Michael Batson

Tasmania was once called Van Diemen’s Land and is the world’s 26th largest island and Australia’s least populated state. From 1803 Britain settled the island as a penal colony, and almost wiped out the indigenous population in the process. Today Tasmania, or “Tassie” to use the colloquialism, is the most Anglophile Australian state, also having the largest proportion of its population-almost 90 percent -born in Australia. During penal times, when 80,000 convicts were sent there, the island was the closest thing to a totalitarian state as ever existed within the British Empire. A network of spies, field police and district magistrates controlled settlers’ lives, while the convicts were ground down in a penal system that resembled a machine.

Situated an hour’s drive southeast of Hobart on the Tasman Peninsula is the former British penal colony of Port Arthur. Chosen for its remoteness – there were no roads – the convicts’ only entrance was by sea past towering cliffs of prismatic stone, known as “Hell’s Gates” and surrounded by shark-infested waters.

Australia is a country, it has been said, which has few ruins but many car parks. At Port Arthur you are confronted by both.

Overlooking tranquil blue waters reflecting the bright sunlight radiantly and surrounded by mature trees and abundant birdlife, the historical site of Port Arthur could easily be the destination for holidaymakers. In a sombre middle-age following a harsh adolescence, it was a hotel, noted for its gardens and well-maintained grounds with paths lined with statuesque English trees, where fine wine and food could be enjoyed.

Previously it had a more sinister reputation. Tasmania’s history as a penal colony is well documented but to confront it is to come to Port Arthur.

The English prison system of the 1800s was described as “a vast machine” designed like a factory to pulverise convicts. To do the crushing the British established a handful of special prisons among their Australian gulags. Norfolk Island was feared but it was always Tasmania, then Van Diemen’s Land, that held the most dread for convicts.

Isolated in western Tasmania was Port Macquarie, where conditions were so dreadful convicts would murder just to escape, if only for the trip to Hobart and the gallows. Eventually it was abandoned as “uneconomic” only to be replaced by the nadir of punishment in the British penitentiary system, Port Arthur.  

Named for its founder, (later) Sir George Arthur, the island’s governor (from 1824-36), he became feared and loathed by convict and Vandemonian (a white person from Tasmania usually one transported there before 1853 when transportation ceased) settler alike. Under Arthur, Tasmania became the closest thing to a totalitarian state as ever existed within the British Empire.

A military man, Arthur was once superintendent of British Honduras (1814-22) now Belize, then a slave state. Driven by Calvinist fundamentalism, he was described as the archetype pious colonial strongman. He devised a multi-level system of convict punishment where prisoners moved up or down based upon their deeds, all of which had the character of a machine. He was also responsible for the or the repression and persecution of the Aboriginal population in the conflict known as the Black War. Some historians claim this conflict should be known as the Tasmanian War for which cost the lives of hundreds mainly Aborigines as the conflict nearly annihilated the island's indigenous population.

By 1822, 58 percent of Tasmania’s population were convicts, a new system of fear was deemed necessary to control them. As they constituted the island’s only source of labour and as such were vital to the economy, Arthur controlled the settlers’ lives too; through a network of spies, field police and district magistrates.

From 1826, he began recording details of all 12,305 convicts sent to Tasmania in ledgers which stacked together stood three-feet high – the “Black Books”. Indiscretions by settlers resulted in a range of lost “privileges”. Arthur thought crime an illness and often compared prisoners to unbroken horses, to which the “System” would employ “enlightened rigour” through hard labour and the boredom of repetition.

Port Arthur’s visitor centre’s business thrives. The ticket counter advises tours are optional and after selecting an entrance fee, visitors are free to wander about on their own. Tours start at regular intervals or you travel solo and join a tour later. Passes were for the day of issue with no extension. Gates close every night and passes are graded, starting at $28 for bronze and concluding at almost $100 for gold.

Optional extras complete the pricing regime. Boat tours take visitors across the bay to the cemetery island. Walking tours circumnavigate the site. Port Arthur is not cheap, but there are discounts for families, but the money is spent maintaining the grounds and improving facilities and it shows. As is common with presenting historical sites to the public, emphasis is given to the interactive, together with the sights and sounds

Downstairs from the ticket counter, past the small-scale replica model of the original grounds is the “arrivals hall” an interactive introduction to life here among convicts. Upon payment a playing card is produced, mine the nine-of-clubs, correlating to a convict, an introduction to arriving at Port Arthur. Prisoner sentence and outcomes are documented; a DVD recalls the history of the colony. One can try on leg irons, children seem to like this, oblivious to their sinister connotations.

