Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia
I’ve wanted to visit Port Arthur ever since I read Matthew Kneale’s haunting novel English Passengers (2000): https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Passengers-Matthew-Kneale/dp/0140285210/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1489093076&sr=8-1&keywords=Matthew+Kneale+English+Passengers.
It’s a beautiful, miserable, fascinating place.
Set in a cove near the southern tip of Tasmania, the penal colony was founded in 1833 as a high-security jail for transported prisoners who were too recalcitrant for the main convict settlements of New South Wales.
Port Arthur was practically escape-proof: the only direct land-access was by a narrow spit at Eaglehawk Neck. By sea there was nothing to the south but Antarctica, to the east New Zealand, to the west the continent of Africa.
Islands in the cove were given over to the first reformatory for boys in the British Empire, Port Puer, and a cemetery, the Isle of the Dead, where convicts, guards and the guards’ families were buried in strict hierarchical order.
The modern tourist site also contains an area commemorating the thirty-five people who died in the Port Arthur Massacre, when a lone gunman on a killing spree fired on visitors in the café, gift shop and car-park areas on April 28th 1966.
When the penal colony was first founded there was much work to do, and the settlement was intended to be self-sufficient. The Penitentiary itself was initially built as a water-powered mill.
Though Port Arthur was built by physical convict labour, its design reflected contemporary ideas about using psychological punishment to alter prisoners’ minds.
The dominant building on the whole site is the huge Convict Church, its central position symbolising the place of religion in the process of reforming wrong-doers.
The Separate Prison was built to the specification of Jeremy Bentham’s aborted Panopticon project, which allowed all inmates to be supervised from a central point, without individual prisoners having any personal contact with any other individual prisoner or guard.
The idea was that prisoners would have time to contemplate their predicament and the evil ways that brought them to it.
The outcome was that some of them simply went mad.