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Abstract

Now operational as a museum that engages in aspects of both dark tourism and public education, the Old Melbourne Gaol offers visitors the expected “celebrity prisoners” and “pleasurable terrors” of capital and corporal punishment, but also invites them to consider the former gaol's complicity in enforcing racialised, gendered, and class-based violence. However, while the site's permanent exhibition acknowledges some of the former gaol's intersections with colonial welfare systems, its narrative positions the rise of welfare institutions as the salve for poverty-driven colonial incarceration. This article argues for the value and appropriateness of the site incorporating histories and perspectives of people who endured incarceration in both welfare and penal institutions in order to assert a counter-narrative that challenges visitors to reflect on the social function of incarceration, including its use and impact beyond criminal justice institutions.

Keywords

Australian welfare history dark tourism museums and public education colonial criminal justice

Introduction: Why should we connect histories of welfare and criminal justice?

The notion of incarceration is most commonly associated with criminal justice systems, yet it is impossible to comprehend the “reach and grip of the carceral state” without understanding that multiple “welfare” systems – notably poverty relief, child protection, and mental health – have and do converge to effect a matrix of coercive confinement (O’Donnell and O'Sullivan, 2020: 1). Social scientists have argued for the importance of the shadow carceral state, and recent work has argued for including “care” services within its definition (Copeland and Dettlaff, 2024; Massaro and Boyce, 2021; Murakawa and Beckett, 2024). This helps explain why people experiencing poverty and homelessness, Indigenous people, People of Colour, people living with mental and physical disability, and people who have experienced child welfare systems (referred to in this article as Care-leavers) are significantly over-represented amongst the incarcerated, including many who have not been convicted of crimes (Baidawi, 2020; Chartrand, 2019; Dvorchak, 2022; Fitzpatrick and Williams, 2017; McCausland and Baldry, 2023). This is not a new phenomenon. Today's systems of coercive confinement have evolved at the confluence of multiple discourses used to define and control social “problems” – such as race, class, and ability – and scholars have critiqued overly-presentist responses which ignore the problem's deep historical roots and its persistence in Western societies across multiple centuries (Ben-Moshe et al., 2014; Garland, 2002; McGlade, 2020; Radke and Douglas, 2020). Yet, welfares’ self-positioning as a benevolent service, distinct from (even opposed to) regimes of social control or punishment, remains strong in the public imagination. This article argues that prison museums should be sites of critical public histories that encourage visitors to reflect on the broader notion of coercive confinement rather than “othering” the “bad people” from the past, a response that can emerge from situating historical prisons firmly within a crime and punishment framework (Smith, 2017).

In the interests of informing public opinion about incarceration, the representation of the past in public institutions like museums and heritage sites matters. By engaging audiences with particular renderings of history, these institutions help visitors make meaning of the past and, in their best form, encourage reflection on how this relates to present-day society (Agozino et al., 2020; Obermark, 2019; Rock et al., 2025; Rothschild, 2024). In keeping with the theme of this special issue's focus on carceral geography, social memory, and institutionalisation, this article locates itself in several current debates linking past and present. In a recent “state of the field” article, Jeffrey Olick (2023) argues for the ongoing social, political, and scholarly relevance of memory studies, particularly its central tenet of collective memory, pointing to the ways in which conservative populist politics of the 2020s have attempted to delegitimise representations of the past which seem to call for restorative justice in the present. Historians, too, have grappled with the question of how history, truth, and social justice intersect in what has been described as a “post-truth world” (Gudonis and Jones, 2021). The interconnectedness of the “past, present and future is also a core principle of decarceral and prison abolitionist thought, which in essence, strives for futures that centre community support and harm reduction rather than violence and state coercion” (Kaladelfos and Nagy, 2024: 171). The intersection of these current debates, as well as the pressing global concerns about incarceration outlined above, urges a critical examination of the kinds of social memories about coercive confinement being circulated through public institutions, and this article offers a contribution to that discussion through a case study analysis of the Old Melbourne Gaol.

