Moore River & Carrolup Native Settlements: Archival Evidence

1. Archival Record of State Internment Compounds

The primary archival holdings of the Western Australian State Records Office and Battye Library preserve a devastating, irrefutable documentary record of life inside the Moore River Native Settlement (Mogumber) and Carrolup Native Settlement.¹ Official inspection reports, superintendent daybooks, medical ledgers, and intercepted inmate letters reveal that these state-run institutions operated not as benevolent welfare missions, but as punitive penal settlements designed to isolate and break First Nations families.²

2. Physical Deprivation, Squalor, and Medical Neglect

Archival records detail horrific physical conditions.³ In his 1934 inspection report submitted to the Moseley Royal Commission, medical officer Dr. Davis described Moore River as an unsanitary, disease-ridden camp where over four hundred inmates were housed in rotting timber buildings infested with bedbugs and lice.⁴ Rations consisted almost exclusively of white flour, tea, and salt meat; fresh vegetables and milk were virtually unknown, causing widespread scurvy and rickets among children.⁵ Hospital daybooks record that hundreds of children were treated for advanced trachoma (leading to permanent blindness), scabies, and respiratory pneumonia with minimal medical supplies.⁶

3. The System of Solitary Confinement: The Infamous "Boob"

Discipline was maintained through brutal physical punishment and sensory deprivation.⁷ Both Moore River and Carrolup featured on-site solitary confinement lockups, known universally by inmates as the "boob."⁸ Measuring barely two meters by two meters, constructed from corrugated iron with no windows or floorboards, the "boob" was an uninsulated oven in summer and an icebox in winter.⁹ Children as young as ten who attempted to escape to find their mothers were locked inside the "boob" for up to two weeks on bread and water diets, their heads shaved bald as a mark of public humiliation.¹⁰

4. The Carrolup Art Movement: Defiant Artistic Brilliance

Amidst this deep institutional darkness, Carrolup became the birthplace of one of Australia's most remarkable First Nations art movements.¹¹ Under the encouragement of teacher Noel White in the late 1940s, young Bibbullmun boys (including Revel Cooper, Reynold Hart, and Parnell Dempster) produced breathtaking, luminous pastel drawings depicting the southwestern bush, wildlife, and ancestral country.¹² Exhibited in London and around the world, the Carrolup art movement astonished international audiences, proving that the ancestral soul and creative brilliance of Bibbullmun youth could never be crushed by barbed wire and institutional neglect.¹³