Carceral Archipelago (Melbourne), 2025
Immigration detention in Australia is often understood through its formal sites, yet the government has also designated a wide range of everyday infrastructures, such as hotels, schools, hospitals, as detention facilities under APOD legislation. While the scale and duration of their use vary, hotels in particular have functioned as long-term detention sites, where people have been confined indoors for years under highly restrictive conditions.
Drawing on data from 2018 to 2021, this map reconstructs Melbourne’s detention network, documenting the sites officially designated as places of detention. It also analyses the road connections between them, highlighting how forced transfers between sites are used punitively, to separate individuals, or to punish those who speak out against their conditions.
In this representation, the city itself is redacted. What emerges instead is the underlying spatial form of detention: a sprawling carceral archipelago spread across Melbourne.