The Round House Gaol: Western Australia's first lunatic asylum

This paper is an account of the social history of the Round House Gaol in Fremantle, Western Australia and of those lunatics that were gathered together into its closed geographical space. The first permanent structure, perched on the most elevated and prominent site in Fremantle, was a gaol; the design for which was based on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon or Inspection House, created for the purpose of surveillance and control of inmates. Visible in 1997, the Round House still stands as a dominant, physical marker of the landscape, ranking as a premier historical tourist attraction in Western Australia. But its actual use as a place for the containment of lunatics is only cursorily alluded to. This paper addresses the previously ignored period of 1830-1850.