ABSTRACT
The long-running Australian television show Prisoner (1979-86) and its contemporary reimagining, Wentworth (2013–), have both attracted large audiences and built dedicated fanbases worldwide. What is it about this Australian carceral imaginary that has attracted such intensity? This chapter answers this question through a reading of Wentworth, arguing that the series stages a radical theory of law that takes on the Western liberal legal imaginary and that, in their passionate engagement with the series, viewers are in part responding to these legal questions. Taking as a starting point the axiom that state law is never the only law operating in a particular context, we argue that Wentworth has worldwide traction partly because it explicitly stages various iterations of legal pluralities and their outcomes to demonstrate the failure of state law to provide justice. Like Prisoner, Wentworth foregrounds urgent questions of lawfulness and justice, something that is particularly compelling because these questions of law and justice are examined from radical, marginalized positions (gendered, raced, queered). Wentworth departs from Prisoner in terms of the show’s multiple narratives of complicity that, we argue, thematize the impossibility of escaping violence within the inherently compromised and compromising legacies of colonial pasts and neoliberal modernities. This chapter argues that Australia’s particular carceral imaginary, which follows Western traditions of representing hell and underworld narratives, allows a perverse articulation of legal pluralities that are uniquely Australian, while also being of allegorical significance globally.
