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In 1921, a serious riot at the South Australian Girls’ Reformatory at Redruth made newspaper headlines across the country. The girls defied the reformatory staff and destroyed government property, while following a pattern of resistance that was common among contemporary, incarcerated women. In the aftermath, some observers blamed an official ban on corporal punishment for the riot, as well as the reformatory staff’s inability to segregate the ‘worst characters’ from other inmates. However, others offered a critique of South Australia’s welfare system as unfairly targeting working-class children for removal from their families in certain conditions. This article investigates the reformatory riot and argues that the underlying reasons for the disturbance, and the subsequent closure of the institution, were more complex than many contemporary observers realised.

‘It was pandemonium let loose’: rioting, resistance and punishment at the early twentieth-century Girls’ Reformatory at Redruth, South Australia