When the British colonized Western Australia in 1829, they did so under the legal doctrine of “terra nullius,” or empty land. Of course, the area was inhabited – owned by the Indigenous Nyoongar people who were dispossessed from their land through frontier conflict, disease, physical dependency on European goods, and punishment under British law. By… Read more →
Katherine Roscoe is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Leicester. She works on the incarceration of Indigenous prisoners, European convicts and free migrants on carceral islands surrounding colonial Australia. She is part of The Carceral Archipelago Project which investigates convict transportation and penal colonies on a global scale. For more on the 1883 inquiry into Rottnest, narratives of health, and the creation of the Aborigines Protection Board see her open-access article in Studies in Western Australian History!