David Harris is an adjunct research fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Inland at La Trobe University. His PhD at La Trobe University, completed in 2014, was an environmental history of the Gippsland Lakes in the nineteenth century. His previous academic research was an MA at the University of Melbourne investigating a history of housing and social reform in inner-suburban Melbourne between 1900 and 1920. He has published on the early history of public housing in Victoria, aspects of Victoria’s colonial fishery and the Gippsland Lakes in the nineteenth century. More recently, he contributed to a textbook for a section of the new VCE Australian History course. He taught in Victorian Government secondary schools, has contributed to state and federal secondary curriculum support projects and has lectured in urban history at Victoria College, Rusden. He was as an education officer at Heritage Victoria, has contributed to several heritage conservation studies and has taught environmental history at La Trobe and Monash universities. His interest in the ‘Outward Letter Book, Inspector of Fisheries and Game’ was sparked during research for his PhD thesis. He was intrigued that he had never seen it referenced in any research on Victoria’s colonial fishery; its mere existence was a mystery, as it had obviously avoided destruction, unlike other Victorian Government nineteenth-century fishery archives.

Author email:  d.harris@latrobe.edu.au