Don't Look at the Islands

After all the red, dusty mining towns we've visited over the past few months, we were pleasantly surprised to come across banana plantations as we rolled into Carnarvon a few days ago. We're on Yinggarda country and have arrived in WA's Gascoyne region, known for its wildflowers, horticulture, and of course, there's that Indian Ocean coastline that we just can't get enough of.

Carnarvon itself is a quiet and pleasant town and we've had a relaxing few days here. About an hour's drive north are the Carnarvon Blowholes which put on a pretty good show when the tide's in. It's also at the southern end of the Ningaloo Reef so there's good snorkelling to be had.

Today we headed to the One Mile Jetty. The jetty was built in the 1890s at the mouth of the Gascoyne River and was used to transfer live cattle over the mangroves to ships waiting in the port over one mile away. But the jetty also has a much darker and tragic history - it was the departure point for Aboriginal people being transported to the Lock Hospitals on Dorre and Bernier Islands.

Lock Hospitals were an invention of the British Empire and were used in the 1800s to confine women from garrison towns who were suspected of engaging in sex work and transmitting "venereal disease". Designed to protect soldiers more than medically treating women, the Lock Hospitals were abandoned in Britain in the late 1800s following public outcry, but remained in operation in many of the colonies, including Australia. Lock Hospitals for "common prostitutes" operated in Melbourne and Brisbane into the 1900s, but for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, Lock Hospitals were used in a different context.

Legislation that was, let's face it, deeply rooted in the racism of the White Australia Policy, provided for the "protection" of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and resulted in an estimated 800 men, women and children being forcibly removed from their families and country between 1908 and 1919. They were transported to the Lock Hospitals on Dorre and Bernier Islands about 70 kilometres off the Carnarvon coast at a time when the government sought to outlaw sexual relationships between Indigenous women and white men. Policemen were responsible for "diagnosing" sexually transmitted infections and people were often removed from their communities in neck chains, which was considered by some senior doctors at the time to be "humane".

In the early years of the Lock Hospitals, inmates were often subject to invasive experimental treatments, and the facilities recorded extremely high death rates. Most people transported to the islands were never heard of again. For generations, First Nations people right across Western Australia were told by their families never to speak about, or even look at the islands; the story too traumatic to re-live.

In 2018, the WA Government acknowledged the Lock Hospital tragedy and a collaboration between the government and the Carnarvon community led to the establishment of a memorial and sculpture at the site of the One Mile Jetty. It is titled "Don't Look at the Islands" . A statement by the the sculptors, Joan Walsh-Smith and Charles Smith reads, in part, "Without bitterness we must ensure that these heartrending stories are told; that the tragedy of the Lock Hospitals is acknowledged; and that the victims of this appalling injustice are remembered, so that the like of this can never happen again."

It's a sobering story. We do try to remain apolitical in this blog, but with the referendum just six weeks away, we thought it was a story worth hearing especially for those out there (like us) who are hearing it for the first time. We can't change history, but we can make it.

Here are some photos of the memorial and our wanderings around Carnarvon.