More than quokkas: The Indigenous islanders bringing Rottnest’s dark past to light

Do quokkas really smile? I’m watching a pair of these miniature marsupials foraging on a pristine beach at the edge of Thomson Bay on Rottnest Island, and the ‘grins’ that have brought them global selfie stardom play across their faces. When the Dutch colonialist Willem de Vlamingh set foot here in 1696, he thought the Australian island was infested with vermin and so named it ’t Eylandt ’t Rottnest (Rats’ Nest Island). Today, quokkas—and pristine beaches—are a major draw for the half million visitors who make the hour-long ferry crossing from Perth each year.

This is the Rottnest Island I had read about. But a few minutes’ walk from the Settlement (a cluster of historic buildings and tourist services), in a quiet patch of scrubland where the chatter of holidaymakers is lost to the breeze, is the Rottnest Island I had not. Here, beneath the shady pines, lie the unmarked graves of at least 373 Aboriginal men and boys, some of the 4,000 Aboriginal males from across Western Australia who were incarcerated on Rottnest—also known as Wadjemup in local Noongar language—between 1838 and 1931. 

Some were as young as eight, others as old as 70, many of them were arrested and sent to Rottnest for traditional practices such as carrying spears or hunting. Hard labor, harsh conditions, disease, and violence all took their toll. A sign in the burial ground reads: “Kwidja baalap yey” (the past is still present). And now a new series of projects is striving to reconcile the island’s past with its present, and to shed light on the true Wadjemup story.

In the Settlement’s old mill house, built by Aboriginal prisoners in 1857, this process is well underway. The Wadjemup Museum now charts the island’s complex history, with the story of Aboriginal incarceration being told alongside displays on early lighthouses, World War II defenses, and the volunteers that have been running environmental tours on the island’s flora and fauna for the past 40 years.

Nearby, the displays at the old prison are chilling, showing men tied up in chains. Aboriginal prisoners were also made to perform the punishing task of grinding flour using the millstone now placed in the center of the museum’s main room. The cracked wooden door of a cell in the Quod, the prison’s main building, hints at the horribly cramped conditions within.

“For reconciliation to work, we need all of Western Australia to own this, it was done by the WA government to our dear old men. To me, reconciliation looks like a makarrata, if you like, a coming together.”

- Brendan Moore, Whadjuk Noongar man

Tourism arrived on Wadjemup in 1911, and as it took hold, the largest known Aboriginal burial ground in Australia was dismissed in its entirety and used as a budget campsite called Tentland. This shift from prison era to one of tourism was clearly marked in 1917 when the island was declared a Class A Reserve for public recreation. Then In 1931 the prison was closed permanently and the Quod was converted into a hotel.

Tentland was shut down in 2007, and the Quod site was handed back to the Rottnest Island Authority (RIA) in 2018, a move recognized at the time as the first significant step towards reconciliation, given they had Indigenous representation on the board. 

More momentous steps have been taken in recent years. In 2020, the RIA launched the Wadjemup Project, a state-wide Aboriginal-led initiative focused on finding the most appropriate way to formally acknowledge and commemorate the Aboriginal men and boys who were incarcerated on the island.

“The Wadjemup Project is the next iteration on the reconciliation journey,” says Brendan Moore, a Whadjuk Noongar man who is part of the project’s Wadjemup Aboriginal Reference Group. His own grandfather was held prisoner on the island in the late 1890s. “For reconciliation to work, we need all of Western Australia to own this, it was done by (the) WA government to our dear old men. To me, reconciliation looks like a makarrata, if you like, a coming together.”

A significant focus of the project is the memorialization of the Wadjemup Aboriginal Burial Ground, as it’s currently known, and to give Aboriginal people whose ancestors were imprisoned here, and are buried at the site, the chance to have their say. 

“These men were our leaders, Elders, warriors, and decision makers,” says Karen Jacobs, a Whadjuk Noongar woman who was the first Aboriginal person to sit on the RIA board and is now part of the Wadjemup Project Steering Group, which leads the consultation for the memorialization. “(They) were incarcerated for protecting their people and country and should be laid to rest with honors,” she says. 

