Alana Piper
Biographic Data
| ID | 3857072 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alana Piper |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alana |
| FAMILY NAME | Piper |
| SIGNATURE | PIPER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Technology Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9369-5862 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Historical crime and criminal justice classifications: Data and methodological considerations
This article reports on a large-scale historical criminology project to create longitudinal datasets of Australian prosecutorial data. We reflect on the decade-long process of digitization, transcription, classification, and aggregation that transformed hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscript records into open-source, machine-readable data now readily available for analysis by researchers. Secondly, we explore the possibilities of develop…
Life courses, crime and global south migrants: Intercolonial transportation in the Australian historical context
Marriage, Military, and War: Prosecuting Bigamy in Victoria, Australia 1914–1945
The Second World War saw a sharp rise in bigamy prosecutions in Australia. A variety of factors contributed to this phenomenon, from the whirlwind nature of romances contracted during wartime to increased detection resulting from investigations into military spousal support. This article explores the connections between bigamy prosecutions, war and military enlistment through archival records and media coverage of 159 cases committed for trial ac…
Citizen Social Science in the Classroom: Criminology Students’ Perceptions of Prisoner Records
Inspired by the longer established citizen science, citizen social science projects in the classroom can have positive effects on student engagement and learning outcomes. This article reports on the incorporation of a citizen social science assessment task requiring students to undertake the transcription of digitised historical prisoner records in Criminology and History courses at two Australian universities in 2020. Analysis of student respon…
Digital History
Digital history started to flourish in Australia and New Zealand in the 2000s and early 2010s. But some of this momentum has since been lost due to ageing technologies, a lack of supporting infrastructure, funding issues, discontinued projects, and limited teaching and training opportunities. This ‘state of the field’ article on digital history seeks to encourage greater reflexivity in the discipline by providing a detailed overview of the local …
Pulling out the Most Colourful Threads: Revealing and Weaving Positionality into Collaborative Life Writing
This article uses a collaboration between an academic historian and a family historian as a case study for the importance of acknowledging the role of authorial subjectivity within biographical life writing. In particular, it considers the different lenses – from feminist to familial – that can be used to view the rags-to-riches tale of Sydney fortune-teller Mary Scales (1863–1928). By foregrounding our own positionality towards the subject matte…
What is Digital History
Digital history is a field that escapes easy definition due to its incorporation of an ever-growing variety of methods, disciplines and endeavours. However, this slim volume - part of Polity's What is History series - provides a solid introduction to the terrain as it lies at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century
The Health and Medical Needs of Victoria's Older Female Prisoners, 1860–1920
Victoria M. Nagy, Alana J. Piper, The Health and Medical Needs of Victoria's Older Female Prisoners, 1860–1920, Health and History, Vol. 22, No. 1, History, Medicine, and Incarceration (2020), pp. 67-85
Bedlam at Botany Bay
Digital crowdsourcing and public understandings of the past: Citizen historians meet Criminal Characters
Criminal Characters is a research project examining both who criminals actually were, and who they were imagined to be, in order to deconstruct historical and contemporary understandings of ‘the criminal’ as a form of social identity. In particular, it aims to deepen public and academic understandings of the characteristics of historical offenders by using crowdsourcing to transcribe the detailed biographic and criminal career information held in…
I Was a Man of Honour’: Masculinities and Theft in Early Twentieth-Century Western Australia
The interrelationship between masculinity and crime has been recognised when it comes to violent or explicitly ‘gendered’ offences. The role of gender in property offending has received less attention. This article draws on letters to judges and police character reports – items that went from being intermittent to almost standard inclusions in Australian legal briefs between the 1920s and 1950s – to examine the changing ideals of masculinity evid…
Risk Factors and Pathways to Imprisonment among Incarcerated Women in Victoria, 1860–1920
Criminological studies have found that men’s and women’s pathways to imprisonment differ, with risk factors such as substance abuse, mental illness, socioeconomic circumstances and past victimisation more strongly associated with female prisoners. However, limited quantitative or longitudinal research exists on how the risk factors associated with female offending may have shifted over time. This article investigates the criminal careers and path…
Victimization Narratives and Courtroom Sexual Politics: Prosecuting Male Burglars and Female Pickpockets in Melbourne, 1860–1921
Burglary and pickpocketing were the two most prevalent forms of male and female offending, respectively, in the flourishing colonial capital of Melbourne during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using court records and newspaper accounts, this article compares the prosecution patterns and public perceptions of male burglars and female pickpockets. Both offences were associated in the Anglophone world with membership of the criminal…