The Old Melbourne Gaol stands on the lands of the Wurundjeri people. Formerly a site of colonial incarceration, corporal punishment, and execution, today it operates as a museum which deploys tactics of dark tourism to attract visitors, but also attempts to engage audiences with more serious questions about the site's history of violence (Musgrove and Saxton, 2024). The colonisation of the land where the city of Melbourne now stands began in the mid-1830s, and the colonial society's need for carceral spaces was apparent almost immediately although it relied on relatively stop-gap measures until the Melbourne Gaol – then an imposing stone building casting an ominous metaphorical shadow over the city below it – opened in 1845 (O’Toole, 2006). The site operated as one of the city's major carceral facilities until 1924, and over the subsequent decade many of its buildings were demolished, but the cell block which now houses the site's permanent exhibition, along with some other parts of the decommissioned gaol, were reopened as a military detention compound during World War II (Gardiner, 2008; National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025b). The Old Melbourne Gaol is recognised on both Victorian and national heritage registers for its “cultural, aesthetic, architectural, scientific and historic significance to the State of Victoria” yet, this article argues, its role in either reinforcing or disrupting present-day attitudes towards coercive confinement is an important aspect of the site which has received relatively little attention (Victorian Heritage Register, 2001). In addressing this gap with respect to this particular site, the article adds to the growing body of literature on former prisons as tourist sites that highlights the impact that such sites can have on shaping public attitudes towards the meaning and nature of incarceration as well as broader conversations about national or group identity (Oettler and Pérez Benavides, 2025; Stone et al., 2018; Strange and Kempa, 2003; Welch, 2012, 2013; Wilson, 2011; Wood et al., 2017).

Engaging critical narratives at the Gaol

The Old Melbourne Gaol is run by the National Trust of Australia, which although a non-profit charitable organisation, does rely on income (including funds generated through visits to its heritage sites) to enable its work (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2024). As Wilson (2008) has argued, assumptions about the kinds of histories that the paying public will want to view shape the nature of the histories presented at sites like the Old Melbourne Gaol, and this in turn reinforces audience expectations. Wilson examines, in particular, the phenomenon of the “celebrity prisoner” – a figure whose crime and punishment experiences can be crafted to inspire public fascination and intrigue. Some prison sites manufacture their own “celebrity prisoners” through the presentation of prisoner biographies as escape and adventure narratives, while others capitalise on the notoriety of former prisoners (Barber, 2020; Ferguson and Madill, 2017; Wilson, 2008). At the Old Melbourne Gaol, the intersection of storytelling through “celebrity prisoners”, the public's quest for a sense of historical authenticity derived from engagement with objects and places connected to past events, and a national obsession with the highly mythologised bushranger Ned Kelly (who was executed at the gaol), mean that featuring Kelly's story at the site is virtually inevitable (De Groot, 2016; Fagence, 2019).

The Old Melbourne Gaol might be critiqued for engaging in the kitschification of the Kelly legend through a range of items sold in its gift shop (Stone and Grebenar, 2022), but its exhibition, while certainly allowing Kelly to dominate its ground floor space, attempts a somewhat more even-handed telling. Twenty-five of the cells on the gaol's ground floor have been developed into museum spaces, and five of these feature Ned Kelly. Those five cells, which are accompanied in the open space outside them by a life-sized full-body photograph of Kelly and a glass display case featuring the recreated armour used in an early film, constitute a “Kelly Zone” at the far end of the ground floor. In the cell with the display panel titled “The Kelly Legend” visitors are told: “Even in death, Ned Kelly remains a polarising figure. To some he is a folk hero representing an emerging national identity celebrating independence, mateship and ‘a fair go.’ To others he is a liar, braggart and brutal killer” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a). In the cell entitled “Conflict” visitors are told about the Kelly Gang's killing of three police officers at Stringybark Creek in 1878, the crime for which Kelly was eventually executed and one of the elements of the legend which most divides opinion about him as a “worthy” national icon. Its text treads carefully. The incident is located in the context of the Kelly family having a long history of conflict with police, and explains that Ned and his brother Dan were on the run because of an altercation at the Kelly property in April 1878 during which a police officer was shot and injured. Its reference to “varying accounts” of that incident alludes to disputes about whether the shooting of the officer was provoked and embedded in police harassment of the Kelly family, and about who shot him, but most of the text in this cell provides a reasonably dispassionate chronicling of the series of crimes that culminated in Kelly's capture and does not include any of the explanations that have been offered over time to either excuse the gang's actions or position them as politically motivated figures. The cell also features photographs of police officers injured and killed during the events. However, while the exhibition takes a step back from the hero or villain dichotomy which dominates popular understandings of Ned Kelly, the majority of the “Kelly Zone” is a classic example of the “celebrity prisoner” trope, filled with snippets of drama and adventure from his life which encourage the visitor to relate to him, even if he remains a morally ambivalent figure.

