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Rottnest Island

The Lives and Legacies of a Carceral Island: A biographical history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island by Ann Curthoys, Shino Konishi, and Alexandra Ludewig

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July 2023, no. 455
Georgina Arnott reviews 'The Lives and Legacies of a Carceral Island: A biographical history of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island' by Ann Curthoys, Shino Konishi, and Alexandra Ludewig

Islands, as recent histories of immigration detention and quarantine show, offer unique things to human societies. Rimmed by a watery bulwark, they have more surveyable borders than do mainlands. Their status as sublands suggest that they exist outside the conventions and temporal dimensions of larger, mainland societies. What happens on an island stays on an island; at least, island prison warders and sojourners imagined this to be the case. 

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