Sharing the archive: Using web technologies for accessing, storing and re-using historical data
Historical data pose a variety of problems to those who seek statistically based understandings of the past. Quantitative historical analysis has been limited by researcher's reliance on rigid statistics collected by individuals or agencies, or else by researcher access to small samples of raw data. Even digital technologies by themselves have not been enough to overcome the challenges of working with manuscript sources and aligning dis-aggregate…
Us Girls Won't Put One Another Away: Relations among Melbourne's prostitute pickpockets, 1860-1920
Larceny from the person, or pickpocketing, was the most common form of indictable crime committed by female offenders in turn-of-the-century Melbourne. It was an offence particularly likely to appear within the criminal careers of recidivist female offenders. Female pickpocketing, however, was notoriously difficult to prosecute. The usual differences found in trial outcomes for men and women were exacerbated by the specific contexts in which such…
Shackled: Female Convicts at Moreton Bay, 1826-1839
Shackled: Female Convicts at Moreton Bay, 1826–1839. By Jennifer Harrison (Collins Street East, Anchor Books Australia, 2016), pp.x + 271. Twenty-three Illustrations. Three Tables. AU$34.95 (pb)
Defending the Accused: The Impact of Legal Representation on Criminal Trial Outcomes in Victoria, Australia 1861–1961
Access to legal representation by accused felons was entrenched as part of the adversarial system from the early nineteenth century, but a substantial minority of defendants remained undefended at superior court level well into the twentieth century. Using a sample of criminal trials collected across a crucial hundred-year period that saw the development of incipient legal assistance schemes, this article seeks to examine what effect the presence…
Access to Legal Representation by Criminal Defendants in Victoria, 1861–1961
Traditionally under the English legal system, prisoners charged with felonies had been denied the right to legal representation on the grounds that such assistance was superfluous, perhaps even harmful to the cause of justice.1 Jurist William Hawkins, writing in the early 18th century, declared that ‘it requires no manner of Skill to make a plain and honest Defence’, adding that the ‘artless and ingenuous Behaviour of one whose Conscience acquits…
Versatile Offending: Criminal Careers of Female Prisoners in Australia, 1860-1920
The use of longitudinal data from the criminal records of a sample of 6,042 female prisoners in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Victoria reveals limitations in the traditional method of examining criminality within specific offense categories. Investigations devoted exclusively to particular categories of women's offenses potentially obscures the extent to which women resorted to multiple forms of offending. Such versatile activity challenges c…
Book Thieves: Theft and Literary Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Australia
Book thieves were a familiar figure to the reading public of Australia and other English-speaking nations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their exploits were covered in books about books, library and medical journals, and in newspapers that reported their appearances in court, and treated them as a humorous oddity in other coverage. This article examines the historic concerns and assumptions about book thieves, as well as …
The Prosecution Project: Understanding the Changing Criminal Trial Through Digital Tools
The Prosecution Project is a large-scale digital project that aims to provide a new way of exploring the context and impact of changes in the criminal trial during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so from an elementary platform: the digitization of the court calendars of criminal trials in the higher courts in the six main Australian jurisdictions over time periods as long as 130 years. The objective is to address questions of the …
Woman's Special Enemy”: Female Enmity in Criminal Discourse during the Long Nineteenth Century
The belief that women secretly hate other women is one with a long history. This article highlights the role that idea played in the myriad of literature produced about women of the "criminal classes" from the early Victorian period through to the end of the First World War, as interest in female crime and prostitution was at its height. The trope that women are each other's worst enemies was evident in criminal discourse across transnational con…
I'll have no man”: Female families in Melbourne's criminal subcultures, 1860–1920
In recent decades, historians have produced a wealth of scholarship demonstrating the importance of the exploration of domestic contexts and familial dynamics to the development of understandings of women's historical experiences. However, the home lives of a particular group of women—those on the criminal margins of society—warrant further investigation. The study of such women challenges the hetero-orthodox assumption that women's relationships…
Theft on trial: Prosecution, conviction and sentencing patterns in colonial Victoria and Western Australia
From Ned Kelly to Waltzing Matilda, tales of thievery dominate Australia's colonial history. Yet while theft represents one of the most pervasive forms of criminal activity, it remains an under-researched area in Australian historical scholarship. This article draws on detailed inter-jurisdictional research from Victoria and Western Australia to elaborate trends in the prosecution, conviction and sentencing of theft in colonial Australia. In part…
Women's Work: The Professionalisation and Policing of Fortune-Telling in Australia
