The Lure of the Lash: Spectacular Violence and White Ethnonationalism at an Australian Convict Site
Abstract
Like the transformation of a rice plantation and site of Black enslavement into an English-style garden discussed by Connor Hamm in this volume, the Port Arthur Penal Settlement in southeastern lutruwita/Tasmania has navigated the process of reinventing a site of involuntary and often brutal labor as a tourist destination, a transformation already underway at its closure in the late-nineteenth century. However, while U.S. plantations suppress their violent histories through reinvention, Australian penal settlements instead offer up their brutality as spectacle. If Hamm’s exploration of the Black history of Magnolia Gardens troubles romanticizing it as a space of white leisure—as surely it must—how can such revelry in spectacularized violence against convict bodies coexist with the meticulous unearthing of their stories? I suggest that the answer lies partly in the historically specific form of white ethnonationalism that has grown up around convict narratives in Australia, in which white tourists identify themselves with convicts rather than their masters.