Mark Finnane

Griffith University, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Faculty Member

Griffith University, School of Humanities, Faculty Member

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I am Professor of History in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science and a researcher in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. Previously I was Dean of Humanities (1993-6) and Dean of Graduate Studies (2000-2006) at Griffith. I was a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (CEPS) (2007-14) including Director of CEPS in 2009. I am a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (2001), and of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (2013).

My doctoral research on mental illness and mental hospitals in post-Famine Ireland (ANU, 1979) is the foundation for my later work on the history of policing, punishment and criminal justice. My books include Insanity and the Insane in Post-Famine Ireland (1981 and 2003), Police and Government: Histories of Policing in Australia (1994), Punishment in Australian Society (1997), When Police Unionise: the Politics of Law and Order in Australia (2002), JV Barry: a Life(2007) and most recently (with Heather Douglas) Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty after Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), a study of the criminal law’s response to Aboriginal crimes of violence over the last two centuries.

In 2013 I was awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship (2013-18) to research the history of prosecution and the criminal trial in Australia. This enabled the Laureate Fellowship research team to develop the Prosecution Project, which is building a rich, archive-based resource for exploring the changing patterns of policing and prosecution of criminal offending in Australia since the late eighteenth century. The project continues - it is a research-generated database, with support from researchers as well as citizen volunteers.
See https://prosecutionproject.griffith.edu.au/

Currently I am also Director of the Harry Gentle Resource Centre, at Griffith University, established with the support of a bequest from the estate of the late Harry Gentle, and dedicated to the study of the peoples and lands of
Australia, initially focusing on early 19th century Queensland.
see https://harrygentle.griffith.edu.au/
Phone: +61737351032
Address: Griffith Criminology Institute, Griffith University, Mt Gravatt campus, Qld 4122 Australia

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Articles and book chapters by Mark Finnane

Speculating about genocide: The Queensland frontier 1859–1897

by Jonathan Richards and Mark Finnane

Asia_Pacific Economic History Review, 2024

In the colonisation of Queensland, Australia it is commonly accepted that large numbers of Indige... more In the colonisation of Queensland, Australia it is commonly accepted that large numbers of Indigenous people were killed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Calculations of violent mortality have recently been revised radically upwards. We suggest that the methodology deployed in these new studies is unreliable, reflecting errors in counting and calculation, as well as underestimating the selection bias of the samples. We caution against projecting aggregate violent mortality where the underlying data is so imperfect and emphasise the value of more detailed local and regional studies to inform better understanding of colonisation's impact on First Peoples.

'Upholding the Cause of Civilization': The Australian Death Penalty in War and Colonialism

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2022

The abolition of the death penalty in Queensland in 1922 was the first in Australian jurisdiction... more The abolition of the death penalty in Queensland in 1922 was the first in Australian jurisdictions, and the first in the British Empire. However, the legacy of the Queensland death penalty lingered in Australian colonial territories. This article considers a variety of practices in which the death penalty was addressed by Australian decision-makers during the first half of the 20th century. These include the exemption of Australian soldiers from execution in World War I, use of the death penalty in colonial Papua and the Mandate Territory of New Guinea, hanging as a weapon of war in
the colonial territories, and the retrieval of the death penalty for the punishment of war crimes. In these histories, we see not only that the Queensland death penalty lived on in other contexts but also that ideological and political preferences for abolition remained vulnerable to the sway of other historical forces of war and security.

Mark Finnane

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