In the early twentieth century, fortune-telling was being heralded by Australian newspapers as the nation’s latest fad. It was enjoyed as a popular form of entertainment, particularly by women. For other women though, fortune-telling represented a source of income, and sometimes their sole means of support. At the same time, fortune-telling was actually a criminal offence, leaving women who practised it vulnerable to police prosecution. Yet while…
Defending the Accused: The Impact of Legal Representation on Criminal Trial Outcomes in Victoria, Australia 1861–1961
Access to legal representation by accused felons was entrenched as part of the adversarial system from the early nineteenth century, but a substantial minority of defendants remained undefended at superior court level well into the twentieth century. Using a sample of criminal trials collected across a crucial hundred-year period that saw the development of incipient legal assistance schemes, this article seeks to examine what effect the presence…
Versatile Offending: Criminal Careers of Female Prisoners in Australia, 1860-1920
The use of longitudinal data from the criminal records of a sample of 6,042 female prisoners in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Victoria reveals limitations in the traditional method of examining criminality within specific offense categories. Investigations devoted exclusively to particular categories of women's offenses potentially obscures the extent to which women resorted to multiple forms of offending. Such versatile activity challenges c…
The Prosecution Project: Understanding the Changing Criminal Trial Through Digital Tools
The Prosecution Project is a large-scale digital project that aims to provide a new way of exploring the context and impact of changes in the criminal trial during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so from an elementary platform: the digitization of the court calendars of criminal trials in the higher courts in the six main Australian jurisdictions over time periods as long as 130 years. The objective is to address questions of the …
I'll have no man”: Female families in Melbourne's criminal subcultures, 1860–1920
In recent decades, historians have produced a wealth of scholarship demonstrating the importance of the exploration of domestic contexts and familial dynamics to the development of understandings of women's historical experiences. However, the home lives of a particular group of women—those on the criminal margins of society—warrant further investigation. The study of such women challenges the hetero-orthodox assumption that women's relationships…
A growing vice’: The Truth about Brisbane girls and drunkenness in the early twentieth century
This article discusses the escalating concern about female drunkenness in early-twentieth century Brisbane. It argues that the tabloid Truth in particular created an image of the problem drinker as a teenage girl. In the process, the Truth constructed these adolescent girls or young women as if they were devoid of any personal responsibility for their drinking. It transferred the blame for this onto traditional adversaries of prevailing social va…
Digital History
Digital history started to flourish in Australia and New Zealand in the 2000s and early 2010s. But some of this momentum has since been lost due to ageing technologies, a lack of supporting infrastructure, funding issues, discontinued projects, and limited teaching and training opportunities. This ‘state of the field’ article on digital history seeks to encourage greater reflexivity in the discipline by providing a detailed overview of the local …
Victimization Narratives and Courtroom Sexual Politics: Prosecuting Male Burglars and Female Pickpockets in Melbourne, 1860–1921
Burglary and pickpocketing were the two most prevalent forms of male and female offending, respectively, in the flourishing colonial capital of Melbourne during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using court records and newspaper accounts, this article compares the prosecution patterns and public perceptions of male burglars and female pickpockets. Both offences were associated in the Anglophone world with membership of the criminal…
Sharing the archive: Using web technologies for accessing, storing and re-using historical data
Historical data pose a variety of problems to those who seek statistically based understandings of the past. Quantitative historical analysis has been limited by researcher's reliance on rigid statistics collected by individuals or agencies, or else by researcher access to small samples of raw data. Even digital technologies by themselves have not been enough to overcome the challenges of working with manuscript sources and aligning dis-aggregate…
Access to Legal Representation by Criminal Defendants in Victoria, 1861–1961
Traditionally under the English legal system, prisoners charged with felonies had been denied the right to legal representation on the grounds that such assistance was superfluous, perhaps even harmful to the cause of justice.1 Jurist William Hawkins, writing in the early 18th century, declared that ‘it requires no manner of Skill to make a plain and honest Defence’, adding that the ‘artless and ingenuous Behaviour of one whose Conscience acquits…
A menace and an evil’ Fortune-telling in Australia, 1900–1918
Fortune-telling was hugely popular in Australia in the early 1900s. Frequently employed as entertainers at society and charity events, fortunetellers across the country plied their trade from shops, street-stalls, private homes or travelling sideshows, and advertised their businesses in the daily press. Yet fortune-telling was also a criminal practice under legislation inherited from England. Up until the early twentieth century, however, it seem…
I go out Worse Every Time’ Connections and Corruption in a Female Prison
