The search for Maltese troublemakers and criminals in Australia

Yosanne Vella is an associate professor in history pedagogy in the Faculty of Education at the University of Malta. She is a history teacher trainee and she lectures on various topics on history teaching. She was recently on Sabbatical leave in Australia where she gave papers to undergraduate and Masters’ students as well as to fellow academics on ‘teaching change and continuity in history to secondary school children’ and on ’using history teaching to combat Islamophobia’. The presentations were given at Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, at Victoria University’s Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing and at the Faculty of Education of Newcastle University in New South Wales. She was the Vice-Chair of the Education and Culture Committee of NGOs at the Council of Europe up to 2014, she is one of the editors of the online textbook Historiana published by Euroclio, the European History Educators’ Network, and she is one of Euroclio’s ambassadors. She is also on the editorial board of a number of journals including Heirnet’s International History Teaching Journal. She has published various books, textbooks, papers and teaching resources on history education, as well as a number of history papers on women in Malta in the 18th century. She is the Vice-President of both the Malta History Society and of the Maltese History Teachers’ Association.

Synopsis

Sponsored by the Alfred Mizzi Foundation. This lecture describes the search by the author in the Public Records Office Victoria and in Australian newspapers for criminal activity by the Maltese. What started as a search with the objective of finding Maltese women criminals in the 19th century evolved and changed into a more general search dictated by the history and availability of the historical sources. This paper gives some background on the Maltese immigrants in Australia based on secondary sources and describes the first arrivals, the slow trickle in the 19th century and early 20th century, and the great wave of Maltese migrants in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, as well as Maltese migration to Australia today. This is followed by an explanation of how this history in turn constrained this particular study on Maltese criminals. A possible explanation is given as to why no Maltese women criminals where in fact found by the author and how non-Maltese women criminals proved to be quite interesting. Some comparison is made between the crimes of Australian non- Maltese women in the 19th century and the crimes of Maltese women in Malta in the 18th century. The first Maltese women encountered by the author in the records are mentioned, and then the paper shifts its focus to Maltese male criminals in Australia. They are small in number but they do give some indication of what Maltese male troublemakers were getting up to in early 20th century Australia. The final version of this paper ended up somewhat different from the initial idea however it is hoped that it can still make a contribution to the general history of the Maltese in Australia.

Speaker: Prof. Yosanne Vella