Boab Prison Tree

The prison in the name looks like a fiction. Historians Kristyn Harman and Elizabeth Grant, and separately the anthropologist Kim Akerman, traced the story of Aboriginal prisoners held inside this hollow boab back to a 1948 newspaper description of an artwork, and to a different, similarly named tree at Wyndham. No evidence has turned up that anyone was ever locked in this trunk. What is documented is older and quieter. In 1916 the anthropologist Herbert Basedow photographed it as a living boab used by Aboriginal people as a shelter and a burial place, and recorded bleached human bones inside it. The tree carries real significance for the Nyikina and Warrwa people, and that has nothing to do with the legend that put it on postcards. It is a giant. The one measurement on record, taken in 1905, gives a trunk four metres through, which is close to twelve and a half metres around. The same record put its age at roughly 500 years, which would make it past 600 now, though that reads as a round guess rather than a dating, and radiocarbon work since has been reported to make it considerably older. Nobody has settled it. It stands a few kilometres south of Derby on the road toward the Gibb River Road, free to visit, ringed by a post and wire fence put there because visitors compacted its roots and cut into its bark.