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<\/a>Rottnest Island is a very popular tourist destination<\/em><\/p>\nConvict Heritage<\/em><\/p>\n Convict heritage has enjoyed a resurgence in recent times. Thanks largely to the efforts of family historians, the Australian public has shed what Babette Smith called \u2018the convict birthstain\u2019. This changing attitude was marked by UNESCO granting 11 convict sites \u2018world heritage\u2019 status in 2010. UNESCO places particular emphasis on connecting these respective locations to a wider history of penal, political and colonial policy. Other convict heritage sites are equally popular, if less sensitively drawn, with increasing numbers going on prison \u2018ghost tours\u2019 or \u2018tales of escape\u2019 talks which risk overstating the grisly repression of the state and as a result exaggerate the convicts as working class heroes. Nevertheless the convict legacies of Australia have become a huge industry, drawing local, national and international tourists away from the beaches and towards Australia\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Aboriginal History<\/em><\/p>\n The negation of Aboriginals within Australian historiography was challenged by W.H. Stanner in his 1967 Boyer Lecture entitled \u201cThe Great Australian Silence\u201d. From the 1980s the violence suffered by Aboriginal communities at the hands of settler colonists was brought to the forefront by historians like Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan. In the public sphere the verdict of Mabo in 1992 saw \u2018terra nullius\u2019 overturned in favour of indigenous land rights. The 1990s witnessed a backlash against what Blainey termed \u2018black armband\u2019 history. Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologise for the \u2018stolen generations\u2019 when the Bringing them Home <\/em>report was published in 1997. More recently, Keith Windschuttle\u2019s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History <\/em>(2002) claimed that \u2018liberal\u2019 historians had exaggerated the scale of violence in the colonisation modern-day Tasmania. His claims sparked the \u201cHistory Wars\u201d as Henry Reynolds bit back at Windschuttle\u2019s \u2018white blindfold\u2019 view of history. Today, the dispossession of Aborigines is frequently recognised by the inclusion of a statement recognising Aboriginal communities as the true owners of \u2018this land\u2019 as a preface to speeches. However, specific sites of massacre are often bereft of physical features (at least to a non-Aboriginal eye) and are too rarely commemorated. The contemporary international visitor to Australia will mostly encounter Aboriginal art, in museums and tourist shops, or Aboriginal culture, through tours and dance. Though much of this art is overtly political, many tourists are searching for an ahistoric \u2018authenticity\u2019\u00a0 which help them elide fraught histories of dispossession.<\/p>\n Material Histories<\/em><\/p>\n As I walked around the buildings that made up the colonial settlement of Rottnest Island – an Aboriginal prison –\u00a0 there were interpretation boards in front of many of the buildings that dated from its time as a prison island. The majority of these interpretation boards focused on the role of Europeans. For example the board by the store house emphasised Superintendent\u2019s Vincent\u2019s design aesthetic rather than those convicts who built it brick by painstaking brick. The key building \u2013 the prison \u2018Quod\u2019 had no\u00a0plaque or interpretation board at all to acknowledge its former role. Instead, the walls, and with it the history, has been literally whitewashed, transforming it from Aboriginal prison to \u2018luxury accommodation\u2019.<\/p>\n Few would realise while in the \u2018Governors Sports Bar\u2019 that Governors used to holiday there thanks to the team of six Aboriginal prisoners who waited on them hand on foot. Just as the governors sipped drinks in willing blindness to the illegal chaining and bouts of disease that ravaged the prison population, tourists sip drinks in willing blindness to the history of Aboriginal injustice to which their ancestors are party.<\/p>\n Burial Ground<\/em><\/p>\n We visited the only burial ground for Aboriginal convicts, out of three, that is marked as a site of remembrance. For more than twenty years battles raged between Indigenous activists and the Rottnest Island Board\u00a0 about commemorating the area. The area is now marked off by a barrier warning trespassers and informing visitors that this area will be left \u2018natural\u2019. Rather than using gravestones and plaques that are familiar to most visitors, it asks tourists to take part in a commemorative ceremony that connects them to the land by picking up the soil and speaking to the Aboriginal ownership of this land. Myself and my other half did so, but I had to wonder how many were interested in connecting with commemoration when it took place in peripheral spaces so easy to bypass for the majority of visitors. This voluntary act\u00a0 does not divest the Rottnest Island Board from their responsibility to put Rottnest carceral history in places visitors will encounter it.<\/p>\n<\/a>Fremantle Prison has UNESCO heritage status<\/em><\/p>\nThe old prison building is now Rottnest Lodge<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a>Gov\u2019s sports bar plays up Rottnest\u2019s history as a leisure resort<\/em><\/p>\n