Threading Lives – Speculative Archival Research into Colonial Women Transported to Van Diemen’s Land
 

Threading Lives – Speculative Archival Research into Colonial Women Transported to Van Diemen’s Land

Kay Buttfield
University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
Doctor of Creative Arts, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland
2021
:
https://doi.org/10.25907/00105

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Threading Lives – Speculative Archival Research into Colonial Women Transported to Van Diemen’s Land23.42 MB
Thesis Embargoed Access, 05-Dec-2026
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Threading Lives - Speculative Archival Research into Colonial Women Transported to Van Diemen’s Land21.52 MB
ThesisExegesis only Open Access
Other Studies in Creative Arts and Writing Convict women Colonial Tasmania marginalised women
Unravelling the Threads is an interrogatory nonfiction narrative which promotes and shares revelations about social norms and expectations of women in the Cape Colony and Hobart in the 1830s. A companion to the artefact Threading Lives – Speculative Archival Research into Colonial Women Transported to Van Diemen’s Land, the exegesis dialogues with the creative piece using approaches that evolved through the concept of practice-led research. Methodologies such as archival investigation, immersion theory, journaling, the importance of place, family memories and memoir helped give voice to these women, their stories and their histories, while acknowledging that no story can ever fully be told or known by another. Their lives were then further understood by linking them with coincidental historical interconnections. Unravelling the Threads is a performative adjunct to the artefact, which is framed by the practice-led-research that created it: it is a metanarrative that allows questions to be answered and legitimised by reimagining the lives of colonial women in both British outposts. It allows and invites questions and understandings of how historiographic metafictional narratives can reveal women’s stories which both define the importance of place and cast intimations about the accuracy, or not, of the historical record.
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