On our way down to Hobart we decided to take a diversion – a similar diversion to the one made by thousands of convicts from 1833 onwards – to Port Arthur. The differences between our journey and theirs were manifold – ours took us just an hour and a half along the A3 and then the A9 while theirs took them a day or so of sailing along the Derwent River. We paid to get in to Port Arthur while they generally paid to try and get out and, of course, we could walk out – they couldn’t. In fact, even if they did try to walk out, they would have faced a line of aggressive and hungry chained dogs across the isthmus at Eaglehawk Neck. That would certainly have been enough to make me turn around!
The Port Arthur site is part of the UNESCO World Heritage listed Australian Convict sites – 11 locations whose history revolves around the management and incarceration of convicts. However, the Port Arthur site is the largest and most extensive and this is clear from the moment you enter the site. From the visitor centre the large government gardens are to the right with a view across to the large penitentiary. The gardens were neat and symmetrical, with topiary used to keep the bushes under control. All this was intended to symbolise to the convicts (who obviously weren’t allowed in the gardens unless tending them!) the importance of ordered and civilised behaviour in life.
Looking over the green by the gardens you see the first building – the penitentiary. Again, this building exudes symbolism. Its name implies that it was always a part of the correctional machinery of the site, but in fact, as well as having the machinery of punishment, it also gave prisoners the means of self-improvement. It was originally a flour mill and granary, but this quickly failed with an inadequate flow of water for the mill, so it was then converted to a penitentiary. The upper floor though had multiple uses – a library, a dining hall and even a chapel – definitely offering the prisoners the chance to try to improve their lot. The building has fallen in a state of disrepair with many of the bricks stolen for local properties and fire ravaged it in 1897. The scale of the building with 136 cells just on the first two floors is still evident though. The top floor was even more intensively used, as a dormitory for 480 better-behaved men.
Many of the buildings have survived or been restored and we spent some time walking around the Commandants House where each successive Commandant appeared to have a higher and higher opinion of their status as they added successive extensions to it.
As we walked across towards the Asylum and Separate Prison, it was fascinating to see something which followed up from Maria Island yesterday – the cottage which William Smith O’Brien lived in at Port Arthur after he was moved from Maria Island. He only lived here for a fairly short period before he finally agreed to the terms of his parole, but, like at Maria Island, he seems to have had a certain status and comfort attached to his confinement here. It was interesting to note as well that many other political prisoners where housed at Port Arthur – Chartists from the UK and also Canadian rebels.
One of the most interesting, and perhaps depressing, buildings though was the separate prison. This was based on Jeremy Bentham’s theories and in particular his blueprint for a panopticon. The word comes from the Greek panoptes, meaning all-seeing and so this is a concept for an institution where one officer can watch all the prisoners all the time. A semi-circular layout enables this and the fact that the prisoners don’t know if they are being watched or not is though to enforce on them a sense of self-regulation in their behaviour. Bentham was a passionate advocate of correction through the mind and not the body – psychological rather than physical punishment. This he argued would be more effective. Perhaps the first physical manifestation of these ideas came through the building of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia – an institution that came about partly as a result of the pressure from the Quaker Society. Port Arthur adopted some similar ideas, but unlike Bentham’s original design philosophy, the individual cells could not be seen by an individual jailer. Charles Dickens visited the Eastern State Penitentiary and it is safe to say that he wasn’t a fan:
I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and token are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; …. and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it ….
Charles Dickens 1842
This slightly depressing visit was nevertheless a fascinating insight into the mentality of those who planned and ran the correctional institutions of the era. Whether we have seen the light, in terms of penal reform, from the mistakes of that era …. the jury is still out on that one, though the signs are not looking good ….
From there we decided that a taste of the coast would be much less depressing and that the power of nature to shape things would hopefully be more uplifting than the immovability and obstinacy of human endeavour and particularly politics! The coast of the Tasman peninsula did not disappoint in this regard. We started heading ten minutes south of Port Arthur to Remarkable Cave. The coast around here is composed of dolorite (a fine-grained igneous rock) and sandstone. The dolorite forced its way through the sandstone and the cave has been formed from the sandstone being eroded away to form caves. These have collapsed creating the current structure. Perhaps one of the most impressive things about the cave is that fact that the hole at the end, as you look through, resembles the shape of Tasmania.
From there we headed back north stopping at the Tasman Arch, the Devils Kitchen and then a walk along the cliffs to waterfall bay, though, thanks to the drought, this is temporarily renamed waterfall-less bay as it was completely dry. Still, the coast and the cliffs are majestic and varied all the way along with rock stacks, ledges and a multiplicity of different shapes and gorges running through. A quite amazing sight …
The final stop before heading on the Hobart was just north of Eaglehawk Neck at something called the Tesselated Pavement. This is made up of a flat siltstone which was cracked by stresses in the earth’s crust between 60 and 160 million years ago. These stresses caused cracking in the surface and, over time, salt crystals have got into the cracks forcing them further apart. The further from the seashore, the longer the pavement dries out and this causes greater erosion. These areas look like ‘pans’. Nearer the sea, with less erosion, the squares look more like loaves – an intriguing effect which is quite unique globally. There is apparently an area called Bimini Road in the Bahamas which looks like a tesselated pavement underwater, but some argue this is an actual pavement and evidence of the building of Atlantis! Nobody seems to have claimed that about the Eaglehawk Neck one.
From there, an hour in the car brought us to Hobart for a few days. We are staying right beside Constitution Dock where we moored in Sunstone 24 years ago after the Sydney Hobart race.
