Port Arthur’s infamous hell-hole on show

Press, 16 March 1982, Page 29

Port Arthur’s infamous hell-hole on show

Port Arthur, 114 km south-east of Hobart, is currently Tasmania's single most popular attraction, but it was not always so. Far from it. One hundred and fifty years ago Port Arthur was an infamous “hell hole,” a place of punishment for men convicted of crimes in the Australian colony. Today, visitors with an odd mixture of morbid curiosity and genuine interest, tread the stone ruins of the old Port Arthur prison, perhaps experiencing for a few moments the claustrophobic blackness of the solitary punishment cells where prisoners once existed in small, silent caves for weeks on end, their only contact with the world outside being the daily visit of a silent jailer who delivered bread and water and removed the slop bucket.

Tasmania was at first populated almost entirely by convicts and their guards, located at scattered, sites throughout “Van Diemen’s Land.” After 27 years, the expense of operating many small depots proved too much. In 1830 it was decided to keep most of the convicts at Port Arthur, from where they could be sent out as labour gangs to help construct the roads and bridges that were required on the island. From the start Port Arthur prison was planned to be “an intermediate sort of x penal place of employment between the extreme misery of Macquarie Harbour and the somewhat less so of the Hobart prisoners’ barracks.” One wonders what the “extreme misery of Macquarie” might have been. Port Arthur’s first superintendent, who had 68

men and boys in his command living in timber huts, complained of convicts arriving “nearly naked, having come down here destitute of the most essential articles.” Scurvey was rife for ’several years until the diet of bread, gruel, soup and salt meat was. supplemented by fresh meat and vegetables. Yet the superintendent was a humane jailer, if judged by the standards of his time. He struck off the chains of convicts upon their arrival and replaced them only as punishment for prison offences. He was comparatively lax with the lash, inflicting an average of 43 lashes on 53 men in 1832 (out of a convict population of 278). In the extreme misery of Macquarie Harbour floggings of 100 lashes were common. As a place of employment, Port Arthur was fairly strenuous. Men laboured hard from sunrise to sunset, cutting and hauling timber, constructing roads and buildings, and cultivating land all with their own muscle power alone. The most hardened criminals in the chain gang wore yellow clothing, bearing the label PF“felon” and performed the heaviest and most degrading work, all the while being forbidden to speak.

Escape was virtually impossible. The only route to “freedom,” Eaglehawk Neck, the narrow isthmus linking Tasman Peninsula to the mainland, was guarded by guards and fierce dogs. The grim settlement operated for 47 years, supporting a town which grew out of the business of imprisoning convicts. In 1877 it was abandoned and the prisoners were moved to a new jail in Hobart. Bushfires destroyed much of the settlement in 1878, but notable buildings remain — the penitentiary, church (designed by a convict), the Model Prison (a radical experiment for the era), hospital and guard house, all of which were built between 1835 and 1837. The remains of the old prison are in what is now an idyllic, park-like setting. The lunatic asylum (men lost their minds in those solitary cells) has been restored to house a reception centre. Other buildings also in use include an audio-visual theatre, scale model of Port Arthur of the 1870 s, a small museum, and the commandant's residence (now a private home). Some estimates put the total number of Port Arthur inmates as high as 30,000 over its 47-year history.