There are other aspects of the gaol's exhibition that exemplify some of the most problematised aspects of dark tourism sites, including the depiction of historical punishments in ways that enable their consumption as what Rose Cullen (2017: 7) has termed a “pleasurable kind of terror.” This “dark dungeon” practice has been critiqued for discouraging critical reflection on the justness of punishment both because it locates now abandoned practices as relics of a cruel and distant past (Musgrove and Saxton, 2024; Stone, 2006) and because it dehumanises prisoners by portraying their suffering as a spectacle and the punishment itself as necessary because it protects us from them (Brown, 2009; Smith, 2022; Urquhart, 2022; Wise and McLean, 2020). This is particularly pronounced in the portion of the exhibition on Level 1 that examines execution and corporal punishment. The ominous gallows and accompanying cell containing a list of executions enacted in the Colony/State of Victoria are diagonally opposite another cell in which visitors view the tools of execution and a mannequin dressed as a condemned man about to hang (complete with hood, bound hands, and a noose around his neck). In the next cell a Cat O’ Nine Tails is hung on the wall in front of an image depicting it being used to flog a prisoner, and also in this cell begins a series of biographies depicting the colony's early executioners as monstrous and often bungling figures. Visitors then move through a series of cells that chart gradually increasing opposition to the death penalty in Australia from the late nineteenth century, but this section of the gaol tends to emphasise the ghoulish punishment of the past as a history from which we have escaped rather than providing the kind of rhetorical education that can enable critical thinking about social justice in the present (Obermark, 2022). Laurajane Smith's (2017) research on visitor reactions to the Old Melbourne Gaol confirms that even when prompted to think about the significance of the gaol for contemporary Australia, respondents tended to see themselves as “good people” who had not only an historical but also a moral distance from punitive incarceration.

If parts of the gaol's exhibition deliver the kinds of “celebrity prisoner” and “dark dungeon” displays that have rightly attracted criticism of the social value of prison tourism, there are also parts that reflect the move in museum practice towards presenting narratives that take a stance on social issues and disrupt conventional historical narratives (Anderson, 2020; Fleming, 2016; Zabalueva, 2023). Taken as a whole, the entire ground floor can be read as an anti-death penalty narrative. The exhibition moves visitors through time, from bushranging in the 1850s to Victoria's final execution in 1967, and many of the case studies challenge audiences to think about the injustices embedded in the system. Was An Gaa, one of the many Chinese men who migrated to Victoria's goldfields in the nineteenth century, sane when he murdered his companion, and did racism impact the Governor's decision to deny the application of Chinese migrants who petitioned for Gaa's execution to be stopped? How should we feel about the execution of Basilio Bondetti who, in 1876, was convicted on circumstantial evidence and did not realise until he was almost upon the gallows that he was to be executed because he spoke almost no English? How should we understand the act of infanticide committed by Emma Williams who lived in a “society, which could not support her and then condemned her to death” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a)?

The recognition of the toll that Victoria's criminal justice system took on Aboriginal people is an area for development, although one of the first cells on this floor states that the gaol “is committed to telling more of the history and stories of Indigenous Australians during the operation of the Old Melbourne Gaol, and our collaborative research with Aboriginal communities continues behind the scenes” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a). There is, of course, a risk that simply including more examples of Aboriginal people being incarcerated or executed could be read as reinforcing stereotypes about Aboriginal criminality, so it is fair that the gaol is proceeding carefully and in collaboration with the local community. The cell presenting the case of Fatta Chand provides an interesting example of other ways that Aboriginal people can be represented within the exhibition. Fatta Chand was an Indian migrant charged with the murder of another Indian hawker in 1891. The account of his trial, incarceration, and execution reveals the racism of nineteenth-century Victoria in multiple ways.

Chand was arrested and immediately put on trial for murder. He spoke very little English and denied the charges, through his court appointed translator. Key witnesses in the trial, Indigenous people living at Coranderrk Reserve in Healesville, were scorned by the defence. … Chand was found guilty and sentenced to death. Chand went on a hunger strike when in gaol and was force-fed beef tea in defiance of his religious beliefs. Chand was hanged on 27 April 1891. He was only 24 years old and protested his innocence to the end (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a).

Not only is Chand's own experience of racism clear, Aboriginal people emerge as advocates for a legitimate cause, yet the society of the time was prepared to dismiss their testimony as unworthy or unreliable. In this we see an example of alternate narratives of Aboriginal people and the law that still provide visitors with an opportunity to reflect critically on race relations and criminal justice.

