Inventing a colonial dark tourism site: The Derby boab 'prison tree'

A large hollow boab known as the "prison tree" just outside the small town of Derby in Western Australia is a major tourist attraction, visited by thousands of people annually. It is represented as a historic site, where Aboriginal people were incarcerated for opposing "heroic" European pastoralists attempting to found a modern Australia. To understand the "prison tree," it is vital to comprehend the impact on the Aboriginal traditional owners of the expansion of pastoralism to the Kimberley region in the 1880s and 1890s.