How do you build a successful history research group?

Notes from the creation of the St Helena Island Community

Setting up a new organisation is a daunting prospect. We start with lofty ambitions and unending passion for the subject matter we have as our focus. But the journey is often fraught as we try to find like-minded people, resources, funds and an audience to share our information and stories. Today’s blog shares the winding, inspiring and surprising journey I travelled once I made a decision to create a community focused on Moreton Bay’s unique St Helena Island and it’s prison establishment.

Setting up ‘The St Helena Island Community’…

The first time I set foot on the rich, red soil of St Helena Island in Moreton Bay, Q’ld, I knew I was hooked. For the next 20 years, I did as many roles as I could – environmental educator, ranger, interpreter, museum creator, tour guide trainer – all with the aim of learning and sharing the story of this fascinating place. But as my knowledge of the history of the island grew exponentially, so too did the awareness of the seismic gaps in the known history of St Helena Island. We were telling a narrow, limited version of St Helena’s rich history, one that had not changed for the last 80 years. Where was the story of women? Minority cultures? This spawned the birth of ‘The St Helena Island Community’ (SHIC) in 2018, with the intention of gathering like-minded people together to research all aspects of St Helena’s history.

Setting some lofty goals:

1. A Factual History: Establish an accurate, detailed, holistic history of St Helena that encompasses all St Helena’s histories, not just the prison. A priority has been to source this from original documents to ensure accuracy and debunk long-held myths.
2. Documentation and Digitisation: There has been a lack of centralised, accessible documentation relating to St Helena Island, no digital information and no searchable digital database to store and analyse the data. We aim to change that.
3. Interpretation: A story not shared remains hidden and unknown. Changing the known story of St Helena Island meant sharing new knowledge to new audiences wherever possible and through a wide variety of delivery platforms, both in-person and via digital media.

Finding the right team with the right expertise

My previous work and connections as a Q’ld Parks & Wildlife Service Interpretation officer and an environmental educator meant that I had developed a deep and extensive knowledge of St Helena’s history. I had been researching St Helena information for many years, storing it, of course, on my own home computer. What began as attempts to fill information gaps became a desire to expand my research and share it widely. As a writer and a born communicator, a website and blog posts became a great way to share new findings with a new audience and to begin to create a St Helena Island Community. Interestingly, I found myself in conversations with many genealogists in search of their family story.

Enter Sandy Liddle, whose ancestor was buried on St Helena Island. Ongoing conversations revealed a new, unknown St Helena history about immigrants and lime burning and they also led to Sandy offering to help with family history research. A more timely and urgently needed gift could not be made, as Sandy brought with her extensive cataloguing skills through her experience as a Librarian and an archivist. Sandy has been extraordinary at uploading and collating data. She is also an expert genealogist and has been able to build a personal family story of prisoners and warders to complement the prison information that I had collated. My learning from this was that all conversations are opportunities to connect with the right person.

As Sandy and I continued to collate important new information about St Helena Island, the need for solutions to file and house this digitally became more and more apparent. Thankfully, Sandy knew a Information Manager / Database specialist and Deb Houlahan came on board. Deb’s extensive skills and experience with digital databases provided the leadership we urgently needed to develop an understanding of what the digital space would look like.  Deb established a digital SharePoint database and ensured that it was flexible and nuanced enough to cater for the specific needs of the SHIC team. It was at this point I understood that I had to change and adapt to new ideas about uploading data, and thankfully Deb patiently trained me into new ways of thinking about filing.

Outcomes achieved due to the variety of skills and expertise of the members

The St Helena Island Community is proud of the many outcomes we’ve achieved.  For myself, as the storyteller and writer, I have:

• Established the website sthelenacommunity.com.au and written blogs and eBooks about the latest stories and research.
• Partnered with Q’ld State Archives in 2019 to write, with Sandy, all the St Helena information for the ‘Birdcage of the Bay’ exhibition on St Helena.
• Connected with genealogists in search of information on what happened to their ancestor INSIDE the walls of St Helena Penal Establishment and write extensive profiles to capture these stories.
• Updated St Helena’s tour guides annually with new information to share on island tours.
• Spoken at Conferences and workshops on the latest research.

Sandy, the archivist, was determined to create a list of St Helena Penal Establishment’s prisoner admissions – yes, every single one.

• SHIC has built an extensive, central repository of new, accurate and detailed information about St Helena Island’s prison history.
• Sandy and Deb have sourced data from every original prisoner register found and spent countless patient hours uploading it.
• In June 2026, Sandy announced she had completed uploading the last prisoner entry, which reached a massive 7218 prisoner admissions.
• A written biography for every prisoner has been created by Sandy and Deb.
• Belinda has been building a list of prison staff, which at this stage totals 431. Creating individual warders’ biographies is still a work in progress.

Deb, the database expert, saw the urgent need to make a permanent digital database to store the ever-expanding research documentation in one place. 

• Deb saw the need for us to utilise the latest available software, but sustainability was key – we needed a long-term program that was not too costly on an annual basis and was fairly user friendly, with some training from Deb.
• Deb suggested SharePoint as a solution, as it also offered the ability to be fully searchable for data analysis. We have wrestled with naming conventions often but acknowledge the metadata we have layered around each document is key for locating information using various search terms.
• Deb and Sandy have uploaded countless documents into SharePoint, and this is ongoing. We are aware that SHIC has created an important digital legacy that will inform St Helena’s history in perpetuity.

A recommendation from the wise is to embrace what the digital world can offer and be flexible and open to its possibilities. It might offer an invaluable solution to your needs.

What has made this a successful journey

The SHIC team of 3 major players has worked incredibly well together, and we believe that some key aspects have made this an enjoyable, satisfying, and worthwhile journey for all of us:

1. We acknowledge each other’s individual skills and expertise and are appreciative of what each person contributes. The 3 members each have a skill set that SHIC needs, and together we can provide all the skills and knowledge required to achieve our goals.
2. Everyone has a different perspective and that is a great and wonderful thing. We have 6 hour coffee catch ups! In that time we wrestle hard with an idea or an issue. We listen to each other, debate with gusto and we value the input from each member of the team.
3. We have no strict timelines or work hours. Life is busy and unpredictable, and so we have no time demands for each other and there is no strict roster. We all input what we can, when we can, as often as we can and this means it has remained sustainable over the long term for all of us.
4. We are all passionate and curious about what we are doing, and therefore our motivation never flags. We enjoy St Helena’s history, the work we are doing, the team we have, and we also get great satisfaction from the outcomes we are achieving.

The most recent research success is one certainly worth mentioning. Given my intention to create original, detailed research into previously under researched aspects of St Helena Island, I was successful in gaining a Visiting Fellowship with Griffith University in 2025. I decided to address the male-centric story of St Helena Island by researching the little-known history of Women and children at St Helena Penal Establishment. The Harry Gentle Resource Centre now has a link to the project, the results speak to a thriving warders’ community of 47 families living on the island between 1867 and 1932, totalling 255 warders, wives and children.

The issues faced by women and children living at St Helena Penal Establishment and their contributions to the penal settlement were presented at Q’ld State Archives in June 2026, and I will be sharing this in an article about my research findings in the GSQ journal Generation in 2026. Look out for more GSQ blog posts also, where I will share unique, fascinating stories of individual women and children living under penal rule on St Helena Island.

For further information, contact:
Belinda Daly
The St Helena Island Community.
sthelenaislandcommunity@gmail.com
www.sthelenacommunity.com.au