Prison Tourism

In order to understanding the purpose of dark tourism research is to determine the domestic tourists, who visit the Ulucanlar Prison Museum, motivating factors and positive and negative feelings. In the research, among the qualitative research methods, content analysis is preferred to determine the visitors motivating factors and their positive and negative feelings. Total 127 reviews based on domestic tourists comments, are kept to content analysis. In this case, while the research’s ideal population creats all domestic tourists visiting Ulucanlar Prison Museum, domestic tourists who left comments about Ulucanlar Prison Museum on www.tripadvisor.com website, creats real population. In the research, according to visitors reviews classified that 6 dimensions (motivation of visitors, both positive and negative senses of visitors, the prison museum activities, experiences, suggestions to other visitors and wishes) are identified.

The heritage-listed Hay Gaol in southwestern New South Wales, in addition to other functions, served as a locked institution for adolescent girls. The Gaol now functions as a museum and is also the location for the annual Australia Day celebrations for the town of Hay.  However, the exhibits in the Hay Gaol Museum focus more on the town’s settler history than on its previous carceral function. This disembodied presence may symbolise a nation’s refusal to acknowledge the importance of material culture to Forgotten Australians.

In order to understanding the purpose of dark tourism research is to determine the domestic tourists, who visit the Ulucanlar Prison Museum, motivating factors and positive and negative feelings. In the research, among the qualitative research methods, content analysis is preferred to determine the visitors motivating factors and their positive and negative feelings. Total 127 reviews based on domestic tourists comments, are kept to content analysis. In this case, while the research’s ideal population creats all domestic tourists visiting Ulucanlar Prison Museum, domestic tourists who left comments about Ulucanlar Prison Museum on www.tripadvisor.com website, creats real population. In the research, according to visitors reviews classified that 6 dimensions (motivation of visitors, both positive and negative senses of visitors, the prison museum activities, experiences, suggestions to other visitors and wishes) are identified.

Old Melbourne Gaol is one of the premier tourist destinations of Melbourne, offering access to the city’s oldest prison. It houses, amongst other exhibitions, the death masks of some of the more famous prisoners executed at the Gaol, including that of the bushranger Ned Kelly. This paper reports on 101 interviews undertaken with visitors to Old Melbourne Gaol in 2011. These interviews were collected as part of a wide-ranging study of visitors to museum and heritage sites across 45 different sites and exhibitions in Australia, England and the USA. Collectively, the interviews at the Gaol represent perhaps the highest frequency of banal and platitudinous responses to any other site in the study. This paper explores why, and discusses the politically conservative consequences of this response for Australian attitudes and understandings of the history of incarceration and class and ethnic inequality. The paper documents and explores the ways in which platitudes, and other thought-terminating clichés, were utilised by visitors as they made choices to close down their emotional engagements and empathy with the history on view. Drawing on recent pragmatic debates on the role of emotion generally, and empathy in particular, in fostering the development of historical and political consciousness, the paper argues that tourism at Old Melbourne Gaol facilitates at best an ambiguous response to Australia’s early convict history, while facilitating continuing misrecognition of issues of inequity.