Established in 1830 as a penitentiary for recalcitrant convicts, Port Arthur differed from the other secondary stations due to the hermetic regularity of its discipline.

By 1840, “The Factory” had over 2000 convicts, soldiers and civilian staff living there.

Originally convicts were housed in hastily-built barracks of weatherboard huts. Later these were replaced by more extensive buildings where prisoners under heavy sentence were housed in cells measuring 2.2m by 1.3m, among the smallest in Australia. Of these facilities, one commandant said; “There is not the space required for the health of the inmates”.

This is the profile of Port Arthur often seen on the posters, now largely a façade, its walls supported by steel braces to prevent it falling over. Outside the walls I was attacked by a dive-bombing bird, an episode of amusement rather than alarm given it was small enough to be noticed but not large enough to be of threat.

It is hard to imagine the conditions back then. Now tour groups, 20 or 30 strong could be seen moving about the manicured grounds, the guide’s voices carry around the ruins. Under the shade of a large tree near the museum I took shelter from the marauding birds. The peace was again shattered, this time applause rung out from one of the walking tours.

Large three-tiered catamarans ferry tourists to the nearby Isle of the Dead. Touring coaches and campervans crowd the car parks. The width of most four-wheel drive vehicles now makes it impossible to park a car, the distance between the white lines too narrow to accomplish the task, so you have to search for a space between two cars.

Arthur, with all said and done was no sadist, not vindictive, he was a reformist.  Yet he still employed the cat. Flogging, rather than producing good behaviour, hardened a man. Port Arthur’s museum illustrates this fact. Clothing was part of the System. Grey was the least shameful colour, indistinguishable. Magpie colouring was reserved for the worst offenders and based on medieval jesters it invoked the sense of the clown – an insult.

As harsh as life was for the convicts, the guards and associated staff from 1800s England would have found life a constricting microcosm of stultifying societal structure. Pressure to conform to the rigid norms of Victorian society, isolated as they were from family or the usual support networks afforded them by life in England, must have induced a suffocating claustrophobia. Any fraternisation between the bonded and free was discouraged. Many of the Redcoats stationed there were later sent to New Zealand to fight the Māori in what became known as the New Zealand Wars.

Overlooking the small harbour is the commandant’s house, the views now framed by statuesque trees. Built in 1833 and gradually developed it was home to the prison’s five commandants. In later life it became the Carnarvon Hotel, a boarding house, and eventually a private residence.

From the 1980s extensive restoration work began to convert it into the tourist attraction it is today. Cross sections in some rooms have been removed to reveal the building techniques used over time and the crockery of the Carnarvon Hotel are preserved in another room.

For Arthur, official religion became a means of penal control, prescriptive even for settlers. The prison chapel is stark, built like a lecture hall with tiered booths and swing doors to separate the congregation individually. Religion, rather than bringing repentance, saw men forced to attend church twice daily view religion as part of the cruel machine. A fact not helped by the Reverend Durham, Port Arthur’s resident priest for 15 years and considered by all convicts as notoriously difficult to work for.

The remains of the settlement’s Gothic church contain an eerie fiery glow as if burning, though the bushfires which ravaged the settlement have long since passed.

To punish offenders the separation wing was built. Stultifying procedures backed by punishments cells which mirrored burial alive. Dark caverns with the thickest walls, which claustrophobia does not describe. Rather than flogging, the Separate Prison aided the System milling process, to change ‘the evil tendencies of the convicts’ minds’ and was designed to threaten and intimidate.

In the museum section of Port Arthur visitors can go online. Computer terminals let you enter details and search the database. I found a name sake who arrived at Port Arthur on 10 January 1820 on the Dromedary, his place of origin or crime was not recorded, so much for Arthur’s “Black Book”.

Further information for visitors is available through these websites:

www.archives.tas.gov.au
www.portarthur.org.au
www.statelibrary.tas.gov.au

Later Port Arthur became infamous for another reason, a massacre in 1996 by a lone gunman who went on a rampage through the historic site killing 35 people and wounding 23 others; an act which prompted fundamental changes to gun control laws in Australia.