RAHS Day Lecture – Ill Used: A tale of two illegitimate pregnancies

Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 2 December 2026 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm

Event Location: Online only via Zoom

Cost: Free

Event Description:

This paper will examine the treatment of two convict women who, in early nineteenth-century Van Diemen’s Land, both fell pregnant out of wedlock while assigned to the settler Charles Ross Nairne at his remote farm, Glen Nairne. One of the women went onto become the first woman judicially executed on the island.

About the speaker:

Philippa Duncan is a PhD candidate in History and Creative Writing at the University of Tasmania. After two decades in journalism, political communications, and advocacy, she now turns her attention to the past, writing a historical fiction as part of her thesis on Mary McLauchlan, Van Diemen’s Land’s first murderess. Pip is the inaugural Writer in Residence at the Cascades Female Factory in South Hobart and a place-based researcher with deep roots in Lutruwita/Tasmania.