Adventures in Moving Out

            This is something of a time capsule—a diary entry I was working on almost exactly a year ago.  Somehow I just never found the motivation to tack on the conclusion and post it, but now does seem an appropriate time to finish the job in recognition of the anniversary it represents.  So here is what I wrote in early September, 2008:

A friend of mine, Jim, had a singular experience about 15 years ago.  He had built a home on high-bank, waterfront property on Bainbridge Island, and at 3:00 a.m. one New Year’s Day he got to ride that house down the cliffside to the beach.  This was not, mind you a poorly constructed house.  Jim had built it himself, by hand, and because he is German he is morally and culturally incapable of shoddy work.  It was a beautiful and well built house.

          Unfortunately, he had not built the bank below the house, and so, when weeks of rain had sufficiently lubricated the clay beneath the hillside topsoil, the whole thing simply slipped away like a tablecloth and stack of dishes off an up-tilted kitchen table.  Jim awoke just as his home weighed anchor, knew immediately what was happening, and says his first thought was, “I guess now I get to see how well I built it.”  How’s that for pride of workmanship?  When was the last time you heard of a homebuilder taking one of his structures for a nighttime slide down a cliff and regarding the experience as a good, if unexpected, chance to test the soundness of his carpentry?

          I had a similar feeling to Jim’s this past weekend as I helped our son, Benjamin, settle into the house he will share with four friends this school year:  “I guess we get to see how well we raised him.”  Not to suggest that Ben is beginning a slide down a cliff to a rocky beach.  I’m saying merely that he is now, to a far greater extent than ever before, on his own, and we, his parents, are commensurately less able to shield him from life’s pains.  Which is what we’ve been working towards all these years, of course—a sensible, responsible, self-reliant young man.  Nonetheless, our arrival at this point does cause a pang and gives one that over-the-falls-in-a-barrel feeling.

          In the weeks before the move, small tags of masking tape began appearing on virtually everything we own, marked with a “B” if Benjamin was taking it, or with a ludicrously knocked-down price if it was for our garage sale.  That was Labor Day weekend, by the way, and it netted us about $400—10% of that in quarters.

          Then, this weekend, we shoe-horned all of Benjamin’s chattels—and those of his friend Chris—into a 17-foot U-Haul truck for the three-hour trip to Bellingham, up near the Canadian border.  Ah, U-Haul.  “Adventures in Moving”—do you remember that slogan of theirs?  At the rental agency I looked for that familiar phrase but couldn’t find it anywhere; it’s completely gone.  Apparently U-Haul finally has realized that the last damned thing people want when moving is “an adventure.”  They might be looking forward to brighter days in a new location (perhaps where there is no warrant out for them), but adventure en route is not the desideratum.  You must have noticed that only tourism-related businesses use the “adventure” motif in their ads nowadays, and even they employ it with discretion.  You will never see, for example, commercials or billboards promising “adventures” in accounting, or in obstetrics, or laser-eye surgery, or divorce law.  There’s good reason for that.

          Nonetheless, I did remember the U-Haul ads of yesteryear, and for auld lang syne I began our trip with a bit of adventure by using the 17-footer to knock over the rental agency’s mailbox. The U-Haul lady was very nice about it. The box evidently takes quite a thrashing, and she keeps a maintenance fellow on retainer to come re-set it every second or third rental.

Among the above-mentioned chattels—computers, beds, pots and pans, kitchen table and a third-hand bicycle—was a leather sofa, purchased in July for $10 at the Rotary Auction.  It is the perfect sofa for a student house, in that it clearly has seen all that life can throw at a piece of furniture and remains, if not unscathed, at least recognizable still as a leather sofa, now past all caring what happens next.  It is extremely comfortable, and has an air of being ready for anything, from a Superbowl party to an unplanned pregnancy…

And, well, I’m afraid that was as far as I got in writing up our 2008 adventures in moving, probably because I recoiled in instinctive horror at the implications of that final sentence and could go no further.  I am gratified to report that Benjamin did enjoy a successful (i.e. no unplanned pregnancies) year following his installation in the rental house, and managed to cram what was left of his household items into storage for the summer.  He did this on his own because his parents had irresponsibly fled the country in the meantime, leaving him to fend for himself.  As of this writing, he is touring Europe, but will return at the beginning of September to share a different home with a different set of friends for the next school year.

