I have noticed that, after only a few days in Hobart, when I ask for directions in the street, helpful strangers casually volunteer their convict ancestry.
“You have to go to Port Arthur to really understand the convict past and I hope you get a grey, rainy day, because that’s the best way to see it,” Hay says.
Barbara and I drive to Port Arthur, an hour and a half outside Hobart. The road is so windy and narrow it causes my stomach to lurch, and there’s the optical illusion (I hope it’s an optical illusion) when Barbara is driving that at any moment she’s going to cream my side of the car up against the hulking cliffs. We’re driving on the left-hand side of the road. Neither of us, it turns out, really knows our right from our left.
There’s roadkill every mile, wallabies with their stiffened legs sticking up, as if clawing the sky for breath, and other fat furry things with teeth, bigger than dogs, half-flattened and unidentifiable. I figure Barbara and I have about as much chance of making it out of Port Arthur alive as some of the convicts from the 1800s.
Then I find myself standing in a punishment cell. I pull the heavy door closed behind me. The walls are thick sandstone bricks. The air is damp and smells faintly fishy. The darkness isn’t the kind to which the eyes gradually adjust. The blackness is absolute, a form of live burial.
Port Arthur’s Separate Prison, completed in 1852, is modelled on the work of the philosopher and prison reformer Jeremy Bentham. Bentham believed that sensory deprivation, coupled with a rigorous moral and spiritual education, could shape the minds of even the most dangerous, unrepentant criminals. Or as he put it, the prison could function as “a machine for grinding rogues honest.”
Port Arthur is physically isolated in relation to the rest of Tasmania, and in the 1830s, when the convict settlement was established, there were no road links. The settlement was not only self-sufficient but became a major exporter, producing shoes, furniture, barrels, and ships, with its ready population of what was essentially slave labour. Most of the prisoners transported to Tasmania in the 1800s were petty thieves. They had probably stolen a loaf of bread or a few potatoes, but they were repeat offenders. At Port Arthur, compliant prisoners were offered an education and the chance to develop a trade. The more dangerous criminals wore leg irons and were sentenced to hard labour. They worked in felling gangs in Huon Pine forests, gathering lumber for the burgeoning shipbuilding industry.
The hard labour quickly destroyed the men’s bodies and sometimes killed them. The leg irons—I lifted one and it took both hands—dug into the men’s flesh and the resulting open sores became infected in the tropical climate. There was scurvy and rampant respiratory disease. Only the prisoners who refused to submit to the slavery that Port Arthur imposed were sentenced with solitary confinement. They were fed bread and water, and were led to the nearby chapel in calico hoods with slits cut for their eyes. The hoods assured they could see nothing but whatever lay straight ahead.
The chapel is a humble stone building fitted inside with separate wooden cubicles for each convict. The stand-up cubicles, each about the size of a coffin, were constructed so that the prisoner could look only at the lecturing parson in front of him. I stand for a moment inside the cubicle and close the wooden door between my cubicle and the next. There’s a tourist standing in the pulpit taking pictures. The flash bounces in my eyes, temporarily causing a blind spot. Someone has moved into the cubicle next to mine, blocking my exit. I give a little tap, just to let them know I want to get out. Nothing happens.
“Okay, let me out,” I say.
Comments