Although acknowledging and addressing the island’s prison-era past is vital, it is also paramount to local Whadjuk Noongar people that visitors recognize it as part of a much longer, and deeper, connection with the land. “Wadjemup is an essential element in an ancient Dreamtime (creation) story embedded in Whadjuk culture,” says Brendan. In Noongar Nyitting (Dreaming) Wadjemup was created during the ‘cold times’ by two spirit brothers. 

“Its recent use as a prisoner island is a blip in time compared to its true cultural significance,” he tells me. Before it was cut off from the mainland by rising seas at the end of the last Ice Age, Wadjemup was an important site for Noongar people, who lived, hunted and held ceremonies here for tens of thousands of years. They never returned as inhabitants, until they were forced to, but it remained a place of enormous spiritual significance.

Standing at West End, where the island tapers into a narrow neck of rock and eventually runs out in a wild landscape of serrated limestone and thunderous waves, I can see why. A snaking boardwalk leads to what feels like the end of the world. It is here, Whadjuk Noongar people believe, where a person passes into the afterlife, carried to their final resting place by Mamong (the whale).

Gathering up a handful of soft damp sand, I paddle into the shallows and scatter the grains into the water, an action that lets the spirits know that I respect the boodja, their land.

“Wadjemup means ‘the place across the water where the spirits are’,” Karen tells me. “And it was seen as either a transition point between the world of the living and Kooranup, the home of the dead, or as a part of Kooranup itself.”

West End lies halfway along the Ngank Wen Bidi, or Sunset Trail, part of a network of hiking routes that showcase the 7.3-square-mile (19 square kilometers) island’s natural beauty and highlight important Aboriginal sites. I’ve come to Wadejmup in August—part of the spring season of Djilba, according to the Noongar calendar, when the second rains fill up waterholes—and the salt lakes that are the focus of the Gabbi Karniny Bidi trail are aflutter with banded stilts, red-necked avocets and ruddy turnstone birds. In former days, Aboriginal prisoners were made to harvest the thick crust of rock salt that gathers on the dried-up lake beds here each summer.

Throughout the trail, there are signs of the work the RIA is doing to restore the island’s flora. “Every year, we plant thousands of native seedlings across the island,” Jason Banks, its executive director, tells me. “Rottnest Island pine, Rottnest daisy, samphire, and many more, all grown in the island nursery.” 

The proposed Wadjemup Conservation Centre, Jason explains, will be a focal point for informing visitors about the island’s unique plants and wildlife—quokkas and all. 

On the Ngank Yira Bidi, or Sunrise Trail, at the eastern end of the island, I follow the path as it leads along Henrietta Rocks, one of the most diverse seagrass habitats on the West Australia coast. I learn that the seagrass beds here provide a vital nursery for juvenile marine species and were once a rich hunting ground for the Whadjuk Noongar people, who fished for bream during the Bunuru and Djeran seasons (February to May).

On the Wardan Nara Bidi trail, or Salmon Sea Trail, the track weaves through Watson Glade, where Aboriginal prisoners used to spend their ‘free’ Sundays. In this place, men from the Kimberley region in the state’s far north would craft spear points made from glass, some of which are now on display in the Wadjemup Museum.

It’s the museum that I’m thinking of as I head for my ferry back to Perth. Or more specifically, a small display that had caught my eye—a request for visitors to carry out their own ceremony of sorts, as a way of acknowledging the Whadjuk Noongar people as the island’s traditional owners. 

So I make my way back down to the beach. The smiling quokkas are gone, and the ebbing tide is retreating from the shoreline, too. Gathering up a handful of soft damp sand, I paddle into the shallows and scatter the grains into the water, an action that lets the spirits know that I respect the boodja, their land.  

It’s overdue—I should have done this when I first arrived—but still important. Much like everything that is happening, and has happened, on this affecting and extraordinary island. 

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