And one year on, I am confident that, whatever lies ahead, Benjamin will do as well as my friend Jim and land where he lands, upright and exhilarated by the trip.  On second thought, if I know Benjamin, he’ll arrive at the end point reclining on his $10 sofa.

     --originally posted 9/2009

A Few Commuted Sentences

In preparation for making this entry I did a little research—very little, actually—and was chagrined to find that Seattle is not in fact among the American cities with the worst traffic congestion.  I had heard it was on that top-ten list; it seems to deserve to be on that list; and I had convinced myself that it was so.  But whatever its traffic ranking, Seattle’s public transportation is shabby and inadequate (or at least it was when we left 10 months ago, but perhaps Metro has wrought great improvements in the meantime), so we have been enjoying the much better transportation facilities here.

Which is ironic, because if you ever want to see Melburnians throw a fit, go ahead and compliment their city’s public transport.  “Oh, you’re joking,” they will protest.  “It’s terrible!  Connex has absolutely ruined it.  Back when the state ran the trains there was never a delay, and just look at what we’ve got now.”  What they’ve got now is an overlapping network of trains, trams, and buses that covers the city and its suburbs, and seems just fine to us, though, as indicated, we arrived here not expecting much.  Connex, a French corporation, operates the trains, though a Hong Kong consortium is due to take over in November; Yarra Trams runs the city’s famous tram cars; and I have no idea who controls the buses—Rupert Murdoch, perhaps.  Most of our travel is on the trains and trams. 

The $109.60 monthly ticket we each buy allows us unlimited weekday use of the network within zone one, covering the city and about half of the suburbs.  On weekends, the tickets are valid for the whole network, including the most distant suburbs, which gets us out into the hills for some bushwalking.  On weekdays, Kathryn brings her bike along, takes the train to the last station in zone one, then disembarks and cycles another couple of miles to work.  My daily train journey is just 25 minutes, door to door.  I have done this painless commute several hundred times now, if you count each direction as a trip, and cumulatively it has given me a fair bit of reading time, as well as opportunity to make pretty close observations of my fellow passengers.

They are from all walks of life, all socio-economic levels, and hail from every corner of the globe—a set of facts that delights me anew every time I look up and become aware of it once more.  Riders on the commuter trains are generally silent, except for the people on their mobile phones, though there never seems to be more than one or two of these per car.  When there are none, the silence can be a bit eery and oppressive to novice riders—at least, I found it so.  On one of my early trips I felt a strong urge to engage my fellow commuters in a rousing singalong of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” just to lift the somnolent and funereal atmosphere.  I was fortunately able to resist this urge:  it’s plain to me now that the results would not have been good.

The silence prevails even when the trains are very crowded, as they often become during the peak commute times, and riders stand jammed in the aisles and entry points.  As the train approaches a station, a passenger will shift very slightly toward the door, not saying a word, and his or her fellow commuters will likewise alter their stance enough to let the person by.  Only very occasionally will someone mutter “cheers,” if the others have really had to scrunch up, but that’s the exception.  It’s rather like bees tapping their antennae and passing smoothly through a tight spot in the hive, only with more iPods in the case of the train passengers.

On either side of the doors are signs announcing that certain seats are to be yielded upon request to elderly passengers or those with special needs.  I’ve never actually heard such a request being made because whenever anyone boards who fits the bill, the person in the nearest seat will immediately rise and offer it without being asked.  It really is striking for the outsider to see the way these veteran commuters, who normally seem to be deliberately ignoring the rest of the world, will instantly step up and act to help someone who needs assistance.

