Hyde Park Barracks<\/a>, which was designed by a convict architect and has been turned into a museum focusing on Sydney\u2019s days as a penal colony. (Not sure if my making this museum my one tourist-attraction priority is more about me stereotyping Australia, or me being a self-parody at all times. YES LET\u2019S GO TO THE PRISON MUSEUM, THAT SOUNDS FUN.) I don\u2019t have a huge amount to say about it; if you\u2019re ever in Sydney you absolutely should go. It\u2019s an extremely moving experience. A very text-heavy museum, especially given that parts of it are clearly aimed at children (its mascot is a rat! and they give kids a map they can use to go through the museum finding all the rats, and if you \u201ccatch\u201d them all you get a prize I think), but you know, it\u2019s probably okay that kids will likely get distracted before they get to the wall captions about the development of surveillance to prevent prison sex.<\/p>\nHonestly, I found this museum so affecting. It brought home yet again how America hides away its prison culture. We\u2019re pretty much the opposite of penal-colony Sydney, where you could see chain gangs in the streets and hear floggings\u2013but where you could also have whole neighborhoods created by convicts as their second chance at making a good home. A place where people genuinely understood what you had been through: what you had done wrong, why you did it, and what you suffered for it.<\/p>\n
Lots of powerful details: the page from a convict\u2019s Bible, opened to the parable of the prodigal son; the little display about \u201cchain migration,\u201d explaining how people really would write back to their families in Britain to say, \u201cIt\u2019s not so bad here! Try stealing something and see if you can join me!\u201d; all the pipes people smoked; the lists of crimes for which you could be transported for life, which ranged from \u201cstealing curled hair\u201d to homicide. There\u2019s an openness about how the powerful and moneyed interests often shape what\u2019s considered a crime and what the punishment is. There\u2019s a really amazing display with a flogging post and excerpts from descriptions of corporal punishment: a careful, restrained diary of punishment, which often counsels against excess but never quite reaches empathy.<\/p>\n
The museum itself doesn\u2019t share that defect. I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019ve been to museums in America which glamorized criminals, but never a museum which empathized with prisoners. Hyde Park Barracks is basically on the side of the prisoners: a theological category (the status of \u201cprisoner\u201d is pretty important to Christian faith and practice) distinct from moral categories like guilt\/innocence.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I\u2019m in Sydney, and it\u2019s amazing. Beautiful weather (and what I\u2019m gonna call sublime weather, the day we went out to Botany Bay and watched the swells breaking on the sandstone in front of a stormy sky), lovely people, majestic cockatoos which sound like fishwives, magpies, aggressive little mynahs harassing giant ravens, ibises rooting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[171,101,25,172,78,79,106,107,387],"class_list":["post-8316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-abuse-of-power-comes-as-no-surprise","tag-america","tag-england-your-england","tag-every-day-is-self-parody-day","tag-home-is-anywhere-you-hang-your-head","tag-moral-memories-of-the-past","tag-no-more-cotton-pickin-prisons","tag-prayers-to-st-joseph-cafasso","tag-under-capricorn"],"yoast_head":"\n
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