It wasn’t until the twentieth century that Rottnest became a holiday resort. Before then it had served as a native prison and boys’ reformatory, Corporal L. Welch superintending the inaugural batch of ten felonious Aborigines in 1838, a mere nine years after the first white settlement of the Swan. Just how badly the Aborigines imprisoned on Rottnest over the next eighty years or so were in need of restraint and reform is a quodlibet that can be tackled variously, according to where one stands on the question of property. But, as far as I could tell from the exhibition of photographs and documents in the excellent Island Museum, punishment ran disproportionate to misdemeanour. Where the shock of exile didn’t hurt, flogging and excessive chaining, to say nothing of influenza, pneumonia and measles in cramped unhygienic conditions, did. And all this as retribution for what? In Mangarmana’s and Mangawalter’s case, sheep stealing. They received six and twelve months respectively. Beedly was given six months for cleaning out the contents of a hut. Kyser was in for a year for assaulting a Chinaman.

In fairness to the authorities on the mainland they did on more than one occasion instigate enquiries into the treatment of native prisoners, even going so far as to appoint a certain Francis Fraser Armstrong as Storekeeper, Interpreter, and Moral Agent. The terms and responsibilities of Armstrong’s Moral Agency were these: he was to be allowed free access to the Aborigines, was to be present at any bodily punishments, and was expected ‘to attend to everything which may in any way tend to improving the habits and morals of the prisoners or to their advancement in civilisation and their gradually imbibing the great truths of revelation and the fundamental rules of Christianity’.