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Closing the cell door : where are the Histories of Care-leavers at the old Melbourne Gaol?
Musgrove, N. Saxton, L.
Musgrove, N.
Saxton, L.
Author
Abstract
The Old Melbourne Gaol maintains a crucial place in social histories of the city. The Gaol ceased operation in 1924 and, as a heritage site, locates its history firmly in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. While the exhibition invites a moral consideration of modes of punishment implemented in the gaol, its critique suggests resolution: these are not practices that we engage in now. By presenting these kinds of closed or finished narratives, the site turns visitors firmly towards the past rather than creating a site which invites reflection on the harms that carceral institutions continue to inflict in the present day. This, we argue, has a particular significance for Care-leavers, who are a significant demographic to have passed through the Gaol’s walls. While recognising that a site like the Old Melbourne Gaol has innumerable memory communities invested in it, and that no presentation of the site might fully satisfy them all, this article argues for present-looking public histories that place the gaol’s history in conversation with weighty social justice issues of today, including acknowledging the gaol’s role as part of the foundations of the ‘care’-to-prison pipeline observed by many activists as a pressing social issue in the twenty-first century.
Keywords
Care-Leaver Activism, Dark Tourism, Sites of Conscience
Date
2024
Type
Journal article
Journal
International Journal of Heritage Studies
Book
Volume
30
Issue
11
Page Range
1324-1335
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Arts and Humanities
Faculty of Education and Arts
Centre for Education and Innovation
Faculty of Education and Arts
Centre for Education and Innovation
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided theoriginal work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allowthe posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided theoriginal work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allowthe posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.