Richard Pennell studied Arabic and Spanish and Islamic History in Britain. He has taught the history of the Middle East and North Africa at the University of Melbourne since 1997, after earlier posts in Morocco, Libya, Turkey, Singapore and Kenya. He has published widely on North African history, most recently Banning Islamic books in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2011). This current article is part of a long research interest in cross-cultural legal trials, a subject on which he has already published several articles.

He studied History and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne, and worked on the university’s expedition to the Neo‑Assyrian (Iron Age) site of Tell Ahmar in Syria from 1990 to 1993. He completed his Masters in Archaeology in 1995, and has been employed at Heritage Victoria since 1997. In 2009 he directed the excavation of a mass grave at the former Pentridge prison.

Jeremy Smith is Heritage Victoria’s senior archaeologist. He studied History and Archaeology at the University of Melbourne, and worked on the university’s expedition to the Neo‑Assyrian (Iron Age) site of Tell Ahmar in Syria from 1990 to 1993. He completed his Masters in Archaeology in 1995, and has been employed at Heritage Victoria since 1997. In 2009 he directed the excavation of a mass grave at the former Pentridge prison.

Sebastian is the Editor of Provenance, the refereed journal of Public Record Office Victoria, an interdisciplinary journal which publishes articles based on archival research in history, cultural heritage and the interpretation of archival collections. He has been working professionally as an editor since 1995, and joined the Victorian Society of Editors in 2001, and is currently a professional member of the society. Sebastian Gurciullo has been the General Editor of the Australian Society of Archivists' refereed journal,Archives and Manuscripts, since 2009.

Brett Wright is an undergraduate student majoring in history at the University of Melbourne. He is a former journalist who worked in police rounds for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in the 1980s. In 2010 he won the Mary O’Donoghue Prize for Irish Studies, awarded by the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, for an essay on the Fenians and Irish terrorism. Copyright © Brett Wright

Carolyn Woolman is a former secondary school and TAFE history teacher who in 2011 completed a Masters in history at La Trobe University. Her thesis examined the socio‑economic mobility and civic involvement of a Scottish miner on the central goldfields of Victoria, concentrating on the (Maldon) Tarrangower field. She has a strong interest in regional history, and is a volunteer indexer and researcher for the Maldon Museum and Archives Association.

Author email: cmwoolman@gmail.com

Dr Felicity Jensz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ at the Westfälische Wilhelms‑Universität Münster, Germany and an Honorary Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, where she obtained her PhD. Her research focuses upon the relationships between missionaries, Indigenous peoples and governments in the nineteenth‑century British colonial world.

Paul Macgregor is an historian who is the convenor of the Melbourne Chinese Studies Group, and was the curator of Melbourne’s Museum of Chinese Australian History from 1990 to 2005. He is the editor of Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific (1995), and joint editor of both Chinese in Oceania (2002) and After the Rush: regulation, participation and Chinese communities in Australia 1860-1940 (2004).