Glen Stasiuk

Digital preservation of cultural heritage

This focus of this chapter is the state of the art of digitisation of cultural heritage in Australian archives and libraries from a comparative perspective. Globalisation, mobility and the new techniques that spin off from the digital age bring about new possibilities that stimulate and enhance our capacity to ask new questions about how we perceive ourselves and how we want to preserve our history. It also seeks to make this archival documentation accessible to scholars and community members alike looking for their own family’s history in its societal context—within and across the national borders that hold their records. As migration in all its forms can be seen as a metaphor for the journey of the self and the collective, migrant heritage can also serve as a way to prioritise digitisation projects in cultural heritage institutions. However, more global collaboration and partnerships are needed to achieve this “virtual reconnect” the cross-national scattered nature of migrant histories and heritage held in archives around the world.

Vagabonds and Rogues: The Prison Writing of Aboriginal Author Graeme Dixon and the Role of Literary Witnessing of Incarceration in Australian Prison Tourism

“The past is not another country… it is our own” (Dixon 2003: 15). These are the words of Aboriginal writer and former Fremantle Prison inmate Graeme Dixon, from his preface to Holocaust Revisited: Killing Time (2003). Recent scholarly critique of prison tourism across criminology and museum studies substantiates a lack of prisoner-produced knowledge in the Australian ethnography of prisons and histories produced for and presented in prison museums. Dixon’s unpublished memoirs (2010) Vagabonds and Rogues (Angels and Saints) is a major work in the field, important not only for its insight into prison life but also for the account it makes of the entwinement of child institutionalization and the criminal justice system in Australia. It specifically elucidates the poorly understood connection between the Stolen Generations and Forgotten Australians; the latter a state child welfare system that adversely affected more than 500,000 Australian children, a number of whom were Aboriginal and in some cases the children of Stolen Generations parents (Australian Government Department of Social Services 2015).

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. It served this purpose for almost 100 years, finally closing in 1931, after incarcerating up to 4,000 people captured from different Aboriginal nations all over the State of Western Australia (Green and Moon 1997: 380). Despite its significance, its role as the first and longest operating Australian Aboriginal prison site remains hidden beneath national forgetting. In the 85 years since the last Aboriginal prisoners left in 1931, government and local authorities have largely ignored the presence of the former prison on Rottnest Island and inadequately signposted its history. However, its natural heritage and tourism value were recognized very quickly. In 1917, Rottnest Island was declared an A-Class Reserve (State Records Office of Western Australia 2015) and since the 1920s has been reimagined as a place of pleasure and escape for non-Aboriginal Australians. National Trust Australia (Heritage Council State Heritage Office 2012a) classified the island as a significant heritage place in 1993, while a number of colonial buildings, such as Rottnest Island Hotel, are listed on the WA State Heritage Register (Heritage Council State Heritage Office 2012b), with the notable exclusion of the Quod (the Prison—see below).