I got a close and unexpected look at this during my morning run the other day, when I came across a small old lady, tapping a white cane before her and apparently trying to tumble down into an underground parking lot.  She did not look like one who had left her Maserati there, so I stopped to ask if she needed help.  She did.  After a lot of garbled communication (she was from Hong Kong, and was difficult to understand) she called her boss and handed me the phone.  Apparently the tram driver had set her down in the wrong spot, and I soon found out where she needed to go.  I walked her to the right tram stop, where we waited till the next one arrived.  As we boarded together, the man nearest the door promptly vacated his seat for her; the lady in the seat next-door held my new friend’s arm and helped me get her settled; and the tram driver kept the traffic waiting till he was sure he knew where she wanted to get down.  And the thing is, no one took this as an inconvenience or an imposition; there was no fuss at all:  a blind lady merely wanted to go to work on the tram, and everyone regarded it simply as part of their morning routine to help things along and keep the commute running smoothly.  That’s the kind of place I live in now, and part of the reason I love being here.

I did forget to mention that pregnant women are among those “with special needs” and having, therefore, a free ticket to the seats by the door.  Australia encourages large families, and I have never lived in such a baby-rich environment as this.  So, along with the elderly and the infirm, pregnant women are regularly offered the doorside seats.  Of course, it is sometimes difficult to tell if a woman is pregnant, or is simply carrying a few extra kilos of non-baby weight.  And, just as in the U.S., it is an extremely faux pas here to guess wrong in this matter when addressing a woman.  A teacher I know says that because of this, a friend of his doesn’t usually offer his seat to a large woman unless he is sure she is pregnant.  His reason for such apparently unchivalrous behavior is pure Aussie—straight to the point, and mincing no words:  he would rather see a pregnant woman stand, he says, than see a fat woman cry.

--originally posted 8/2009

Weathering the Weather

            Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of Victoria

Or something like that.  Tomorrow, 21 June, is the winter solstice here in the Southern Hemisphere, so I think a weather update is appropriate.  Melbourne’s solstice forecast calls for partly cloudy skies, temperatures from 11° to 16° C (52° to 61° F), with northerly winds averaging 30 km/h (19 MPH).   In local parks the deciduous trees have not yet dropped all their leaves, while down below the daffodils are just about ready to start blooming. 

For at least two months, as we have been descending into this extreme meteorology, native Melburnians have been solicitously asking how we are coping with their cold weather.  They usually accompany the question with a little drawing in of the shoulders and a pantomime of pulling a coat a bit tighter around themselves.  Sometimes it’s not even a pantomime—they actually do pull the coat tighter, pull down their gloves, settle their winter caps and cinch up their scarves.  Our answer is usually some variation on “so far, so good,” and Kathryn and I avoid each other’s eyes.

            I have seen no frost here yet.  For my morning runs I am still in leggings and a tee-shirt, and am sweating copiously when I get home.  Just for the sake of comparison with our weather in Melbourne so far, here’s something a friend once told me of her stint in North Dakota.  One winter evening there, she was in a hurry and rushed outside immediately after a shower, her hair still damp.  On the way to the car her head brushed up against something, which caused her hair to shatter and tinkle to the ground at her feet like a broken icicle.  That, I submit, is cold. 

What we have seen here so far is pretend cold, and the people who pile on the layers and wrap up in woolen scarves are simply playing at winter, the way children put on everything in their closet and imagine they are polar explorers.  Several times already we have grossly over-packed for weekend excursions because friends assured us that we were visiting “a cold place.”  So now, when one of us says that Such and Such is supposed to be “cold,” the other will ask, “Is that cold cold, or Aussie cold?”  There is a substantial difference.

--originally posted 6/2009

Thereby Hangs a Tail

The school where I teach is closed today, 8 June, to observe the birthday of her Australian Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.  Be it noted, this is not the Queen’s actual birthday—that’s in April.  Today is merely the observation of her Official Birthday.  I don’t know what that means, precisely, but it does seem a pretty neat arrangement for someone, naming no names, to scoop in twice as many presents per year as non-monarchs would be entitled to.