‘When they are all thrown together it is impossible to improve them’, declared turnkey Sarah Ann Nixon of the female prisoners at the Toowoomba Gaol during the 1887 inquiry into Queensland prisons. Nixon was articulating a paradox that authorities struggled with throughout the Victorian era. During the late nineteenth century, a variety of institutions were established to contain female disorderliness and effect the reform of criminal and immoral…
A growing vice’: The Truth about Brisbane girls and drunkenness in the early twentieth century
This article discusses the escalating concern about female drunkenness in early-twentieth century Brisbane. It argues that the tabloid Truth in particular created an image of the problem drinker as a teenage girl. In the process, the Truth constructed these adolescent girls or young women as if they were devoid of any personal responsibility for their drinking. It transferred the blame for this onto traditional adversaries of prevailing social va…
Film Review
I go out Worse Every Time’ Connections and Corruption in a Female Prison
‘When they are all thrown together it is impossible to improve them’, declared turnkey Sarah Ann Nixon of the female prisoners at the Toowoomba Gaol during the 1887 inquiry into Queensland prisons. Nixon was articulating a paradox that authorities struggled with throughout the Victorian era. During the late nineteenth century, a variety of institutions were established to contain female disorderliness and effect the reform of criminal and immoral…
Crime Over Time: Temporal Perspectives on Crime and Punishment in Australia
Crime Over Time: Temporal Perspectives on Crime and Punishment in Australia, edited by Robyn Lincoln and Shirleene Robinson, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010, 260 pp., $59.99 (hardback
A menace and an evil’ Fortune-telling in Australia, 1900–1918
Fortune-telling was hugely popular in Australia in the early 1900s. Frequently employed as entertainers at society and charity events, fortunetellers across the country plied their trade from shops, street-stalls, private homes or travelling sideshows, and advertised their businesses in the daily press. Yet fortune-telling was also a criminal practice under legislation inherited from England. Up until the early twentieth century, however, it seem…
Looking Flash: Disreputable Women's Dress and 'Modernity', 1870-1910
The cant word ‘flash’ has been used in Australia and other parts of the English-speaking world since the late eighteenth century. When it was applied to women, it referred to sexual and criminal knowledge and an interest in flamboyant clothes. This continued to be the case in the years between 1870 and 1910, the period dealt with in this article. Using Australian examples, we explore the flash street style affected by disreputable women: prostitu…
I'll have no man”: Female families in Melbourne's criminal subcultures, 1860–1920
In recent decades, historians have produced a wealth of scholarship demonstrating the importance of the exploration of domestic contexts and familial dynamics to the development of understandings of women's historical experiences. However, the home lives of a particular group of women—those on the criminal margins of society—warrant further investigation. The study of such women challenges the hetero-orthodox assumption that women's relationships…
Theft on trial: Prosecution, conviction and sentencing patterns in colonial Victoria and Western Australia
From Ned Kelly to Waltzing Matilda, tales of thievery dominate Australia's colonial history. Yet while theft represents one of the most pervasive forms of criminal activity, it remains an under-researched area in Australian historical scholarship. This article draws on detailed inter-jurisdictional research from Victoria and Western Australia to elaborate trends in the prosecution, conviction and sentencing of theft in colonial Australia. In part…
Women's Work: The Professionalisation and Policing of Fortune-Telling in Australia
In the early twentieth century, fortune-telling was being heralded by Australian newspapers as the nation’s latest fad. It was enjoyed as a popular form of entertainment, particularly by women. For other women though, fortune-telling represented a source of income, and sometimes their sole means of support. At the same time, fortune-telling was actually a criminal offence, leaving women who practised it vulnerable to police prosecution. Yet while…
Book Thieves: Theft and Literary Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Australia
Book thieves were a familiar figure to the reading public of Australia and other English-speaking nations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their exploits were covered in books about books, library and medical journals, and in newspapers that reported their appearances in court, and treated them as a humorous oddity in other coverage. This article examines the historic concerns and assumptions about book thieves, as well as …
The Prosecution Project: Understanding the Changing Criminal Trial Through Digital Tools
The Prosecution Project is a large-scale digital project that aims to provide a new way of exploring the context and impact of changes in the criminal trial during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so from an elementary platform: the digitization of the court calendars of criminal trials in the higher courts in the six main Australian jurisdictions over time periods as long as 130 years. The objective is to address questions of the …
Woman's Special Enemy”: Female Enmity in Criminal Discourse during the Long Nineteenth Century
The belief that women secretly hate other women is one with a long history. This article highlights the role that idea played in the myriad of literature produced about women of the "criminal classes" from the early Victorian period through to the end of the First World War, as interest in female crime and prostitution was at its height. The trope that women are each other's worst enemies was evident in criminal discourse across transnational con…
Shackled: Female Convicts at Moreton Bay, 1826-1839
