The uses of rurality in twentieth-century youth justice: an Australian case study, 1900-1994

Abstract

In 1900, the Westbrook Reformatory for Boys, an institution holding both young people convicted of criminal offences and those deemed to be neglected children, was established in a farming region in Queensland, Australia. The institution would remain in the same location until 1994. By then, it had been rebranded as a Youth Detention Centre, housing teenagers convicted of crimes or on remand rather than the original mix of neglected and offending children and young people. In the institution's earliest stages, rurality and agricultural labour, were central to its work. By the century's end, Westbrook’s rural setting, its distance from the capital city, and its inclusion of a working farm were key contributing factors to its closure. Drawing on archival data, newspaper records, memoirs of former inmates, and the findings of three inquiries into the institution, this essay seeks to explain how and why rurality, perceived as central to projects of moral reform in 1900, became understood primarily through the lens of inconvenience and danger by 1994. In doing so, it argues that the moral and rehabilitative discourses associated with rurality did not necessarily become obsolete or irrelevant by the end of the twentieth century. Instead, they interacted with shifting cultural expectations about the treatment of institutionalised children, as well as changing economic circumstances, creating a situation in which the perceived value of rurality alone was insufficient to justify the continued presence of a youth justice institution at Westbrook.