Defeating the Panopticon

The Wadjemup Aboriginal Burial Ground project (Rottnest Island, initiated in 2017) adjacent to a prison-turned-hotel known as ‘The Quod’ (est. 1864) and Roebourne’s former Gaol (est. 1886) now visitor centre and museum, are both (post)colonial sites in Western Australia. Both also comprise of unique histories stemming from Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison concept that have somehow seen them uncomfortably oscillate between places associated with horrific Aboriginal incarceration by an early colonial State and privileged public tourism. Consequently, both places are part of a lengthy and ongoing process of confronting their dark histories. Simultaneously, Indigenous communities are aiming to reappropriate them as their own, albeit in different ways. One response is appreciatively closed to casual tourism, the other is seemingly more inclusive of it. This is timely because the Black Lives Matter Movement has recently refocussed public pressure onto colonial monuments. It is well understood but rarely confronted however, that architectural design itself was entirely complicit in the advancements of colonisation and the rendering of racial hierarchies (Mossman, 2018). This is what makes the State and community sponsored preservation of Wadjemup and Roebourne Gaol even more enticing if not at first, beguiling, as projects. The preservation and development of places such as these have also become deeply important for being reappropriated by the very inter-generational, Aboriginal communities whose lives have been so severely affected by them. This is largely because for those communities to continue to tell their stories, to share the adversity endured by their ancestors, and to ensure the lessons of history are never taken away or repeated, the role that these places play in warranting the ‘Truth-Telling’ of colonial dispossession is not yet over.