Some of the cases of executed people fit more into the sensational or celebrity mode: there is Martha Needle the “Richmond Poisoner”; and Frederick Deeming, whose murders of two wives and four of his children have been described as making him Melbourne's first serial killer; not to mention several spaces devoted to Ned Kelly; but the “Kelly Zone” marks the end of the exhibition's presentation of nineteenth-century executions. The two twentieth-century cases included each provide a message about the virtue of Victoria having abandoned capital punishment. Colin Campbell Ross was convicted of the murder of a 12-year-old girl in 1921. He consistently claimed his innocence and was in fact pardoned in 2008 – long after his execution. The titles of the panels presenting this case study reveal its narrative arc: “The Crime,” “The Trial,” “I am an Innocent Man,” “Death by Hanging,” “Investigation and Pardon,” “An Innocent Man Has Been Hanged” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a). The overall message of the final cell, “Never Again,” captures the sentiment with which Victoria's final execution (Ronald Ryan) is conveyed. In some ways this anti-death penalty narrative is a safe one for the gaol to tackle – capital punishment can be communicated as a practice of a dark past from which we have emerged – but it is also a worthy one (Musgrove and Saxton, 2024): support for the death penalty in Australia remains relatively strong at around 40% of the population despite the practice having been abandoned for almost six decades (McCarthy and Brunton-Smith, 2024). This floor of the exhibition encourages visitors, if somewhat gently, to engage in difficult histories that challenge not only the past, but also their views on issues with present-day resonance. This shows a willingness to engage in social education as well as the lure of dark tourism, a trend that scholars have observed as emerging at other prison tourism sites (Shehata et al., 2018).

The imbalanced narrative around welfare institutions

The Old Melbourne Gaol's exhibition can thus be seen, in some notable respects, to encourage visitors’ critical reflection on the harms of systems of punishment and incarceration, albeit primarily those aspects that can be firmly located in the past. However, the same cannot be said of its presentation of welfare systems and institutions – systems that were enmeshed with criminal justice systems in the past as deeply as they are today, and which have relied heavily on coercive confinement (Ashton and Wilson, 2014; Baidawi, 2020; Coleborne, 2024; Fitzpatrick and Williams, 2017; Musgrove, 2023; Radke and Douglas, 2020). Scholars working in both present-day and historical contexts, including those with living experience of welfare institutions, have highlighted the importance of understanding incarceration in the name of welfare as part of the same phenomenon of social control as incarcerating convicted people (Carlton and Russell, 2023; Garland, 2002; Musto, 2019; O’Donnell and O'Sullivan, 2020; Wilson et al., 2024b). This section of the article turns a critical eye to the part of the Old Melbourne Gaol's exhibition titled “Women and Children of the Gaol” to highlight the importance of understanding incarceration of convicted people and incarceration of others as part of a larger carceral “social solution” rather than as discreet phenomena.

The contextualisation of the “Women and Children of the Gaol” provided on the gaol's website states:

In line with the recent upgrade of the Old Melbourne Gaol interpretation in 2020, the histories of women and children have now been revitalised with the installation of new permanent panels. The second floor now features a suite of cells devoted to their histories. Researchers at the Old Melbourne Gaol, including staff, volunteers, and academics, have been tracing this history of women and children for decades. Previous installations honoured these stories and placed the experiences of women and children in context with the site. Drawing from this expertise, the new installation places these histories at the heart of the Gaol. Adjacent to the gallows, the narrative starts with the story of execution and female imprisonment and ends with the social welfare work of Dr John Singleton and the Salvation Army (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025d).

There are several points to note. First, the current exhibition dates from 2020, long after survivor-activism by Care-leavers had firmly inserted a narrative highlighting the carceral and punitive nature of welfare systems into Australian public discourse and thus the exhibition might reasonably be expected to have responded to Care-leaver survivor-activist voices (Wilson et al., 2024a). Second, a claim is being made for the centrality and importance of this part of the exhibition, affirming the gaol's intention to place value on representing these stories in productive ways. Third, it imposes a metanarrative of emerging from a dark past of execution and incarceration through the salvation of philanthropic figures and organisations – an outdated view of history that has been profoundly disrupted by Care-leaver activism (Swain et al., 2012; Wilson and Carlton, 2022).

