Western Australia 1904
Aboriginal Concentration Camp

The photo of prisoners is from a book coming out in November this year. http://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/every-mothers-son-is-guilty-policing-the-kimberley-frontier-of-western-australia-1882-1905

The photo, in front of Wyndham gaol, ironically, is designed to show that the treatment of Aboriginal prisoners in Western Australia was humane and orderly. It was issued following Dr Walter Roth’s ‘Royal Commission into the Treatment of the Natives.’ Roth said the criminal justice system operating in the Kimberley was a ‘brutal and outrageous state of affairs.’ Men were arrested by police on horseback, usually without warrants or evidence on various East Kimberley pastoral stations that had been established on the Aboriginal country mostly in the 1880s.

Most (including at times children as young as ten ) were charged with the ‘unlawful possession of beef’ for allegedly spearing the introduced cattle and received sentences of up to three years gaol often including a flogging. On police patrols over…