Port Arthur, Tasman Arch, Dogline at Eaglehawk Neck
Blue sky everywhere. Sandwiches, check. Chips, check. Cameras and phones, check. Chargers, check. Gas, check. Warm layers, check. Sunglasses, check. We’re on the road to Port Arthur, a kilometer of cars in gridlock on the other side of the bridge at 9:45. At Sorrell, a small town about a half hour from Hobart, the urban sprawl gives way to rolling farmland with cows and sheep.
We reach Eaglehawk Neck, a military outpost established in 1832, which the last detachment left in 1859. It’s a long house with a few shacks nearby on an isthmus only 100 meters wide. In 1832, when the Brits took the first convicts to Port Arthur 30 kilometers away, they dug a trench from one side of the isthmus to the other and covered it in white cockle shells. Several regiments served here: one named “The Bloodsuckers,” another “The Fusil Jocks.” They chained ferocious dogs in the trench and on floating platforms in the water at both ends. “The Dog Line,” which began with nine but quickly became 18, proved remarkably effective as only a dozen convicts from Port Arthur were unaccounted for.
Stephen finds a walnut tree and we pick a few dozen off the ground. He shows us how to put two in your hand, their seams touching, and squeeze them to crack one open. They are delicious.
The long house is now a museum with exhibits about the Dog Line and the 1830 Black Line. The latter was a line of about 4,000 military, police, convicts and settlers that marched across Tasmania, herding and eliminating the aboriginal tribes they found. Nearly exterminated them completely. Waaayyyyy beyond what happened in Australia.
We motor on and reach Port Arthur, which began as a timber industry town built by convicts with a granary that was converted to a penitentiary in 1832, from which time it became a dedicated prison that, over the years, held about 12,700 convicts until 1877 when it was abandoned and its remaining 64 prisoners, 126 paupers, and 79 mentally ill were dispersed. Simple neglect and two massive fires have destroyed many of the buildings. Some, like the stone barracks at the top of the hill behind the penitentiary, are almost completely gone. Only its foundation and part of a lower wall remain. Others, like the penitentiary, which had four floors of 130 solitary cells, have their remaining stone walls propped up with high-tech stainless steel braces. Across a wide grassy field and up a tree-lined path, only the outer walls of a large stone church with several stone turrets stands partly hidden by trees. It’s gaping windows and doorways, its lack of any roof and the total absence of any ornamentation suggest a simple dignity.
The whole place is now a World Heritage site and we think it’s absolutely beautiful on a sun-filled bay with green, grassy swards and huge weeping willows and massive oaks, an English garden with a fountain, manicured hedgerows, forested hills.
The penitentiary had a library of more than 13,000 books! Mostly trade manuals so convicts could learn useful skills.
It’s all idyllic … now. And you might think it also was when Commandant Boyd arrived and declared that corporal punishment did no good and would henceforth have no place there. No more flogging with the cat-o-nine-tails (33 lashes average but 250 was not unknown), no more centipede line (men carrying 100+ foot trees on their shoulders), plodding the treadmill that turned the stone grain grinder (with leg irons that weighed 50 pounds). Gone.
In its place: isolation followed by separation. Isolation was a cell about the size of three people standing next to each other. No light. Can’t see your hand in front of your face. For 30 days. Separation was a solitary cell in a block where no noise was allowed. The guards wore special shoes. The inmates had to wear masks over their faces and, if they passed another inmate in a corridor, had to turn their backs to each other and face the walls as they passed. The numbers of mentally ill skyrocketed but Boyd saw no connection between that and his re-educational practices that he was convinced would enable the convicts to contemplate the nature of their sins.
Port Arthur, by and large, was THE place for incorrigibles: the place where second and subsequent offenders from Australia or from Van Diemen’s Land (named by Abel Tasman after Anthony Van Diemen, the first Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies), or from Canada or France or Ireland. Political prisoners were not unknown.
William Smith O’Brien, a member of the British Parliament but leader of the Young Ireland Movement in 1850, had his death sentence for a failed rebellion converted to “transportation” and was placed in Port Arthur’s former stables — a stone house on a hilltop above the barracks — until he was granted clemency, went to Brussels for a few years and wound up with his statue on O’Connell Street in Dublin.
As we return to Hobart, we see the Tasman Arch, a blowhole sputtering at low tide, and a wild and unforgiving coastline growing darker in the darkness and thrashed by lowering skies and heavy waves. We eat the left-over bourguignon and crash after a looonnng and wonderful day.
Another day of “conviction” in Tasmania.
Two Tramps 