The metanarrative suggested by the gaol's website is indeed conveyed by the exhibition itself. Even here, the Kelly legend intrudes. Once visitors walk past the gallows and the cell listing all people executed in Victoria, they reach the Ellen Kelly cell which, effectively, begins “Women and Children of the Gaol”. Ellen Kelly had been convicted of wounding with intent to prevent lawful apprehension following the wounding of a police officer at the Kelly property – the incident which sent Ned and Dan Kelly on the run from police – and was sentenced to three years hard labour (Public Record Office Victoria, 1855-1948b). Initially, her story is used as a device to communicate some of the conditions inflicted upon women in the gaol: “Like other women incarcerated at the Melbourne Gaol,” visitors are told, she “experienced conditions of hard labour with little compassion from authorities”; and as per gaol regulations, her infant daughter remained with her in the gaol for four months, at which point “she was forced to send her child home” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a). From there, however, the narration slips into high drama.

On … 29 June 1880, Ellen Kelly was called from her work to be told her son Dan was dead and Ned was lying seriously wounded in the prison hospital. … Greatly distressed, she claimed to have dreamt of a fight between the police and the Gang only two nights before. The following afternoon, while Steve Hart and Dan Kelly were being buried, Ellen and Ned were reunited in the hospital section of the Melbourne Gaol. It was the first time they had seen each other since October 1878 … Ellen saw Ned for the last time the day before he was hanged and apparently urged him, “Mind you die brave, die like a Kelly.” When her son was led to the gallows the next morning, Ellen Kelly was a few metres away working in the prison laundry (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a).

No doubt this story is entertaining, but it draws visitors back into the Kelly legend rather than firmly orienting them to the theme of the exhibition they are commencing.

The next part of the exhibition uses crimes for which women were executed as a device for providing commentary on the broader social conditions of women in the nineteenth century, and how they brought women into conflict with the criminal justice system in distinctly gendered ways. After seeing the story of Elizabeth Scott, the first woman executed in Victoria, whose story is used to convey the tragic intersections of young girls being pressured to marry older men (Elizabeth was married at 13 to a 35-year-old man), excesses of alcohol common across the colony, and domestic violence, visitors are explicitly told:

Four of the five women who died on the gallows in Victoria were executed at the Melbourne Gaol. The reasons they committed their crimes were complex; their guilt bound to the values and expectations of “womanhood,” as mothers, caregivers and wives (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a).

Much of what Meighen Katz (2017) has argued about an earlier rendition of representing women within the gaol's exhibition holds true for the current iteration: by locating the crimes of women in the broader context of urban poverty and highly gendered limitations on the ways in which women could live and work it “captures the sense of desperation among a group of women seeking to extricate themselves from situations with few routes of escape” (342). However, as Katz also notes, the focus on the kinds of crimes presented – spousal murder related to domestic violence, infanticide, and so-called “baby-farming” – places women's sexuality and its suppression in nineteenth-century society at the centre of the conversation when, in fact, the majority of women who served sentences in the Melbourne Gaol were convicted of crimes related to poverty, including vagrancy and petty theft.

There is, of course, much complexity to be negotiated in very short amounts of text within the exhibition panels, and it is fair to say that while spousal murder and infanticide did not represent the offences of a typical female prisoner, issues of sex and poverty cannot be entirely disentangled when seeking to understand crime in nineteenth-century Melbourne. It is also quite reasonable to highlight the ways in which women's sexuality rendered them vulnerable in that society, and there is an implicit suggestion within the exhibition that imprisoning women for the consequences of this was cruel and, at least in some ways, unjust. The more problematic element of the exhibition's narrative is how it explains the way we supposedly exited that dark past. Enter, the philanthropic saviour.

The cell titled “Refuge and Shelter” introduces the figures of John and Isabella Singleton. Their inclusion in this history in and of itself is not unreasonable – they have been noted as prominent figures who devoted considerable time and energy to providing charitable relief to the poor and to visiting gaols with the welfare of prisoners in mind (Morrissey, 1976; Serle, 1968). Problematic, however, is the presentation of the Singletons as virtuous saviours of women whose vulnerability is at times conflated with the spectre of “uncontrolled” and “deviant” female sexuality so common in nineteenth-century discourse about working-class women. In the cell titled “Refuge and Shelter” visitors are introduced to the Singletons as benevolent and pious philanthropists:

Dr John Singleton and his wife Isabella saw at close hand the suffering caused by the social turmoil of the gold rush years and beyond into the 1890s depression. … Dr Singleton drank no alcohol and was a deeply committed Christian with great compassion for the plight of the more vulnerable members of society: the sick, homeless, abandoned and destitute (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a).

