Bibliographic record
Abstract
The story of Alexander Pearce’s arduous journey through southwest Tasmania and the gruesome fate that befell his comrades on their famishing trek across the island state has been narrated many times in song, on the stage, in print, and on screen. Most famously, the story of Pearce’s escape with seven other convicts from the Sarah Island penitentiary in Macquarie Harbour in 1822 was told with dramatic license in novelist Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life. The historic convict narrative, itself grounded in actual events, was later renamed For the Term of His Natural Life and made into a film shot at Port Arthur in 1908 by Charles McMahon; remade in 1911 by Alfred Rolfe as The Life of Rufus Dawes; remade again in 1927 by Norman Dawn; then adapted once more as a TV miniseries in 1983 by Rob Stewart. Craig Godfrey later directed a straight-to-video, schlock horror-comedy called Back from the Dead (1996) at Port Arthur and Hobart, featuring the modern-day resurrection of a cannibalistic killer convict called Kavendish who was imprisoned in Port Arthur and who “is loosely based on Alexander Pearce.” Tracing Pearce’s Gaelic heritage, Barrie Dowdall filmed a documentary for Ireland’s Channel 4 titled Exile in Hell (2007). More recently the horror film Dying Breed (Jody Dwyer, 2008) imagines Pearce’s inbred descendents feasting on unwary travellers who venture into the wilderness in search of the Tasmanian Tiger. That same year Michael James Rowland directed a carefully researched, hour-long ABC docudrama called The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce. Finally, Tasmania writer-director Jonathan Auf der Heide teamed up with Melbourne cinematographer Ellery Ryan to film the beautifully crafted feature Van Diemen’s Land in 2009. This longitudinal case study brings together historical, aesthetic, and spatial perspectives on film to develop a geocritical analysis of Tasmanian cinema.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".