Abstract
At 8:00 p.m. on a summer’s night, I am seated at the front bar of the local pub, in the New South Wales’ town of Hay, having driven five hours from Canberra, Australia’s capital city. Hay is situated on the land of the Nari-Nari people, has a population of approximately 3000, and is located on a flat, treeless saltbush plain at the crossroads where the Sturt, Mid-Western, and Cobb Highways meet. Many road travelers stop in Hay on their way to or from Adelaide, South Australia, but I am not passing through. Hay is my destination. Tomorrow morning, Hay residents will gather on the site of the former Hay Gaol, now a museum, to celebrate Australia Day. I want to witness how this commemorative event is conducted on a former prison site. Tomorrow’s temperature is expected to be 28 °C. The locals, who are used to hot summers, complain to me over their drinks, “It’ll be cold tomorrow.” I note their affability, but I also think that they are a tough bunch to have such tolerance of the heat. Hay is known for its wool, beef cattle, crops, and its brutal carceral history. It is a town that also hosts five museums.
We’ve done the best we can for a little town that just wants to do right by everybody. We don’t want to rock the boat.
—Jeni Japp, Chair, Hay Gaol Museum Committee (2015)
The officers left their morals out the front when they walked in that door!
—Diane Chard, former inmate, Hay Institute for Girls (2015)
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Notes
- 1.
Australia Day is celebrated annually on 26 January and marks the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the first fleet of British ships at Port Jackson, New South Wales. Indigenous Australian leader and campaigner Professor Mick Dodson AM notes that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people refer to the anniversary date as “invasion day,” and has argued that this date of national celebration should be changed (Smiles 2009).
- 2.
A community survey found that 85 percent of people in Hay believed that tourism is significant to the town’s growth (Hay Shire Council 2010a: 6).
- 3.
Winlaton Juvenile School was a state-run institution, established in 1956, in Melbourne, by the Children’s Welfare Department for “delinquent” girls (Find & Connect no date b). The Good Shepherd Sisters ran eight Magdalene laundries in Australia. Hundreds of young women were incarcerated by the Good Shepherd Sisters, throughout the twentieth century and forced to work, without pay, in the Sisters’ commercial laundries. Many of these young women had not committed a crime and were not afforded a legal trial (Chynoweth 2014b: 176–179).
- 4.
This protocol was not always followed, however. The records of former prisoner Wilma Robb show that the welfare department had not authorized her transfer to Hay until nine days after she had already been sent there (Robb 2015).
- 5.
Lynwood Hall, in Sydney, was built in 1891 as private residence and was leased to the New South Wales Government in 1917 as a school for truants. In 1936, it was established as a domestic school for female state wards (Find & Connect no date c).
- 6.
The activity of dressing dolls was only introduced in the few years prior to the closure of the Hay Institute in 1974 (Robb 2015).
- 7.
Donnison’s (1976: 13) inaccurate assertions include, “...[n]o girl under fifteen years of age was sent to Hay,” “no girl stayed longer than three months” and “no girl ever returned to Hay.”
- 8.
The survey comprised a series of ten questions that were logically sequenced, thus some questions depended on responses from previous questions. The aim of the survey was to determine the degree of familiarity of academics within the humanities and social sciences with the notion of “Forgotten Australians” and “Care Leavers,” and the nature of any associated research, if applicable. Potential respondents were contacted by email. Survey participation was made available via “SurveyMonkey,” was voluntary, and the identity of respondents was anonymous. There were 114 respondents from June to August 2015.
- 9.
While girls attended a court hearing, before being sentenced to Parramatta Girls Training School, even if they had not committed a crime, there was no additional court hearing for Parramatta girls who were sentenced to the Hay Institute for Girls.
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Chynoweth, A. (2017). Rocking the Boat: The Hay Gaol Museum and the Disruptive Narratives of Forgotten Australians. In: Wilson, J., Hodgkinson, S., Piché, J., Walby, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56135-0_15
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