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.

In this history of Wadjemup (Rottnest Island), one of more than 3,500 islands off the coast of Western Australia, nineteen kilometres from Perth, Ann Curthoys, Shino Konishi, and Alexandra Ludewig ask us to consider islands as a kind of tabula rasa, the site of mainlander ‘projections and metaphors’ or, as Robert Aldrich and Miranda Johnson have chillingly put it, ‘laboratories’. This book sits within the growing area of Island Studies, an adjunct to the cross-disciplinary Ocean Studies.

Imperial powers have long recognised the strategic benefit of islands. The authors note that ‘islands were the first overseas places to be colonised by Europeans’. The European colonisation of Africa is usually held to have begun with the Castilians in the Canary Islands from 1402. Britain’s occupation of islands from the seventeenth century – across the Atlantic oceans, within the Caribbean Sea, and along the east coast of Australia – is instructive context for how Western Australia’s first governor, James Stirling, himself the beneficiary of island exploitation, approached Wadjemup in the 1830s. These adventures might be summed up by one word – utilitarian – but others are also important: ruthless, profit-seeking, transitory.