Proserpine Prison Hulk (adult prison phase): prison profile
QLD | Decommissioned | Australian Prison Directory
Source-linked profile checked 2026-11-12. Dates and capacities below describe the stated source period, not necessarily today’s available beds or prisoner population.
About this facility
A floating adult prison anchored near the Brisbane River mouth at Lytton, separate from the mainland gaols and St Helena Island. Queensland Police history records the purchase and refit of Margaret Eliza as Proserpine in 1864. Prisoners aboard helped build St Helena’s establishment. The later boys’ reformatory aboard the same vessel is acknowledged as a different institutional phase, not included in these adult-prison dates.
Classification: Historical adult floating prison; subsequent juvenile reformatory outside the adult-prison phase.
Contact details
Address: Historic anchorage near the mouth of the Brisbane River, Lytton, Queensland; no fixed prison street address
No current dedicated contact verified.
No operating prison or verified dedicated heritage visitor contact. No contemporary police or school contact is substituted.
Government institutional listings sometimes give broad 1863–1886 dates that combine or obscure vessel phases. This adult-prison record follows the QPS purchase/refit chronology and the historical atlas’s 1864–1867 period, without claiming an exact first or final reception day. The later reformatory’s 1881 relocation is not prison closure.
Opening, closure and history
Opening: 1864 — Purchase, refit and prison role documented in Queensland Police timeline
Closing: 1867 — End of adult prison-hulk period in historical atlas; separate later reformatory use followed
1866: Prisoners from the hulk worked on St Helena construction
1881: Later boys’ reformatory moved off the vessel to Lytton; not the adult-prison closure date
Capacity
Capacity has not yet been independently verified.
Deaths in custody: totals and limitations
No complete facility-level series is established here for suicide, medical or natural causes, homicide, other causes, Aboriginal deaths or combined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths. Missing data does not mean zero deaths. Selected cases below, where available, are not lifetime or reporting-period totals. “Murder” is a legal conclusion and is not substituted for a source’s classification.
Photograph
No verified licensed photograph is installed in this profile. No stock or generated image is presented as a photograph of this prison.
Sources
Using this profile
Confirm visiting arrangements and current contacts with the corrections department or heritage operator. Heritage visitor contacts are not operational prison contacts. General information only, not legal advice.
This directory includes prison complexes and components and is not a complete Australian operational or historical census. Component capacities must not be added to their parent complex a second time.
Comments