Australian Dictionary of Biography

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Award of ADB Medal to Anne Rand for long and distinguished service (2010)

Citation

Anne Rand was one of the first generation of local graduates who in the mid 1950s advanced to higher degree research, using the resources of the recently established Tasmanian State Archives.  The outcome was an excellent thesis on ‘The assignment system of convict labour in Van Diemen’s Land’.  In the early 1960s she was Research Assistant in the History Department, University of Tasmania.  In that role she assisted much in preparatory work for the early volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in which Tasmania had substantial representation.  She was also a member of the State’s working party, one consequence being that her name joins those of only two others among official listings for both the first volumes of the Dictionary and the most recent.  This period also saw her brilliant editing of a major Vandiemonian document, Journals of the Land Commissioners of VDL

In 1988 Anne resumed association with the Dictionary as working party member and as research assistant, resigning in late 2008.  As research assistant, she used the relatively few hours of funded time to astonishing effect, gathering data on a great number of individuals and always willing to seek some additional datum.  That work has been essential in the party’s selection of entries, and will doubtless prove of continuing value to researchers.  Meanwhile Anne has continued other historical work, inter alia voluntarily preparing superb indexes to the Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers; she was also joint author of a silver-jubilee history of the University’s medical school.