Please understand, I don’t wish to make fun of, or cast aspersions upon, another country’s holidays.  After all, I come from the nation that gave the world an annual celebration of a burrowing, meteorologically prescient rodent.  Of course, Groundhog Day isn’t really a holiday, since no part of the US that I know of is depraved enough actually to give people paid leave from work to observe it.  Nonetheless, it’s right there on most calendars in the US (not merely on the annual gift calendar from Rodent Fancy magazine, as one might wish), and I just can’t believe that its presence there gives a real boost to America’s prestige.

            Never having celebrated the Queen’s birthday, official or otherwise, I did not know what to expect, and so committed to memory all three verses of “God Save the Queen,” in case I came across a public singalong somewhere.  But I have been disappointed in that regard, unless some carolers turn up this evening.  Australians seem rather ambivalent about the holiday.  On the one hand they, like me, enjoy a day off and the excuse to uncap a few bottles of their excellent wine.  On the other hand, they find it a bit contrived to celebrate the birthday of someone living half a planet away and to whom they are only distantly connected.  But, as I say, a day off is a day off, so most of the Aussies I know shrug their shoulders and go watch a footy game or something.

            But no Queen’s Birthday bar-be-ques this year:  it is raining at the moment, which is always a welcome event in Victoria.  But having mentioned bar-be-ques, I’d like to put in a plug for the superb bar-be-que facilities they have here—an under-reported part of this under-reported country.  We have visted dozens of public parks here in Victoria since our arrival eight months ago, and I would guess that at least half of them have a number of free (or very inexpensive) gas bar-be-ques available for public use.  These are formidable brick structures, topped by a solid, stainless-steel cooking surface that slants to a grease hole in the center.  Push a button and a gas fire underneath heats them up in minutes for you to grill your steak, burger, or what have you.  As I say, you pay a few cents to use some of them, but most are absolutely free.  They are the most amazingly civilized public facility I have ever encountered anywhere, and I never had heard of them before I got here.

            I don’t know what the traditional Queen’s Birthday dinner is, but tonight we are having kangaroo, ‘roo burgers, in fact.  Kangaroo meat is as commonly available as beef here, and generally cheaper.  My kangaroo mince, for example, cost AUD $5.00 per kilo (USD $3.96 per lb.), as compared with organic beef mince, which is AUD $16.00 per kilo.  Moreover, kangaroo is extremely lean (less than 2% fat) with a good, subtle flavor, rather like heart—not gamey at all.  Recently, it has been touted as well on environmental grounds.  Kangaroos are evolutionarily adapted to thrive in the Australian bush and outback, so they tend not to over-graze, as cattle and sheep do.  Kangaroo digestion also produces less methane (a greenhouse gas) than do other stock animals; one might call them the Prius of edible animals.  As I say, I don’t know what the traditional Queen’s Birthday dinner is, but it does my heart good to imagine her Majesty sitting down in Buckingham Palace to a nice, fat kangaroo tail, smoking hot off the barbie, washed down with a flagon of good Aussie Cabernet Sauvignon.

            I’ll leave you with that toothsome thought and the middle verse of “God Save the Queen.” It’s my personal favorite, though I do feel vaguely uncomfortable rhyming “our God arise” with “her enemies.”  I don’t know why.  “Frustrate their knavish tricks” is good though—seems to me the world could use a bit more knavish-trick frustration nowadays.

O Lord, our God, arise,

Scatter her enemies,

And make them fall.

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On Thee our hopes we fix,

God save us all. 