Shackled: Female Convicts at Moreton Bay, 1826–1839. By Jennifer Harrison (Collins Street East, Anchor Books Australia, 2016), pp.x + 271. Twenty-three Illustrations. Three Tables. AU$34.95 (pb)
Defending the Accused: The Impact of Legal Representation on Criminal Trial Outcomes in Victoria, Australia 1861–1961
Access to legal representation by accused felons was entrenched as part of the adversarial system from the early nineteenth century, but a substantial minority of defendants remained undefended at superior court level well into the twentieth century. Using a sample of criminal trials collected across a crucial hundred-year period that saw the development of incipient legal assistance schemes, this article seeks to examine what effect the presence…
Access to Legal Representation by Criminal Defendants in Victoria, 1861–1961
Traditionally under the English legal system, prisoners charged with felonies had been denied the right to legal representation on the grounds that such assistance was superfluous, perhaps even harmful to the cause of justice.1 Jurist William Hawkins, writing in the early 18th century, declared that ‘it requires no manner of Skill to make a plain and honest Defence’, adding that the ‘artless and ingenuous Behaviour of one whose Conscience acquits…
Versatile Offending: Criminal Careers of Female Prisoners in Australia, 1860-1920
The use of longitudinal data from the criminal records of a sample of 6,042 female prisoners in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Victoria reveals limitations in the traditional method of examining criminality within specific offense categories. Investigations devoted exclusively to particular categories of women's offenses potentially obscures the extent to which women resorted to multiple forms of offending. Such versatile activity challenges c…
Risk Factors and Pathways to Imprisonment among Incarcerated Women in Victoria, 1860–1920
Criminological studies have found that men’s and women’s pathways to imprisonment differ, with risk factors such as substance abuse, mental illness, socioeconomic circumstances and past victimisation more strongly associated with female prisoners. However, limited quantitative or longitudinal research exists on how the risk factors associated with female offending may have shifted over time. This article investigates the criminal careers and path…
Victimization Narratives and Courtroom Sexual Politics: Prosecuting Male Burglars and Female Pickpockets in Melbourne, 1860–1921
Burglary and pickpocketing were the two most prevalent forms of male and female offending, respectively, in the flourishing colonial capital of Melbourne during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using court records and newspaper accounts, this article compares the prosecution patterns and public perceptions of male burglars and female pickpockets. Both offences were associated in the Anglophone world with membership of the criminal…
Sharing the archive: Using web technologies for accessing, storing and re-using historical data
Historical data pose a variety of problems to those who seek statistically based understandings of the past. Quantitative historical analysis has been limited by researcher's reliance on rigid statistics collected by individuals or agencies, or else by researcher access to small samples of raw data. Even digital technologies by themselves have not been enough to overcome the challenges of working with manuscript sources and aligning dis-aggregate…
Us Girls Won't Put One Another Away: Relations among Melbourne's prostitute pickpockets, 1860-1920
Larceny from the person, or pickpocketing, was the most common form of indictable crime committed by female offenders in turn-of-the-century Melbourne. It was an offence particularly likely to appear within the criminal careers of recidivist female offenders. Female pickpocketing, however, was notoriously difficult to prosecute. The usual differences found in trial outcomes for men and women were exacerbated by the specific contexts in which such…
The Health and Medical Needs of Victoria's Older Female Prisoners, 1860–1920
Victoria M. Nagy, Alana J. Piper, The Health and Medical Needs of Victoria's Older Female Prisoners, 1860–1920, Health and History, Vol. 22, No. 1, History, Medicine, and Incarceration (2020), pp. 67-85
Bedlam at Botany Bay
Digital crowdsourcing and public understandings of the past: Citizen historians meet Criminal Characters
Criminal Characters is a research project examining both who criminals actually were, and who they were imagined to be, in order to deconstruct historical and contemporary understandings of ‘the criminal’ as a form of social identity. In particular, it aims to deepen public and academic understandings of the characteristics of historical offenders by using crowdsourcing to transcribe the detailed biographic and criminal career information held in…
I Was a Man of Honour’: Masculinities and Theft in Early Twentieth-Century Western Australia
The interrelationship between masculinity and crime has been recognised when it comes to violent or explicitly ‘gendered’ offences. The role of gender in property offending has received less attention. This article draws on letters to judges and police character reports – items that went from being intermittent to almost standard inclusions in Australian legal briefs between the 1920s and 1950s – to examine the changing ideals of masculinity evid…
What is Digital History
Digital history is a field that escapes easy definition due to its incorporation of an ever-growing variety of methods, disciplines and endeavours. However, this slim volume - part of Polity's What is History series - provides a solid introduction to the terrain as it lies at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (20 works) · Criminology (18 works) · History (17 works) · Australian History and Society (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · History (9 works) · Psychology (9 works)