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In 2013, the University of Western Australia and the World Heritage Site Fremantle Prison signed a Memorandum of Understanding to allow archaeological investigation of the Prison over a five year period, under the title “The Fremantle Prison Project”. This paper reports briefly on the first two years of that project. The project, designed to link with the UWA archaeology curriculum, and to meet heritage needs of the Prison, has produced a range of successful outcomes, including three research theses and two field schools. Initial research outcomes include a better understanding of refuse disposal practices within the Prison and the way it functioned as an industrial site in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Everyday Artefacts: Subsistence and Quality of Life at the Prisoner Barracks, Port Arthur, Tasmania
Archaeology in Oceania, 2015
This study focuses on the archaeology of the circa 1835-77 Prisoner Barracks constructed at Port Arthur, the domestic quarters for civilian, military and incarcerated occupants spanning almost the entire convict period. Faunal and artefact analyses of the assemblage uncovered at this site were used to provide a more complex understanding of institutional life. Quality of life of the occupants, and how they chose to improve it, is identified through a range of documentary and archaeological sources. It is shown that the barracks complex was a place of domestic life within the confines of an institution. It is evident in the material culture that everyday activities of occupants included the preparation of food, presentation of the home and self, manual tasks such as the production of domestic items, and recreational activities including tobacco smoking and hunting. By assessing indicators of quality of life within an institutional framework, namely the supply of local and imported goods and the material culture of recreation, this work is able to explore potential activities of the occupants that are often hidden from official records. This is examined through a number of scalar units, considering global, local and individual perspectives of the Prisoner Barrack's landscape.
Island to Inland: Connections Across Land and Sea: Conference Handbook, 2017
In 2016, the presenters were commissioned by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) to undertake an Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Assessment of the Old Melbourne Goal and City Watch House. The project aimed to identify Aboriginal cultural heritage significance to provide a basis for future planning of how these stories could be shared with a wider audience in consultation with Victorian Aboriginal communities. This presentation profiles the case of an Aboriginal prisoner from the Wimmera District in Western Victoria to demonstrate how the colonial government and squatters used incarceration, transportation and hanging as a key method of fracturing Aboriginal societal structures by removing clan leaders in Victoria during the mid-1800s. The Old Melbourne Goal and City Watch House were used during nineteenth and twentieth centuries as places of incarceration for Aboriginal people, and where the colonial European capitalist system was enforced. It was within these constructed spaces that the new power relationships between Aboriginal and European peoples, which have shaped modern Australian society, were demonstrated and negotiated.
Excavation in the Fremantle jail
Following a request from the Building Management Authority, archaeologists from the Anthropology Department of the Western Australian Museum agreed to undertake a watching brief on excavations of historical fills in parts of the Fremantle gaol complex. Archaeologists attended the site on six different occasions to supervise work, to excavate and to examine sediments and fills which were to be removed. Discussions on techniques and methods to be followed were held with B.M.A. staff and contractors and advice was given concerning the procedures to be followed. This report describes some of the methods used and discoveries made during the attendance of the archaeologists, however there has been no attempt made in this report to interpret the numerous portable cultural objects found during excavation
Execution as Exhibition: public and private hangings in colonial Australia
Peer Reviewed Proceedings of the 8th Annual Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) Conference: 11-24. ISBN: 978-0-473-41892-2, 2017
When the British established a penal colony and military outpost in New South Wales, in 1788, they transformed the Great Southern Land. This reimagination of the continent was the result of transposing, from the Kingdom of Great Britain to the far side of the world, cultural and social practices as well as ideas of justice and punishment. This paper looks at how the tradition of the public execution was brought to Australia with the First Fleet. This is done through highlighting some colonial experiences—three public hangings and one hanging undertaken behind prison walls—of execution as exhibition. These are: the first man hanged in the new settlement (Thomas Barrett, 27 February 1788); the man they could not hang (Joseph Samuels, 26 September 1803); the man who drew an enormous crowd (John Knatchbull, 13 February 1844); and the most famous Australian man to be hanged (Edward Kelly, 11 November 1880).
Legacy of the ‘Fatal Shore’: The Heritage and Archaeology of Confinement in Post-Colonial Australia
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2004
Why does the theme of 'confinement' link historic-period heritage places across the continent of Australia? This article explores incarceration as not only a dominant theme in heritage-listed and archaeological sites from post-contact Australia, but also as a central underlying element in both Anglo-Australians' sense of ambiguous difference from their European origins, and indigenous Australians' painful experiences of engagement with the state. It considers the shared experiences of 'confinement' through a wide variety of registered convict, post-convict and indigenous heritage places in order to question how and why this theme has come to hold such a special resonance for different communities within modern Australia. Expanding upon Bruce Trigger's classic definitions of 'alternative archaeologies', the authors suggest this resonance has resulted in the emergence of a post-colonial form of heritage practice within this settler nation.