--originally posted 6/2009

Cell Hell

            For those of you who have placed bets as to when (if ever) the day would arrive, the time has come at last either to pay up or to collect your winnings, depending on the accuracy of your guess.  Appropriately enough, it was April 1 when we finally, finally surrendered to the pressure of the cosmos and acquired our first mobile (cell) phone.  Wait, that’s not strictly accurate.  We’ve had the phone here since last October (a hand-me-down from Kathryn’s aunt Bev), but it was not until April Fool’s Day that we charged up the battery, bought a SIM card, and purchased some $30 of calling time.  I believe the sales lady said this will be sufficient credit to make one or two phone calls, providing we do it between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m., during the rainy season, to someone with the same hair color as me.  Of course, if the person I’m calling actually picks up his phone and answers the call, then all bets are off and the mobile-service provider places a lien on our home back in the U.S.

           

            I am not a big fan of mobile phones, and I believe we could have held out a while longer against the force of the cosmos, if we did not have to rent cars now and then to get out and see things.  Most recently, we wanted to sample the eastern end of the Great Ocean Road, a magnificent highway running 363 kilometers (225 miles) along Australia’s southern coast, from Torquay to Portland. 

We had reserved our car via the internet, and had arrived betimes at the rental office to pick it up.  The paperwork was nearly done, when the agent concluded brightly, “Right.  Now I just need your mobile number and you’re all set!”  Notice the phrasing, which implies that a mobile phone is just part of the standard equipment for a would-be car renter—as indespensible as a driver’s license and a working pair of eyeballs.

            “We haven’t got one,” Kathryn told her.

            “Then I can’t give you the car,” the agent replied in the same perkily efficient tone.

            “But you have our home phone,” Kathryn protested.

            “Yes, but we require a mobile number, in case we need to contact you about something.”  Presumably, this was in case of a national emergency, when the country’s entire fleet of rental vehicles might have to be commandeered to protect the homeland.

            “But we haven’t got one,” Kathryn repeated.

            “I can’t release the car unless I have two contact numbers, one of them a mobile, in case we need to contact you.”  She was still perky, but I got the impression the agent rather enjoyed having an iron-clad rule she could fall back on to turn us out, carless and dejected.

            “Ah, our mobile number,” I interjected.  “Gosh, yes, I have that right here in my notebook.  Let’s see.  It’s 11-1111-111, ah, 1.  Yes, that’s it.”  And off we went with the car.

            Actually, it didn’t quite play out like that.  Kathryn, who is marginally more honest than I, proposed giving the agent aunt Bev’s mobile number.  Would that suffice?  Happily, it would.  So Kathryn called her aunt, got the mobile number, and passed it to the agent.  “But we won’t have that phone with us,” Kathryn warned her.  You still won’t be able to contact us.”  The agent didn’t give a tinker’s damn—she had her mobile-phone number, and the letter of the rule had been fulfilled:  we had our car for the weekend.  Outside the sun emerged from behind the clouds and the birds began singing once more.

            We could foresee this scene playing out again and again, however, so we decided simply to take the plunge and activate the phone we already had at home.  That was my project on April Fool’s Day.  “What kind of plan do you want?” the lady at the mobile shop asked me.

            “The kind that gives us a number that we can give to car-rental agencies.”

            “How many calls will you be making per month?”

            “On average?  Zero, give or take.”

            “SMS?”

            “Oh, even less of that.”

            “Ah, in that case, we have a product called the ‘Don’t Even Think of Using this Phone’ Plan.  For a flat fee you get a SIM card, a number, and a small plastic bag.”

            So I got out of the showroom down only $39, but I had a phone that was theoretically operational, and a small plastic bag to put it in.  Moreover, I had a number, a real number that I could give to any petty fuss-budget who might ask for it.

            We still are not thrilled to have a mobile, but friends assure us that soon we’ll wonder how we ever got by without it.  “What if you’re out driving and you break down?” they ask.  “What if you’re hiking and you’re attacked by a dingo?” 

Well, I suppose they’re right.  We’ve paid to activate the thing, so we might as well bring it along when we’re on a trip.  That way, if we break down, we’ll at least have the phone to wedge under the back tire so the car doesn’t roll off down the hill while we wait for help.  And if a dingo attacks, we’ll have something to throw at it.  I guess that kind of peace of mind is worth $39.

