This event is organised by the Descendants of Convicts Group Inc (DOCS) together with the RHSV. Conviction Politics is an international digital history project exploring the impact of radicals and rebels transported as political convicts to their place of exile in Australia. Project leader, Associate Professor Tony Moore from Monash University, will take us through the project’s discoveries, media and exhibition, including screening a selection of short documentaries. Tony will explain how Conviction Politics overturns the orthodoxy of how we think about convict Australia. The project reveals how Australia’s first ‘unfree’ workforce resisted exploitation and subordination through inventive solidarity in the face of coercion, while a vanguard of rebels, liberal pamphleteers, industrial protestors and radical agitators changed the political direction of the Australian colonies.