Rate My Professor Andrew Piper

Dr Andrew Piper is a Lecturer in Australian History and Heritage in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education at the University of New England. He earned a BA (Hons) First Class in Anthropology from the University of Otago in 1985, an MA (Hons) in Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology from the University of New England in 1992, and a PhD in Australian colonial history from the University of Tasmania in 2003. Piper commenced his professional career as an archaeologist, spending much of his early working life in the cultural heritage industry in roles such as historian, archaeologist, curator, and site manager in Africa, Australia, Micronesia, and New Zealand. He served as Conservation Manager at the Port Arthur Historic Site for six years. Piper has contributed to community and governmental organizations, including the National Trust of Australia and the Tasmanian Heritage Council, and currently coordinates UNE’s Heritage Futures Research Centre. He has also drafted policy for the Australian Labor Party.

Piper’s research focuses on the social and economic repercussions of incarceration and institutionalisation, particularly nineteenth-century charitable and pauper asylums, the history of the family in colonial Australia, and the interpretation of physical fabric as historical primary sources, including buildings, architecture, monuments, memorials, cemeteries, and grave markers. Additional interests encompass cultural heritage management, convict and frontier history in colonial Australia, and railway cultural heritage. His teaching covers Australian History, Local, Family and Applied History, and Heritage Conservation. Piper has published extensively on heritage and historical topics. Notable works include co-editing High Lean Country: Land, People and Memory in New England (Allen & Unwin, 2006) with Alan Atkinson, J.S. Ryan, and Iain Davidson, and Train Whistle Blowing: Celebrating 150 Years of Australian Railways and the Culture It Has Inspired (Heritage Futures Research Centre, 2005) with Bruce Dunnett. Key articles feature ‘The dregs of a criminal population: Impression Bay and the origins of Tasmania’s residential charitable system, c. 1839-1857’ (Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 22, 2020), ‘Admission to charitable institutions in colonial Tasmania: from individual failing to social problem’ (Tasmanian Historical Studies, 2004), and ‘A love of liberty: invalid manipulation of the colonial Tasmanian charitable institutional system’ (2008). He served as editor of Past, Present, Future (2004-2007) for the Heritage Futures Research Centre and has delivered numerous conference presentations on archaeological taphonomy, convict history, and heritage interpretation. Piper was awarded New Zealand’s 1986 Commonwealth Scholarship to Australia.