The cell's narration then explains that the Singletons were “particularly concerned about the physical and moral welfare of the thousands of young single women who migrated to Victoria from Britain on assisted passages” and then directly presents John's words to explain why so many young women required “saving”: “Vast numbers of them, without control (supervision) and friendless,” he wrote, “have been seduced from virtue's paths, and quickly swell the number of the fallen” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a). The rhetoric is about rescuing individual women, but the discourse of social reform was built on the notion that society could be protected from “vice and crime” through programs that aimed to change individual behaviour (Yeo, 1996).

Nineteenth-century Victoria was deeply committed to the idea of carceral institutions as the most reliable way of supporting impoverished people and thus, upon leaving prison, many women were faced with the choice of rebuilding their lives without any help, or exchanging one form of coercive confinement for another (Musgrove, 2023). Rather than prompting visitors to reflect on that quandary, the exhibition positions the Singletons as benevolent shepherds who steered “vulnerable women away from the dangers of Little Lonsdale Street and other slum areas in the city and into respectable lodgings, temperance taverns or women's refuges” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a). The couple's own “Home for Friendless and Fallen Women” is described as having provided “temporary accommodation to thousands of sex workers in the 1880s and 1890s, many of whom had been in the Melbourne Gaol” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a). This language suggests that these institutions were safe havens, almost hotels, from which women could relatively freely come and go, but a description of the Singleton's Home for Friendless and Fallen Women from the Leader newspaper presents a different picture:

The home is now located in … a comfortable but small six-roomed stone cottage, standing on about three-quarters of an acre of garden ground. The place is plainly, and, indeed, sparsely, furnished, as several beds have to be made upon the floor every night for want of bedsteads. During the past year … a detached dormitory [was] erected on the ground, containing ten small rooms, one of which is occupied by the matron and the other nine by inmates, two sleeping in each room. There are now twenty-two inmates, so that four, including the workmistress, have to sleep in the cottage. At the rear of the ground is a very rough shed that at some period has been a stable, but is now used as a laundry, and considering the character of the means and appliances there is very fair work turned out by the inmates … During their stay the inmates are diligently improved in religious, moral and industrial training, although the results of their laundry and needlework are not very large (Refuge for Fallen Women, 1878: 6).

This article, which is promoting rather than critiquing the institution's work, concludes that the “exceedingly small sum” spent “upon the inmates for their maintenance” reflects “that the managers of the institution have been solicitous to effect the largest amount of good with the funds entrusted to them” – another reading might be to reflect on the meagre conditions endured by women who were working long hours washing and sewing for no payment except their maintenance within the institution (Refuge for Fallen Women, 1878: 6).

The Leader article also provides insight into the movement of women in and out of the institution. Readers learn about a direct connection with the gaol from where some (although not all) of the institution's inmates arrived, describing those women as “unfortunates who have been imprisoned, and who, for want of a refuge upon their discharge from gaol, too frequently return at once to their evil courses”. The goal of the institution was not merely to provide temporary shelter, but to reform: “They have already had some females of this class in the institution, who have gone out to earn their livings reputably, and are among the most hopeful cases on their books” (Refuge for Fallen Women, 1878: 6). Many women used the institution to help them find employment, but there were other pathways out:

During the year ending 31st December, 1877, there were 138 females admitted, which with 12 remaining at the end of 1870 amounted to 105, the largest number ever received in one year. Of these 80 had been provided for in service or other suitable employment, 10 were sent to hospitals or other institutions, 10 were reconciled to their families or friends, 22 left at their own request, and 11 remained on 31st December, 1877. Eight marriages took place at the institution within the year (Refuge for Fallen Women, 1878: 6).

Women were neither legally nor forcibly detained; they could request to leave, but that would also mark the end of any shelter or support they might receive from the institution. The bargain of such institutions was that women submitted to the imposed regime, or they were ejected. Some women accepted this exchange, but others objected and either left, or refused to enter at all (Musgrove and Michell, 2018; Swain, 2007). There is no simple characterisation of these kinds of welfare institutions. They did impose a disciplinary regime, but they also provided an option that some women felt was better than the others available to them in their moments of desperation. None of these tensions, nor the sense of such refuges existing within a kind of carceral network that contained and confined women whom society viewed with suspicion and disdain, are suggested within the exhibition. The narrative is, rather, that the rise of welfare institutions presented a salvation from the cruelties of imprisoning women who were, very often, primarily victims of poverty.

