Australian Catholic University. She is a social historian with a particular interest in the history of women and children. Current projects include a history of adoption in Australia, and she is the historian chief investigator working on the development of the national Find and Connect web resource for former child migrants and Forgotten Australians.
Author email: Shurlee.Swain@acu.edu.au

Fiona Poulton completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Melbourne in 2007. She is currently in the final year of a Master of Public History at Monash University, and is working part‑time as a consulting historian. Through her work in heritage, she has become familiar with the land records held at Public Record Office Victoria (PROV). Fiona is currently working on her first commissioned history and completing a work placement at the Melbourne Museum.

Joan Hunt is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, where she served several terms on Council, partly as vice‑president and partly as convenor of the History Victoria Support Group. Her work in community history spans thirty‑seven years, from Dandenong Historical Society committee membership in 1974 to involvement in the Ballarat region since 1980.

Arthur Mitchell Fraas is the Bollinger Fellow in Library Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his doctorate in history from Duke University in 2011 with a dissertation entitled ‘“They have travailed into a wrong latitude”: the laws of England, Indian settlements, and the British imperial constitution 1726-1773’. During 2009-10 Fraas held a fellowship as reference intern in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University.

Susanne Davies is the Convenor of Legal Studies in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University. An historian by training, her teaching, research and writing interests span critical criminology, cultural studies, socio‑legal history and gender and sexuality studies. She is the co‑editor of two volumes, A nation of rogues: crime, law and punishment in colonial Australia (Melbourne University Press, 1994) and Harsh punishment: international experiences of women’s imprisonment (Northeastern University Press, Boston, 2000).

John Rogers is the co-founder and president of Friends of the Cerberus, a not for profit community group campaigning to save the breastwork monitor warship, HMVS Cerberus, in Port Phillip Bay. John has heavily researched the career ofCerberus and the other vessels and men of Victoria’s colonial naval forces. With contributions from many members of the public John created a Victorian Naval Forces database of men who served in the Victorian Naval Forces.

Charles Fahey teaches in the History Program at La Trobe University. With Richard Broome, he co-ordinates Global Migration Stories, a unit that encourages students to use the resources of Public Record Office Victoria (PROV). In recent years his research and publications have focused on the central goldfields of Victoria and on rural Victoria. He has also published widely on the history of the labour market, with particular reference to the Sunshine Harvester factory and the Harvester Judgement of 1907.

Mary Daley, in her retirement, is undertaking history research as part of a Masters Degree at La Trobe University. When learning how to work in the records at PROV, Mary found the story of the fire at Steiglitz amongst the files of capital crimes. As a fifth-generation Victorian with relatives currently living close to the tiny town of Steiglitz, and as a bushwalker who has walked in that area, Mary was intrigued. The case of arson she uncovered proved to be complex, sad and disturbing.

Dr Michele Matthews has been a local and social historian for nearly three decades since she first used correspondence held by the then Bendigo City Council for her Honours thesis. She is an ardent advocate for the use of local history records to tell Victorian and Australian history from a grassroots perspective.

Elizabeth Denny studied Chinese history and Chinese language in Melbourne and spent a year at the Beijing Language Institute in 1979. After teaching in inner‑city Melbourne, she moved to Ballarat where she has become fascinated by the local records of early Chinese communities on the goldfields.
Author email: liz.denny@prov.vic.gov.au