The Sheilas are wrecking the joint / Gwen Harrison
- Bib ID:
- 6936875
- Format:
- Book
- Author:
- Harrison, Gwen, 1947-, creator
- Online Version:
- National Library of Australia digitised item
- Description:
-
- Sydney Impediment Press & Wand'Ring Bark, 2015
- ©2015
- 1 broadside : black and white ; 52.5 x 59.5 cm
- Summary:
-
A black and white image from the work Howl for a black cockatoo by Gwen Harrison and Sue Anderson. Features three stylised human figures, with the title superimposed in the centre in grey lettering. "A/P", "Wrecking the joint" and the creator's signatures appear in pencil at the lower edge.
- Biography/History:
-
In 1869 the notorious convict prison on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour was closed and turned into an industrial school for girls and a separate reformatory. It was renamed 'Biloela' in 1871 to counter the dark stain of 'Cockatoo,' but was nevertheless 'a queer place' for the hundreds of young orphaned and neglected girls (some of whom were sent there as babies) who were kept on this barren, windy and snake-infested crag of rock, in prison cells turned into dormitories The artists' book explores the mad wonderland of their experiences, drawing on an 1873 inquiry which outlined their brutal, inhumane treatment, as well as nursery rhymes and text and images adapted from Lewis Carroll and Sir John Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland. A coda links contemporary misogyny ('the sheilas are wrecking the joint') with the girl's rioting in response to their incarceration, and refers to the Royal Commission into the Institutional Response into Child Sexual Abuse established in 2014, which uncovered a similar harrowing pattern of deprivation and isolation a century later in the Parramatta Training School for Girls, where the Biloela girls were moved to in 1888.
- Notes:
-
- Caption title.
- Also available online http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-237592878
- Subject:
- Other authors/contributors:
- Anderson, Sue, 1948-, artist, binder, printer
- Also Titled:
- Wrecking the joint
- Terms of Use:
- Copyright restrictions may apply.
- Copyright:
-
In Copyright
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Copyright status was determined using the following information:
- Material type:
- Literary Dramatic Musical
- Published status:
- Published
- Publication date:
- 2015
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