Tasmania Part 2--the Convicts

 You know a place is going to be interesting, with or without deadly wildlife, when even the relentlessly perky Lonely Planet travel guide gives it a grave and wistful introduction.  After rattling off an impressive list of Tasmania’s many attractions, Lonely Planet Australia asks, rhetorically, why the locals have been so slow to cash in on them.  Ah, well,

The answer’s buried in a grim colonial and indigenous history.  Don’t be surprised if you find yourself crossed with a mournful spirit or an inexplicable sense of sadness.  The ghosts of the past are real but it’s taken until now for Tasmania to face them.

While I can’t report any mournful spirits, etc., I will say we wandered around a few small towns that felt a trifle “odd.”  Understand, I mean that in the most neutral sense possible.  It was just the kind of odd where, in the movies, a young couple stops at a sleepy burg for lunch, and afterward the man says, “Huh.  This is a funny place, isn’t it?”  And the woman says, “Oh, I don’t think so.  They’re just nice people.”  And then the car breaks down inexplicably, they wind up spending the night there, and, of course, all the locals turn into werewolves as soon as the moon comes up.  That’s the kind of odd I mean.  But, of course, we were camping well away from the towns, and so weren’t privy to any lycanthropic activities.

Today, less than 3% of Australia’s population lives in Tasmania, so you would be excused for failing to guess that under its former name of Van Diemen’s Land, it was actually the site of England’s second colony in the region.  Its first settlers arrived in 1803, some 15 years after the founding of Sydney.  Though initially there were no prisons, convicts were among the island’s first English residents, sent there to do the heavy lifting for their overseers—clearing land for agriculture, constructing government buildings, and generally establishing the settlement’s infrastructure. 

In 1822 the first prison in Van Diemen’s Land was established on Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbor; the prison at Port Arthur followed in 1830.   These settlements were expected to make money, and they did.  For a time, Sarah Island was home to the largest shipbuilding enterprise in the southern colonies.  The penal colony at Port Arthur produced, according to one visitors’ pamphlet, “ships and shoes, clothing and bells, furniture and worked stone, brooms and bricks.” 

For the most part, the inmates at these prisons were re-offenders—those convicted of “crimes” after the initial ones that had earned them transportation from England.  Given the for-profit charter of the prisons, and the fact that convicts represented nearly free labor, you will not be surprised to learn that the law made it relatively easy to “re-offend.”  A male prisoner could do it, for example, simply by answering back to a work boss, and some female convicts “re-offended” by becoming pregnant, often with the help of those appointed to reform them.

In 1853 Van Diemen’s Land abolished convict transportation, becoming the last part of the British Empire to do so.  Three years later it officially changed its name to Tasmania (after Dutchman Abel Tasman, the first European to sight the island), in an effort to shed the unsavory reputation it had acquired under the old name.  Sarah Island had closed as a prison in 1833, after only 11 years in operation, and the prison at Port Arthur closed in 1877.

Today, by contrast, Tasmania does face its ghosts and makes no secret of its convict origins; indeed, the prisons still turn a profit, but now as tourist destinations, Port Arthur being the state’s top attraction.  It welcomed more than 250,000 visitors in financial year 2007-08, and it was doing a brisk business the day we turned up, in early January 2009.

It is nearly impossible now, wandering through the parklike grounds—the greenest corner of Australia we have found yet—to imagine the dread the place once inspired, the misery it was witness to.  It rained some the day we were there, but that only served to freshen the air and to add a sparkle to everything when the sun next came out.  

Mason Cove, the harbor, is not large, but it is thoroughly charming.  Its glassy surface gave us a beautiful dual image of the the opposite shore, no matter where we stood.  Without effort I could imagine thronged café tables on the quayside and a dozen pleasure boats lying at anchor in the sun.  They were not there, of course, but that’s what the setting seemed to call for.  What I could not picture was an unkempt sailing vessel, bobbing slowly at the jetty, and discharging wretched and ragged men to stand blinking up at walls and bars and guards with guns and whips, which was the reality, 175 years ago. 

The main penitentiary building was gutted by fire in 1897, and today is a picturesque ruin set amongst broad lawns, its golden stone walls glowing in the sun against a backdrop of dark gumtrees on the surrounding hills.  The rest of the buildings are dotted here and there on the spacious grounds in various states of decay, restoration or modification.  Some of the minor ones are left to molder, to give one an idea of their real age, I suppose; some have been adapted to new uses (the former lunatic asylum now is home to Museum Café, for instance), and at least one, the separate prison, has had several rooms restored to their purported conditions when inmates actually lived and worked there, making brooms.  But once again, the rooms were too orderly and pristine to convey the sense that real human beings actually had lived and worked and grown old there. 

Here’s a contrast:  I have a friend whose grandfather was a guard at the prison on Alcatraz Island, in the San Francisco Bay.  A few years ago, my friend’s father was taking a tour of the old prison, wandering through the cells, when he found and photographed a two-word character sketch of his father, scratched into the painted metalwork by an unknown inmate.  It was not complimentary, but I believe it delighted my friend’s father because it proved that real people had lived and interacted in that place, and that proof breathed humanity into what was otherwise an empty and lifeless building.

This is where Port Arthur did not quite work for me.  By so thoroughly sanitizing the place, and scrubbing out all traces of any individual’s sojourn, the curators of the site have made it much more difficult for visitors to come away with a sense of what it had “really been like,” which is, after all, the main reason most people visit historical places.  Of course, it is a question that has existed as long as there have been tourists:  what is the proper balance between authenticity (whatever that means) and commercialism?  Do you keep things as rough and squalid as they would have been in the penal-colony days, or do you plant lawns to take advantage of the area’s naturally beautiful setting, and so make things more pleasant for families looking for a day out?  There’s no universal answer, of course, and each heritage site must be considered individually, but I will say that here the emphasis seemed to be more on having a good time rather than on a sober consideration of the place’s history.

      I certainly do not fault Port Arthur for being uninformative.  There was a staggering amount of information on tap, in a variety of different media, and even interactive research stations to discover whether one might have had ancestors at the prison. Also, a walking tour with a very knowledgeable guide was included in our admission price.  But I do think the commercial side won out to an unfortunate degree.  Was it really necessary, for instance, to have Felons Bistro (“dine with conviction”) right in the main visitor center?  I don’t know—perhaps it was.  But I know, too, that having such things at every turn does make it more difficult to lose oneself in the historical and the long ago.
      --originally posted 3/2009