The Shameful Isles is a unique resource on northwest Australia’s fatal experiment with medical apartheid. In 1907, the Western Australian government began a program of forcibly removing supposedly ill Aboriginal people to purpose built lock hospitals on Bernier and Dorre Islands, off the coast of Carnarvon. There, they were trapped against their will and exposed to experimental drugs and procedures. Many never returned and are buried in unmarked graves in the sandhills of Bernier and Dorre. Comprised of meticulous research and contemporaneous accounts of patient-prisoners, politicians, stockmen, nurses, policemen and journalists, The Shameful Isles reveals one of Western Australia’s most tragic acts of state-sponsored oppression from which First Nations peoples are still recovering.
