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Welcome to the Quill Project home page. Here you can find more information about the project, what can be achieved on the platform and the team behind it.

We work to research the history and enhance understanding of some of the world's foundational legal texts.
A negotiated text is the product of a formal decision-making process where a text has been negotiated and drafted over a period of time.
Think of the process as made up of four elements — people, procedures, documents, and decisions.

If it is your first time here and you would like to know more about the project, please check out the introduction video below:


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Welcome to

The Constitution
of the Commonwealth
of Australia

Taking place across the 1890’s, the Australian constitutional conventions met across the country-to-be to write the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Learn More

Time Period
1890-1898
Project Partners

Drafting the Australian Constitution

Following a recent referendum and the ongoing discussion about leaving the British Commonwealth, the content of the Australian Constitution has appeared frequently in public discussion in recent years.

As part of the project, some of the materials relating to the drafting of the Constitution have been digitised for the first time, as well as John Williams’ The Australian Constitution: A Documentary History, which will be made available on the Quill website.

The visualisation of these materials shows the complete record negotiations, and what issues were most important to the drafters at the time—the tension between states’ rights and majority rule, the control of railways and waterways, customs and excise. Meanwhile, it gives researchers a tool to access any topic relating to the Constitution that we are interested in the present day.

View Negotiations

The Team

  • Nicholas Cole

    Quill Project Director

    Nicholas couples expertise in constitutional law and history with a track record of delivering digital research projects and international collaborations. As well as providing academic guidance, he is overseeing technical development within Quill to ensure the delivery of the project’s digital outputs.

  • Sarah Murray

    Project Oversight

    Dr Sarah Murray is a Professor at the University of Western Australia where she teaches Constitutional Law and researches in public law, electoral law and court innovation. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, a current member of the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, is co-Chair of the International Society of Public Law AUS-NZ Chapter and a co-Convenor of the WA Chapters of the Australian Association of Constitutional Law and the Electoral Regulation and Research Network.

  • Murray Wesson

    Project Oversight

    Dr Murray Wesson is an Associate Professor in the Law School, University of Western Australia, where he teaches and researches constitutional law, human rights law and legal theory. He has published widely in these areas, especially on the implied freedom of political communication in Australian constitutional law and social and economic rights in South African constitutional law.

  • Tamara Tulich

    Project Oversight

    Dr Tamara Tulich is an Associate Professor in the Law School at the University of Western Australia. Tamara researches and publishes in the areas of preventive justice, anti-terror lawmaking and indefinite detention regimes.

  • Lauren Davis Jarnach

    Senior Documentary Editor

    Lauren is a senior documentary editor with Quill. She is responsible for collating new materials for the Quill platform and ensuring common standards across the whole portfolio of Quill projects.

  • Bethany Jedlicka

    Documentary Editor

    Bethany Jedlicka works on the Drafting the Australian Constitution Project as an Documentary Editor. She graduated from the Australian National University in 2020 with a double degree in Arts and Development Studies. In 2023 she completed her Masters in Publishing Media at Oxford Brookes University, before starting with Quill in October that year.

  • Kate Dromey

    Project Assistant

    ...

  • Eleni Kannis

    Research Assistant

    ...

  • Abdi Hassan

    Project Assistant

    ...

The Negotiations

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