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Name
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Rottnest Island Aboriginal Prison
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Type of carceral site
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Reserve, Station, or Mission
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Dates of use
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1838 – 1931
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Quote
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I came in the steamer. I had a chain around my neck all the way down. I am cold in winter, my blanket is no good, it is old. I do not know when I am going back but I shall be very glad to go.
Testimony/Government Report.
Widgie Widgie Johnnie qtd. in Broome, F. Napier et al. Report of a Commission to Inquire into the Treatment of Aboriginal Native Prisoners of the Crown in This Colony. Government Printer Perth, 1884, p. 12.
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Must'a been
A wajella
Who invented this Hell
Wouldn't know
For sure
But by the torture
I can tell
Poetry.
Dixon, Graham. Holocaust Island. University of Queensland Press, 1990, p. 1.
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To form a Bridgewater
The sea's age typified by algae clinging to the stone
The Indian Ocean limitless breathing might and power even
on this day of calm
I look across at Rottnest in the far off haze where my people
breathed their last sigh for home the mainland to them
the distant blue
What did they do but stand within the paths of cloven hooves
Their only crime to fight for what was rightly theirs
To them the island was a place of souls departed down through
eons of time but by a savage twist of fate
No flight of soul for them
But chained they waited for their lot's conclusion to be
forever part of the island of the dead.
Poem.
Davis, Jack. "Rottnest Island." Black Life: Poems, University of Queensland Press, 1992, pp. 33.
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Looking at these islands as they appear to me on the chart, I fancy I can see the home of the fast disappearing remnant of the aborigines [sic] of the Gascoyne District, the refuge where they shall cease both from being troubled and from troubling.
Newspaper Article.
West Australian, 25th August 1892, p .6.
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Authority
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British Colonial Authority
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Contact
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Kieren
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identifier
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SITE-RIP
