AustLit

'The perimeter of  the New Gaol on Norfolk Island features imposing walls set with three archways, one high and two low. The setting sun throws long shadows onto vivid green grass and the light bleaches the view through the arches to a gentle haze. This is all that remains of the pentagonal panopticon built during the third phase of convict transportation (1825–1855) to this island situated some 1,500 kilometres off the east coast of Australia. And though the prison’s buildings are long gone, these arches were once a gateway into the architecture of Great Britain’s global penal system – the ‘ne plus ultra…of convict degradation’, as Robert Hughes put it in The Fatal Shore (Knopf, 1986). What is now an elegant, slightly surreal parkland – a landscape that is picture-book perfect – is also preternaturally silent: a remnant of the comprehensive system of colonial justice and punishment that first brought the authority and might of the British Empire to this part of the world.' (Introduction)