Abstract
This chapter examines the establishment, duration and end of the ‘Save Fairlea’ vigil. The vigil maintained a continuous and visible activist presence outside Fairlea Women’s Prison for five months during the latter half of 1993. It came to serve as a campaign headquarters in the fight against Fairlea’s closure, which would see women, once again, transferred en masse to a high-security men’s prison. The Save Fairlea vigil monitored the prison’s activities, especially prisoner transfers, subjecting official movements in and out of the prison to increased public scrutiny and activist interventions. The vigil demonstrates that sustained protest at the prison gates can open up possibilities for an abolitionist imagination, as activists’ conversations at the camp and reflections on ‘bearing witness’ to the prison and its mundane routines sparked aspirational ideas and visions for a world without prisons. The daily life of the vigil and the broader campaign to ‘save Fairlea’ are captured in the collective diaries, which now serve as an invaluable archival resource, shedding light on the debates, practicalities and critical self-reflections that shaped this era of the movement. The vigil concluded in December 1993, when the state government announced that Fairlea would remain open, but only until construction of a new private women’s prison was completed.
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Notes
- 1.
The text from a banner at the Save Fairlea vigil , as shown in photographs held in the personal archives of Catherine Gow .
- 2.
At a time when there were no smart or mobile phones, the phone tree was a critical communications tool for activists—comprising a list of volunteers who agreed to be on call and come to the prison gates if there was an emergency. In the event that authorities made a move to transfer the women to Pentridge, the vigil volunteers were tasked to trigger the phone tree into action, which involved notifying the first person they were able to reach on the list. The onus would then be on the person who received this call from the vigil to notify the next available person on the list, and so on. The idea was to summon as many volunteers to the vigil campsite as possible, and as quickly as possible. For those on duty at the vigil, these calls needed to be made via the public telephone box or, if they were lucky, the sole mobile phone of 3CR Community Radio which was sometimes left at the campsite.
- 3.
Now the Australian Services Union.
- 4.
These slogans have been drawn from Catherine Gow’s collection of photographs documenting the vigil. The photographs (and the listing of slogans in text) are presented in chronological order as they appear in the photograph albums, held in the personal archives of Catherine Gow.
- 5.
The CWA , a traditionally conservative group of women located in regional areas of Victoria and an unlikely group of allies, had been inspired to support the SFWPC after campaign representatives undertook a speaking tour in country areas (Gow Interview 2014).
- 6.
Women on the Line #53, 4/9/1988. 3CR Community Radio , Fitzroy.
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Carlton, B., Russell, E.K. (2018). The ‘Save Fairlea’ Vigil: Abolitionist Imaginings and Unexpected Outcomes. In: Resisting Carceral Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01695-1_6
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