--originally posted 4/2009

Quibbling Rivalry

Now here’s something singular I’ve recently discovered:  there seems to be a kind of jocular regionalism here in Australia—a semi-serious rivaly between the states that is overt enough and edgy enough to be detected even by someone as obtuse as I.

Exhibit A:  One day in our early weeks here in Melbourne, as we were sitting in the office of the local telephone company and limbering up to sign a 900-year lease on our DSL modem, we happened to mention to our young salesman that we were planning a Christmas trip to Tasmania.  “Oh, don’t go to Tassie,” he told us immediately.  “They’re inbred there—they’ve all got two heads.”  He grinned a moment later to show us he was kidding, sort of.  But I’ve since heard the same comment, nearly verbatim, from another Melburnian.  This one added, “In fact, if someone tells you they came from Tassie, you ask if you can see their scar.  Where they took off the other head, you know?”  He made it clear that while some people might tell a joke like that, he never would.

But before you start feeling too sorry for the Tasmanians, consider Exhibit B, which I found printed on the back of a Hobart milk carton:

 

“Not everyone can be on the front line helping to protect Betta Milk.  But to ensure that our milk stays in our state, there are suspects YOU can look out for every day to give Nikki and Frank a hand (after all, those mainlanders can be shifty…).” 

In case it’s not clear that these “shifty mainlanders” are retirees from the rest of Australia, Nikki and Frank give you tips for spotting them.

If you live in a small town, don’t think it can’t happen to you—right in your back yard!  Identifiable by their recent retirement, lack of children and abundance of cash to splash, these mainlanders often take refuge as those looking for a ‘tree change’ or ‘sea change’.  These are some of the most shifty and resourceful mainlanders; clever enough to embed themselves into your town’s psyche, then complete their mission methodically over a period of time.

Do your part to help protect our state.  If you suspect unauthorised milk use, contact the Betta Milk website and our new recruits will investigate your case.  Betta MILK.  Betta TASTE.

I have read this several times, letting it embed itself in my psyche, and giving it the benefit of every possible doubt, and the kindest conclusion I arrive at is that it was simply a grotesquely botched attempt at humor: the website given for reporting “unauthorised milk use,” after all, just links to the home page for a Tasmanian internet provider. A less charitable conclusion is that we ought to wait a while yet before we absolutely rule out the two-head theory.  Do but consider:  this amazing screed did not write itself spontaneously and get itself imprinted on a milk carton.  Someone had to scratch his head (maybe both of them) and compose it; others looked it over and edited it, possibly cutting sections deemed “over the top” and a bit strong for inclusion on a family milk container; still others approved the final draft and set the type to print it onto the carton.  You get my point, of course:  a bit on the tetched and paranoid side.

And what of the non-shifty, non-embedded mainland retirees (surely there must be some who just blundered over and thought the place looked nice)?  What are they to make of this crusade against them?  I know a daily read like that would cause me to look up now and then from my morning bowl of flax and bran, just to make sure a lively cohort from the Betta Milk Protection Squad wasn’t sweeping in through the garden gate, lit torches in hand, to welcome me to the neighborhood.  

But meanwhile, back here among the shifty mainlanders, I find Exhibit C on the back of some of our milk cartons:  the lyrics to “Advance Australia Fair,” the national anthem.  So now I really don’t know what to think.  On the one hand, Australia’s milk is perfectly wholesome, and if there really is a rising tide of virulent regionalism, I’m sure dairy products will play an extremely small part in any likely civil disturbance.  On the other hand, I’m beginning to wonder about my own milk use to date: was it all fully authorised?  I certainly don’t have documentation to prove it was.  So, out of an abundance of caution I have decided to switch to the excellent Australian soy beverages.  For now, their producers seem wholly indifferent to my politics or national origin, and the most incendiary thing on the carton is the cholesterol information. 

--originally posted 3/2009

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