Rottnest or Wadjemup: tourism and the forgetting of Aboriginal incarceration and the pre-colonial history of Rottnest Island

Rottnest Island Prison was established in 1838. Situated 18 kilometers off the coast of Western Australia (WA), adjacent to the capital city of Perth, it is Australia’s first and only mass segregation of Aboriginal people in a racially determined prison. Despite its significance, its role as the first and longest operating Australian Aboriginal prison site remains hidden beneath national forgetting. The identity of Rottnest as the the Western Australian State’s premier holiday destination contradicts the Island’s distressing history and perpetuates an incommensurable conflation of past injustice and present forgetting on this site. This chapter examines appropriate avenues of research encompassing museology, tourism and contemporary art, toward the appropriate commemoration and representation of this difficult national history on Rottnest Island as a Site of Conscience