56 Detention Hotels, 2024
In 2021, a senate standing committee uncovered that from 1 January 2018 to 31 January 2021, there were 170 Alternative Places of Detention used in Australia at any time, and of these, 56 APODs were classified as hotel-type APODs. In most of these cases, the locations and specifics of these detention spaces are not known by the public.
Tracking these sites, satellite imagery to used to interrogate the urban and suburban nature and context of this detention infrastructure. While some of the 56 sites have been identified, many remain concealed. The redacted images reveal gaps in the visibility of the detention network and illustrate the bureaucratic and spatial strategies used to obscure them.