Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Australia’s Places of Confinement, 1788-1988
Dates:
7 December 1988 – 14 January 1989
Artists:
George Ainslie, Edward Henry Alder Jr, J. Armstrong, Joseph Backler, George Barney and Mortimer William Lewis, James Blackburn, Henry Louis Bertrand, J.R. Blackett, Thomas 'Satan' Browne, Charles Bryant, G.T. Buller, John Degotardi, Augustus Earle, Peter Edgeley, William Fernyhough, S.T. Gill, Henry H. Glover Ambrose Hallen, Richard Hamilton, William H. Jarrett, Gustav Joachimi, Frederick Kawereau and George Vivian, Roger Kelsall, Thomas Lafarelle, Henry Laing, Thomas Jane Lempriere, W.F.E. Liardet, Henry William Lugard, E.L. Mitchell, Anthony Occhiuto, Water Preston, John Skinner Prout, T.E. Robinson Robert Russel, John Michael Skipper, Thomas Seller, Owen Stanley, Richard Roach Jewell, George Raper, C.G. Ross, William Strutt, Richard George Suter, Alexander Waddell, Samuel White, Henry A. Williams, Henry Wray
Curator:
James Semple Kerr
Opened by:
W. Kidston (Director-General, Ministry of Housing and Construction)
Location:
Monash University Gallery
Monash University, Clayton Campus
About the exhibition
This architecturally focused exhibition presented visual material documenting Australian prisons and asylums, from early colonial times to the controversial high-tech solutions of the 1970s and ’80s.
The exhibition was positioned as particularly timely in light of the ongoing public scrutiny of correctional institutions, including the 1972 Inquiry into Allegations of Brutality and Ill Treatment at H.M. Prison Pentridge, and the 1978 Royal Commission into New South Wales Prisons. As Richard G Fox, Reader in Law at Monash University, remarked in a lecture accompanying the exhibition: ‘Prisons are a secret world. They have been, and most probably still are, more cruelly punitive than the public imagines’.
Conceived by art historian Joan Kerr AM and architectural historian James Semple Kerr AM, the exhibition featured original architectural plans and drawings, watercolours and sketches, photographs and architectural models. The institutional buildings documented ranged from some of the earliest constructed during European colonisation, to more recent designs such as Parklea Correctional Centre in New South Wales and the Metropolitan Remand Centre in Melbourne.
Acknowledgements:
This exhibition was held in association with the Australian Bicentennial Authority.
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Image: Joseph Backler, View of Bathurst 1847, oil on canvas on composition board, 55 x 88.5 cm. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney