Convict Trail

Feeding Time

Port Arthur Penitentiary

Next day as the weather was overcast, we decided to follow the Convict Trail to Port Arthur to visit the infamous penal colony. On the way we stopped at Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park. Though Bill and Martine discouraged us because other guests believed it was too expensive, we decided to stop anyway as this would be our only opportunity to see the little devils. In addition the park features kangaroos, wallabies, pademelons wombats, quolls and a bird show.
We arrived at just the right time and hastened to the kangaroo reserve to participate in feeding time. We were able to enter the pen and hand feed the beautiful creatures pellets that looked like rabbit food. They licked them right off our hands, and let us pet them; this was a real treat for us humans! I felt like a toddler at a petting zoo and took way too many videos of them hopping around. Duncan, being a bit more fastidious than I, wasn’t keen but I cajoled him into feeding them too. He seemed to get a kick out of it.
Then we hurried to one of several Tasmanian Devils pens to witness their feeding. The trainer was the only one to enter this pen, and he scattered hunks of meat around while explaining that these creatures are not very smart, and that is why they are confined to Tasmania where they have no natural predators. They look a bit like small pit bulls with jaws to match. They’re actually cute in a crazy sort of way. Apparently these carnivores are too slow to kill their prey so they live off road kill and injured animals. Their jaws are four times as powerful as a dog’s, and they eat everything bones, teeth, fur, you name it. They can eat putrid remains and not get sick. There were two in the pen, and they seemed to enjoy threatening each other and fighting over the meat in a real tug of war. There were bits scattered all around, but they seemed to want to fight for their meal. They made an unforgettable sound; filmmakers actually used a recording of it as the sound of the witch in Lord of the Rings!

From there we went to view the bird show, Kings of the Wind, a real treat. Trained birds swooped over our heads to nearby perches. We saw a cockatoo, a parrot, a peregrine falcon, a tawny frog mouth and a brown falcon. The parrot flew from perch to perch so we could get a good look at him. The cockatoo was trained to snatch one and two dollar coins from the hands of children and then return them. The peregrine impressed us with his intelligence, but he was missing a wing and couldn’t fly. They are the fastest birds and kill their prey in the air; there is a danger they would crash dive into the ground at high speed if they went after mice and voles on the ground like owls do. The frogmouth opened his appropriately named maw to feed and sat patiently on a portable branch while all the children got their photo taken holding it. Finally all the children lined up and spread their legs as far apart as possible and the brown falcon that flies at about half the speed of the peregrine (still pretty impressive) swooped between their legs like a small plane swooping under a series of bridges a la Billy Bishop.

We saw the sleeping quolls in their log burrow but somehow missed the wombat(s). The young fellow who had developed this place also funds research on a specific cancer that is attacking the Tasmanian Devils. He obviously loves all these creatures and takes great delight showing them off and patiently answering myriad questions from the youngsters. He looked like a youngster himself with his ready smile and strawberry blonde wavy hair. Most creatures have been harmed or abandoned and can no longer survive in the wild so they are fortunate to have him as their loving keeper.

Next we proceeded to Van Dieman’s Land or Port Arthur. I’d been looking forward to this visit for a long time but didn’t know what to expect it to be. Frankly it was like visiting a UK National Trust site, except that it was a former prison. The prison operated for only 47 years and was designed for the hard cases, not the first offenders who might have stolen a handkerchief or two! Our guide said that there weren’t that many thieves in Britain who were sent to Australia for stealing loaves of bread, this is a myth. But a handkerchief cost a month’s wages, and they were frequently stolen and offenders were punished harshly. Duncan said he remembered from Dicken’s Oliver Twist that Fagan had his boys steal them out of gentlemen’s pockets.

There were few prison bars here and, of course, no barbed wire in those days. One enters the peninsula through a narrow isthmus of land at Eaglehawk Bay where they had a Dogline – a line of vicious dogs chained together that would have made it impossible for an escaped prisoner to get past. There were no roads so all goods and people entered the area via water. The bush is dense, lacking food or fresh water so they really didn’t need many restraining walls. There was a Separate Prison set apart from the main penitentiary for the really hard cases. These men were put into isolation cells where they stayed for 23 hours a day. In addition there were two cells with walls four feet thick that were intended to be sensory deprivation cells. When in there, one cannot see or hear anything. Tourists can enter, but I backed out as I entered, I had no desire to even imagine the horror of that experience.

When the prison, supposedly the harshest of its kind in the British Empire, was closed in 1877, remaining prisoners were transferred to Hobart, and the many buildings including a church, a hospital, barracks for the soldiers who served as prison guards, quarters for their families, workshops etc. fell into disrepair. There was a fire in the 1890s that destroyed many of the buildings, and there was no effort made to reconstruct until 1979 because the Australians looked at this aspect of their history as a stain. However no sooner had the prison closed, than curious tourists started arriving even in the late 19th century. Today this is Tasmania’s most popular tourist attraction. Since many of those who were transported were poverty stricken in England, I don’t think there is the same stigma about “transportation” today. In fact Port Arthur is in the process of establishing and information centre to help people look up their convict forbears.

The site was well organized with knowledgeable guides. We took a 40 minute tour and all my questions were answered by the presentation. They had a philosophy of separating the prisoners into groups from the least corrupt to the worst cases. Initially they tried to provide training, both physical and moral, to rehabilitate the men. There were farm and garden plots to help teach self sufficiency. Over time measures became harsher, and the administrators inflicted more physical and psychological punishment hence the isolation cells. Our guide said he felt contemporary prison officials haven’t made many changes from those earlier times.

What was surprising to me was the sense that this place had been sanitized. It didn’t have the air of a prison at all, but rather a 40 hectare derelict estate. I think a visit to present day Wormword Scrubs or the Kingston “Pen” would be far more terrifying. We took a 20 min. boat cruise past the cemetery, the Isle of the Dead, and Puer Island where there had been a “reformatory” for boy offenders from ages 8-18. We hadn’t paid extra to get off and walk around, and the guide on the boat implied that she couldn’t say much about the history of these sites or it would spoil the visit for those who had paid! The boat ride seemed meaningless to me, and the motion of the boat served to rock me to sleep. I awoke and felt a bit dopey for the rest of the visit.

In 1996 a gunman went berserk on this site and shot tourists and staff alike. He killed 35 people and wounded 20! There is a memorial area commemorating those who died that day. What an extraordinarily macabre event that must have been. I don’t remember ever hearing about it, though supposedly it was in all the papers of the day. Bill later explained that because of the massacre, administrators decided to tone down the presentation at the prison centre, it just seemed appropriate given the circumstances.