The 'Ghoulish' query has begun to list gaol musuems - but to my surprise,
not a whole lot.  Australia, by contrast, is crawling with gaol museums -
well, most of our colonies started as penal out-stations of Empire ...
There are two big, old prison sites: Norfolk Island, a small island off the
New South Wales coast, a place of secondary punishment (ie, for convicts
already serving sentences), from the late 1790s to the 1840s, with a
fearsom reputation; and Port Arthur,Van Diemens Land (now Tasmania), a huge
convict complex from the 1840s to the 1870s, and thereafter a home for
ex-convicts who'd become poor mad paupers.  Both Norfolk and Port Arthur
are today picturesque sites of greenery and ruins, but both have some
ghoulsih interpretive activities to commemorate the horrors that went on
there.
Then there are a couple of mid-Victorian prisons which have been
decommissioned only in the last five years - Adelaide Gaol, South
Australia, and Fremantle Prison, Western Australia - they are really spooky
and awful  - you know that people actually lived (and died) in these
ghastly places VERY RECENTLY.
And then there are endless local police-stations cum 10-cell gaols that are
preserved as local history museums.  Some are spectacularly awful, to the
point of outrageousness.
I know this isn't going to be of interest to Money Magazine's halloween
edition, but thinking about the quantity of gaols preserved here seems to
say something weird (or characteristic?) about the land of Oz...
 
Linda Young
Cultural Heritage Management
University of Canberra
[log in to unmask],canbera.edu.au