[5] A visitor to Hay in early 1881 wrote: "The gaol is a really fine building and deserves mention; it faces one in a most ominous manner on coming into the town from Narrandera".

That year, the state's gaols were congested, a result of the new Consorting Act which gave police more powers to convict well-known criminals.

[1] During World War II Hay was used as a prisoner-of-war and internment centre, due in no small measure to its isolated location.

The first internees were over two thousand refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, many of them Jewish; they had been interned in Britain when fears of invasion were at their peak and transported to Australia in 1940 aboard the HMT Dunera.

The internment at Hay of the Dunera refugees from Nazi oppression in Europe was an important milestone in Australia's cultural history.

[12] After the Hay camps were broken up in 1946–7, the Gaol was used intermittently for emergency housing during the 1952 and 1956 floods, and as accommodation for Italian workers in town to build the new sewerage system.

[1] From 1961 to 1974 the Hay Gaol was managed by the New South Wales Child Welfare Department as a particularly coercive maximum security institution for girls between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.

The aim of Hay was to separate the girls involved in the riots and those whose behaviours generally were considered too difficult to be managed at Parramatta.

In its conception, as a facility for maximum security segregation; in its governing according to strict discipline and routine; and in its housing in an old colonial prison, Hay mirrored The Institution for Boys in Tamworth previously established in 1947.

The Hay Gaol Museum has this van in its collection; significantly it has etchings "girls" initials and the acronym "ILWA" (I Love Worship and Adore) carved into its paintwork.

Once in Hay the girls encountered a system of strict dehumanizing discipline and routine, often cited as being harsher than what they would have experienced in a women's prison.

The girls were worked hard; scrubbing, painting, cleaning, cooking, washing, laying concrete paths, tending vegetable plots and gardens and doing handicraft.

Girls who misbehaved were confined to the isolation block in the gaol courtyard for 24 hour periods, fed on nothing but bread and either water or milk.

In mid 1974 Dick Healey, the new Minister for the Department of Youth and Community Services closed Hay and Parramatta and started to overhaul the outdated 1939 Child Welfare Act, under which the institutions had been created and administered.

We had to scrub freshly painted cells with bricks and wire brushes when we went into Hay, listening to the drill with the girls running on the spot.

A common feeling in the Hay community is one of dismay at the suffering of the girls matched by concern at never really knowing what went on behind the walls of the gaol.

The weekend includes a professionally developed museum theatre production performed by locals and a haunting sound and light display in the cell block.

Its brick walls are 46 centimetres (18 inches) thick and the building has a hipped corrugated iron roof and a gabled entrance.

[14][1] Within the compound an L-shaped block with a hipped iron roof and a verandah houses the kitchen, hospital, dispensary, bathroom, store and large workshop.

It is furthermore of State significance for its variety of historical functions, associations and social values as a small-scale prison and detention centre.

Although official records remain unavailable, it is believed that a significant proportion of girls sent to Hay were indigenous "Stolen Generation" children and many survivors from this era have begun visiting the site from all over Australia.

It is probably the only building in Australia directly associated with the internment of the Dunera Boys and with the imprisonment of the Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) following the Cowra Breakout in 1944.

Designed by the prominent NSW Colonial Architect James Barnet, it is probably the only building in Australia directly associated with the internment of the Dunera Boys and with the imprisonment of the Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) following the Cowra Breakout in 1944.

[1] The place is important in demonstrating aesthetic characteristics and/or a high degree of creative or technical achievement in New South Wales.

Although official records remain unavailable, it is believed that a significant proportion of girls sent to Hay were indigenous "stolen generation" children, who constituted many of NSW's most vulnerable of wards of state.

For example, the design of the Gaol combines details reflecting Victorian attitudes towards punishment and detention with vernacular construction features such as locally made bricks.

Additional information about the site's past as a girls' institution is coming to light as survivors start to speak out and return to Hay.

Likewise a detailed examination of government records relating to the use of the site as an internment camp during World War II will also present new information.

Future studies may chronicle the changes to the complex over time and the different ways in which the physical isolation of the town, surrounded by the Hay Plains, added to the segregation effects of the gaol.

This classification, defined by JS Kerr in his 1988 book Out of Sight Out of Mind, is differentiated from the more common Braidwood-type gaol design of the previous colonial architect.