I’ve been taking my students to Peel Island for a number of years now. As a site for experimenting with digital recording for heritage, you couldn’t get much better. It’s both close and remote – accessible only by boat, yet about an hour from Brisbane’s CBD. It’s old and decaying – in a constant state of turning to rust and rot, and falling into a beautiful pile of corrugated iron and weather boards. Yet it is also a place holding the secrets of isolation and segregation, of locking away the sick and inebriated, and deciding how to treat them based on race and gender.
In 1907 the Lazaret – a place for the treatment of Leprosy, now termed Hansen’s Disease – was established, the same year as the Barambah Mission, where Aboriginal people were incarcerated for their own ‘protection’. In a similar vein, the Peel Island Lazaret held those with Leprosy against their will, enabled by the Leprosy act just before the turn of the 10th Century, safely away from the outside world with little chance of escape from the island setting. Thea architectural setting was unique: separate tiny ‘Queenslander’ cottages for each patient, making sure separation was maintained, despite all patients already being infected with the now easily treatable disease. But women were in a separate compound to men, behind a double-fence; and more drastic still so-called ‘coloured’ patients, that is anyone not white, were in corrugated iron sheds, shared by many, lacking windows or initially, even a floor.
While conditions gradually improved on the site, the buildings remind us of an era when race, gender and illness could drastically change one’s circumstances, curtailing the most basic freedoms.
My students and I visited the site for two days in March 2016 to scan and record the slowly collapsing buildings, and those which have been restored and will survive. Taking three scanning systems we captured the overall site context using a GeoSLAM Zeb1 device, the building details for just a few select examples using a Leica P-16, and some interiors and objects using a DotProduct DPI-7. In the next months we’ll prepare the data for uploading to CyArk, where Peel Island Lazaret will have its own page thanks to the generosity of Friends of Peel Island, and the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection.
We were enabled to take this trip by our research partners Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, QUT Robotics’ Professor Jonathan Roberts and his student Troy Cordie. Troy, who is also affiliated with CSIRO Australia’s National Science Agency, brought his honours project robot – “Sandy” – along to scan the Lazaret’s Doctor’s Residence, too fragile to walk within. We also thank Quandamoooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation, who represent the Traditional Owners of Teerk Ro Ra (Peel Island), who continue to care and manage the place with dedication and wisdom, and whose rangers accompanied us on this site visit.
Kelly Greenop 