The deep, dark history of Wagga’s criminal underbelly is about to be revealed in a new exhibition dedicated to our region’s oldest convicts.
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The CSU Regional Archives are currently hosting Captured: Portraits of Crime, an exhibition created by the State Archives of NSW.
Among the portraits on display are some of Wagga’s oldest and most complex criminals, including murderers, thieves, and prostitutes.
Jill Kohlhagen, the collection management archivist for the CSU Regional Archives, said the project was an unintentional byproduct of the archives’ effort to move into the 21st century.
“It all started with the State Archives of NSW’s digitisation project, where they were scanning all their jail photographic description books,” Ms Kohlhagen said.
“They ended up with hundreds of thousands of pages and photographs with all these charges from these convicts and criminals.”
The photographs and stories shared in this exhibition span the 60 years between 1870 and 1930, providing an impressive wealth of engrossing historical knowledge.
While age-old criminals from all over the state are on display, Ms Kohlhagen said she and her team wanted to take the project one step further to shine a light on the fascinating criminal past of Wagga and the Riverina.
“When we found out the exhibition was coming, we asked Sydney if we could borrow some records, and they said yes,” she said.
“That was amazing, because these records are hardly ever allowed out of the building or into people's hands, let alone all the way to Wagga!”
Ms Kohlhagen immediately started researching the convicted criminals she found from Wagga, scanning through old jail record books as well as copies of The Daily Advertiser from more than a hundred years ago.
“We wrote up their stories mostly from the newspaper, because the paper wrote these stories with the most amazing detail,” she said.
“It made it much more interesting, because, as interesting as all these stories are, to be able to actually picture them at the Wagga District Hospital or the Wagga Court makes it mean so much more, because these people were actually wondering around our town.
“The photos are so evocative – you can look into their eyes and see how sad some of them look.”
The Captured: Portraits of Crime exhibition will remain open at CSU’s Regional Archives until June 8.
The exhibition is open and free to attend for all.
Over the next couple of weeks, The Daily Advertiser will bring you the rich stories of some our most notorious criminals from days gone by.