- Title
- “A Funny Place” for a prison: coastal beauty, tourism, and interpreting the complex dualities of Trial Bay Gaol, Australia
- Creator
- McIntyre, Jillian; Barnes, Julie
- Relation
- The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism p. 55-83
- Relation
- Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56135-0_4
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- At the end of World War I, amid continuing paranoia about Germans in Australia, Officer of the Guard Lieutenant Edmond Samuels published an illustrated diary of his tour of duty to three German “concentration camps” in New South Wales (see Fig. 4.1) (Samuels 1919: 7, 31–32). Of the old walled gaol at Trial Bay that a former prison warder in the 1890s called a “half purgatory, half paradise” (in Ramsland 1996: 112–113) where elite Germanic civilian and military “prisoners of war” were interned from 1915 to 1918, Samuels (1919: 30–32) emphasized the “consideration and care” afforded at one of the “most comfortable” internment camps in the world in one of Australia’s “most picturesque spots.” Inside the prison walls POWs smoked, drank beer, played cards, and attended theatrical plays and orchestral concerts. Outside they frequented a beach café in the continental style and sporting facilities: surfing, fishing, and enjoying the finest tennis courts ever seen. In directing attention to the solicitous manner in which Australian authorities looked to internees’ welfare, Samuels was sending—for the Australian government—a “serious message” to Germany so that Australian POWs received the same treatment from their German captors (RSL 2015: 17). He also articulated one of the “national guiding fictions” (Pretes in White and Frew 2013: 2) that have shaped public consciousness of Trial Bay Gaol from its original construction as a showplace of penal architecture and reform in the colonial era through to its recent gazettal within a national park.
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1354790
- Identifier
- uon:31356
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781137561343
- Language
- eng
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