The cell titled “Criminal Children” crafts a similar narrative about the relationship between a dark age of imprisoning children and the arrival of the government child welfare system that was established through the Neglected and Criminal Children's Act 1864. This part of the exhibition opens with a recording, available via a QR code, which paints a stark image of the 1850s when young children were arrested and incarcerated simply because they were completely destitute. A dramatic voice tells visitors that Michael Crimmins was arrested for this reason. The recording continues:

Michael was just 3 years old. At that very young age he was arrested, put on trial in the court, found guilty, sentenced to 6 months in Melbourne gaol, and put in a solitary confinement cell in a cell block like the one you are standing in. But there was somebody he knew there. His mother was also in gaol. However, Michael was not reunited with her. He was kept in a cell all alone (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025c).

Few people, either at the time or in the present day, would view this as a good experience for a young child, but responding to the growing numbers of children in the colony's gaols was only one of the reasons that led to the passing of the 1864 Act. The exhibit correctly notes that it “was the first piece of legislation that addressed the issue of children in gaol” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a), but misses much of the wider social debates about childhood, class, poverty, and religious sectarianism to which the Act was also responding. More importantly, it distracts from the fact that the government's child welfare system simply exchanged one kind of forced incarceration for another, and that in many ways, entry into the child welfare system separated children from their parents at least as much as did the penal system (Musgrove, 2023). Once children were made Wards of the State within the government's child welfare system, they could be separated from their families until they were discharged – sometimes at the age of 18 or even older. Michael Crimmins and his mother may have been separated from one another while in prison, but they were released on the same day and reunited because, in fact, they had entered the system together (Public Record Office Victoria, 1855-1948a; Public Record Office Victoria, 1855-1948b). This part of the Crimmins narrative, as well as the commentary on the extent to which the child welfare system separated families, is missing from the exhibition.

The “Criminal Children” cell also introduces the reformatories that the 1864 Act established for supposedly “criminal” children (as opposed to those, like Michael Crimmins, who would have fallen into the legislations’ definition of “neglected”). The Act enabled magistrates to send children directly to reformatories if they so chose, but many continued to sentence children convicted of crimes to gaol such that, as the exhibition informs visitors, in “1874 approximately 1 in every 200 prisoners at the Melbourne Gaol was a child under the age of 15” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a). “Girls,” the exhibition states, “were often sent to reformatories … [which were] developed for young girls who had committed crimes or were at risk of doing so. They were licensed out to local farms as domestic servants when it was believed they had reformed” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a). The picture painted is of girls being removed to a better situation than they would have faced had they remained in the gaol, but this is strongly contested by the readings that Care-leaver survivor-researchers have provided of the historical sources containing evidence of life within these reformatories in this period (Golding and Wilson, 2019). It is also noteworthy that the only discussion of boys here is that they had better food and labour conditions than the adult male prisoners, and that they were “flogged by cane or birch” until the age of 16 when “cat-o- nine tails awaited” (National Trust of Australia – Victoria, 2025a).

The exhibition's failure to mention that boys, too, were sent from the gaol to reformatories is all the more curious because the exhibition presents Alexander Ross as its visual example of a young person who served a sentence at the gaol. The exhibition reproduces the portion of Ross's criminal register entry that includes his photograph, but examining the original record reveals that just below this is the evidence that upon his release from gaol, he was sent directly to a reformatory (Public Record Office Victoria, 1855-1948a). This omission not only serves to minimise the extent to which the criminal justice and child welfare systems were actively connected, it also misses an opportunity to make the important point that reformatories could deprive young people of their liberty for much longer than their original prison sentences. In 1895, at 14 years of age, Ross was convicted of the indecent assault of his sister and sentenced to 6 months in prison with hard labour and a flogging of 20 strokes with birch. He spent almost three weeks at the Melbourne Gaol, three months at Pentridge Prison (where he was flogged), and was then made a Ward of the State and transferred to a reformatory (Floggings at Pentridge, 1895; Public Record Office, 1864-1923; Public Record Office Victoria, 1855-1948a). The welfare department did not release him on probation until May 1897; his initial six-month sentence would have expired in July 1895. Although the nature of Ross's offence is perhaps not one which lends itself to sympathy from visitors, his case illustrates a wider pattern that is important – that being sent to a reformatory often meant a longer period of incarceration than the law ascribed to the particular offence. Any suggestion that entering the child welfare system was some kind of relief or release from the horrors of prison is, therefore, further problematised.

