incarceration

Asylums in the landscape

For more than one hundred years Queensland’s main mental health facility was based on the banks of the Brisbane River near Goodna.

Palm Island

Palm Island is situated in north Queensland, 65 kilometres northwest of Townsville, in Halifax Bay. It is the largest Indigenous community of Queensland.

Plan of the island of St Helena, HM Penal Establishment, Queensland, 1887

St Helena Island, QLD

Australia

27° 23' 26.088" S, 153° 14' 8.2428" E

See map: Google Maps

1 January 1887

1 September 2010

Location

St Helena Island, QLD

Australia

27° 23' 26.088" S, 153° 14' 8.2428" E

See map: Google Maps

1 September 2010

Brisbane

Government Printer

Collection of the National Library of Australia

A few surviving examples of Queensland colonial prisons have been heritage-listed and are now used for cultural tourism. St Helena Island, 1887. Collection of the National Library of Australia.

The separate-cell design of one of the two cellblocks in Brisbane prison, Petrie Terrace, c1868. Some female prisoners were still housed in an associated ward here, and it was 1903 before a purpose-built separate-cell prison was constructed specifically for women in Queensland. From Report on Prison Discipline, 1868. Collection of Christopher Dawson.

Collection of Christopher Dawson

The American-inspired ‘radial’ design was widely used in late nineteenthcentury Queensland prisons. A variation on Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’, this design created a central focus of control and sense of architectural and social order. The second prison at Rockhampton, built in 1884 and Townsville prison, 1887, from Inquiry into Gaols, 1887. Collection of Christopher Dawson.

Collection of Christopher Dawson

Stone walls do a prison make: law on the landscape

The imposition of a new and dominant system of law was an important part of the European settlement of Queensland.