Grim days of Port Arthur on film

Press, 4 February 1987, Page 32

Grim days of Port Arthur on film

, Television New Zealand recently screened, for a popular repeat performance, the series based on the Marcus Clarke novel “For the Term of His Natural Life” — a dramatic tale set in Tasmania’s early days as a penal settlement. Now the original silent film classic adaptation of the novel is screening in Port Arthur, the reconstructed prison complex on the Tasman Peninsula where the film was shot and much of the book’s action is set. The film, recreated only last year from prints held in archives in Canberra and Washington, is being shown nightly at the Broad Arrow, a motor inn at Port Arthur. Like the novel and the television series, the movie depicts the horrors of a system which transported thousands of convicts from nineteenth century England to a penal hell on earth in Van Dieman’s Land, as Tasmania was then known. Jim Laycock, owner of the Broad Arrow, launched the movie screenings late last year in the presence of three of the cast, now in their 70s and 80s.