Powerful and unsettling, this poem gives voice to the haunted history of Rottnest Island, once used as a prison for Aboriginal people. The boy's voice becomes a guide through its layers of violence and erasure -- unmarked graves, starvation, hangings --beneath the surface of today's tourist idyll. The repetition of "Starved, Hung, Banished" tolls like a bell, reminding readers that beneath leisure and landscape lies memory and mourning. Winnaitch, "the forbidden place," is revealed as a site of both pain and ancestral endurance.