Heritage, resistance and dissonance: reconstructing Pentridge in a prison tourism theme park

Abstract

ABSTRACT Pentridge Prison was established in 1851 in the Melbourne outer suburb of Coburg in the state of Victoria, Australia. Decommissioned in 1999, the site is marked by 150 years of white colonial violence, trauma, incarceration and death. Twenty-four years on, it has been repurposed to include a mix of residential and commercial developments. More recently, Art Processors have been contracted by the developers to curate new Pentridge tours and visitor experiences. This article will observe how the institutional histories of Pentridge have been curated and represented through the on-site redevelopments and tours. Autoethnographic methods are deployed to document representations of social memory at the site. The framework of hauntology assists to elucidate the affective consequences of erasing landscapes marked by trauma and state-sanctioned violence. The result is a site defined by a deep sense of dissonance, where attempts to memorialise traumatic events, violence and death, are undermined by proximity to what can only be characterised as a prison tourism theme park. Ultimately, Pentridge Prison highlights the highly political process of repurposing penal sites and memorialising difficult histories carry profound implications for addressing contemporary injustices associated with imprisonment.