Visiting Port Arthur is a bit of an Australian rite of passage, in a way. Australia’s convict past is such a big part of our history – both explicitly and also by denial, and it’s most possible to grasp the history here. For fifty years or so, Port Arthur was the disciplinary point for the Australian convict system.
A brief background: England was suffering the effects of the industrial revolution on the lower class: dispossession, hopelessness, poverty. This lead to a crime wave (surprise!). Serious criminals (murder, highwaymen, etc) were hung, but repeat trivial offenders (thieves, fences, Irish terrorists wannabes) were shipped to Australia because prisons were full. Shipping convicts to Australia was expensive, so the state had to get a pound of flesh out of them in the form of labour, and the convicts were worked hard. Much of Australia’s original infrastructure was built by convicts (such as Richmond bridge above).
Initially it was a dreadful punishment to be sent to Australia – very few convicts ever came home, there was a pretty good chance you’d die on the way, and when you get there, there was a good chance you’d die working. But as the infrastructure fell into place, the lot of convicts improved, and most convicts were freed with a grant of land within ten years or so. From being a homeless street kid to a landed farmer who could read and write…. A real step up in life. Towards the end of transportation, criminals wanted to be sent to Australia. One reasonably reliable way to be sent out was to burn a haystack. Hence an unexpected proportion of later convicts were arsonists.
Then gold was found, and there was no longer any point in rewarding criminals by shipping them to Australia…..
One thing I’d never appreciated before was how hard the convict system worked to reform the convicts, not merely discipline them. They got taught the 3 R’s, a good trade or two, a strong dose of religious education. If they were able to keep their heads down, they came out of the system much improved. If they couldn’t…. the system would relentlessly crush them.
Port Arthur was the decision point for convicts who had sinned outside (mostly this seemed to mean giving cheek to their overseers).
This building – the most famous and obvious in Port Arthur – was originally built as a flour mill, but that was a spectacular failure due to engineering reasons. Then it was converted to a prison, though it’s always called “The Penitentiary”, I don’t know why. Nearly a thousand convicts lived in this building, in small cells not quite big enough to lie down in. But don’t think that this was unusually brutal – there was a mutiny amongst the marines because the convicts had more space to sleep in than the marines.
Our start to the day was a brief boat trip around the harbour. Port Arthur really was a port – there was no land access. Across the harbour there was an island they used as a cemetery, called the Isle of the Dead.
From some angles, some tombstones are visible. The convicts didn’t get tombstones, of course.
There was also a boys prison on Point Puer. Convicts as young as 9 years old were shipped to Australia. Any convict under the age of 16 went straight to the boys prison, where the focus was on education more than discipline. There’s not much left of that:
In fact, there’s not much left of Port Arthur or any other convict infrastructure. Thanks to some idiot Lord named Molesworth, there was much concern that the convict system was fostering and/or breeding gays. Though it surely happened, in actual fact, one of the quickest ways for a convict to die was for another convict to suspect him of such tendencies. There was such a huge stigma associated with this that the ex-convicts and other settlers did their level best to destroy the evidence of the whole system. Only recently (my lifetime) has having a convict ancestor been considered a good thing.
Later in the time of Port Arthur, the focus moved away from physical punishment (for instance, one convict received over 1000 lashes from the cat-o-nine-tails in his ‘career’) towards silence. Behind the famous old penitentiary is the Seperation Prison.
Convicts held in this prison had to maintain complete silence as long as they were here. Each had a small cell, where they could read and work.
If they were unable to maintain silence, then they got locked into the isolation cells. These were completely dark and silent, and the convicts could make make as much noise as they wanted – no one could hear. You can go into these rooms, and we did: completely terrifying, even with the doors open (no photo, of course). The convicts seemed to fear the silent treatment more than the lashing. More than a few simply went crazy.
Note that needing to maintain absolute silence was no excuse for not going to church. They purpose built the craziest church I’ve ever seen:
You stand in these pews, unable to see anyone but the preacher. This is what the preacher saw:
Did this whole system work? Well sort of. It didn’t achieve what the British Lords wanted – creating a better class of underling who understand their place in life. Instead it created a class of tough larrikins, utterly disrespectful of any hobnobs, but brutally honest and hardworking and with a high value on looking after one’s mates.
By this time we were tired – it’s a lot of walking, and we stopped for lunch. After lunch, we caught a play that was performed on the lawn behind the grand old penitentiary, the convict story of a boy who struggled to adapt to the convict system. Then we wandered the old buildings for a couple of hours.
There’s some lovely gardens at Port Arthur, planted for the nobs by the convicts. They’ve stood the test of time well.
That was enough for us. It’s interesting, but it’s a lot of walking, and it was a hot day. We went and played on the beach around the point for an hour. Melyssa built a castle she insisted on getting a photo of.
In the evening we had dinner at a genuine old English pub, and then the girls played with a huge collection of sparklers that Kath had accumulated. I had to buy matches so we could light them, and while doing so, I met the English cyclist again – he’d popped down to Port Arthur for a couple of days with a mate.