The decision to end the “Women and Children of the Gaol” exhibition with a cell titled “Salvation Army” which reads as a celebration of the organisation's work is one that would read as particularly problematic from the perspective of Care-leavers – a group whose history is activated within the exhibition and whose positioning, therefore, might reasonably be expected to be carefully considered. The “Salvation Army” cell itself is primarily focused on the organisation's work with people leaving prison, but many of the institutions to which young people were sent from the gaol were run by the Salvation Army, and over the course of multiple national inquiries into historical child welfare in Australia, Salvation Army institutions emerged as amongst the most brutal and dangerous for the children they held, and they deployed coercive confinement as a strategy for separating vulnerable young unmarried mothers from their children shortly after birth (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017; Senate Community Affairs References Committee, 2004; Senate Community Affairs References Committee, 2012). The exhibition does not wrestle with this difficult history at all, and as the final stop in the “Women and Children of the Gaol” section, this is cause for consternation. There are several empty cells adjoining this one, and for a relatively small investment, a new cell could be developed in collaboration with people who have survived welfare institutions to present a counternarrative representing the voices of those who experienced incarceration in the name of welfare, and whose perspectives are not adequately addressed within the current exhibition. Even this, however, is a compromise. Should the celebratory representation of the Salvation Army remain at all? The ground floor's clear stance against the death penalty reveals no feeling of obligation to present an even-handed counterview, and this is despite relatively strong support for the death penalty amongst the Australian population (McCarthy and Brunton-Smith, 2024). Australia's national inquiry into children who experienced institutional and other forms of out-of-home placement, and the government's subsequent apology and support scheme, both recognised the centrality of representing survivor-centred histoires of welfare institutions, and in spaces such as the Old Melbourne Gaol, where this history is already invoked, a call to address this issue of representation seems pressing.

Conclusion

As this article has argued, there are aspects of the permanent exhibition at the Old Melbourne Gaol which tend to invite the site's consumption as entertainment, but there are also strong efforts to encourage visitors to reflect on the role of historical criminal justice systems in society's unfair treatment of several disempowered groups. Indeed, particularly given the challenges of navigating complex histories in the limited space available within this kind of exhibition, the site tackles issues of historical gendered violence, racism, and the criminalisation of poverty well. These are all issues with present-day relevance, and topics with which similar museums across the globe continue to grapple – they can sit uneasily with the necessity of such sites having commercial appeal (Oettler and Pérez Benavides, 2025; Pauls et al., 2023; Stone et al., 2018; Strange and Kempa, 2003; Welch, 2013; Wilson, 2008; Wood et al., 2017). While the permanent exhibition at the Old Melbourne Gaol leans towards closed narratives of these challenging topics which tend to explain the terrible conditions then that led to suffering within the gaol, they do not impose the same “problem solved” narrative as that suggested by the exhibition's portrayal of welfare. Thus, as an example of how prison museums can present storytelling that problematises the uneven and unjust impacts of historical criminal justice systems, the Old Melbourne Gaol provides some useful illustrations. Not all visitors engaged in conversations about historical criminal justice will apply insights gained to the present day, but some will, and so this kind of critical public history has a valuable social function.

However, this article has also illustrated that the site presents social welfare as a source of salvation, positioning it as a benevolent force that attempted to undo the harms of a criminal justice system that disproportionately harmed vulnerable people who were essentially victims of circumstance. This mitigates the potential impact of the site's critique of penal incarceration because it suggests that while historical criminal justice systems did not understand the complex needs of vulnerable people, the rise of social welfare (whether philanthropic of government-sponsored) alleviated this problem. The persistence of people from a range of stigmatised, racialised, marginalised, and vulnerable groups being overrepresented in penal institutions across the globe reveals this to be untrue. Furthermore, the messaging about the nature of welfare itself is problematic. Visitors to the exhibition as it stands could well be forgiven for leaving under the misapprehension that colonial welfare systems were not inherently carceral. That is not only a misunderstanding of those historical systems, but also deflects attention away from the profound ways in which welfare and criminal justice systems in the present day push people back and forth between one another, and their complicity in enforcing various forms of coercive confinement on growing numbers of vulnerable people, both in Australia and across the globe.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Nell Musgrove

Funding

This article was produced with assistance from Australian Research Council funding, project number DP210101275

Australian Research Council (grant number DP210101275).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Narrative and counter-narrative: Reinscribing carceral welfare histories at the old Melbourne Gaol

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction: Why should we connect histories of welfare and criminal justice?

Engaging critical narratives at the Gaol

The imbalanced narrative around welfare institutions

Conclusion

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

References