Tasmania

PORT ARTHUR, Tasmania -- Most Americans will probably never travel to Tasmania, the island state of Australia so far south that penguins live along its coast.

But those who end up making the approximately 8,000-mile-trip (one- way to Australia) -- most likely for some other reason -- will find delightful and friendly people, prices similar to those at home, great hiking and backpacking, rugged scenery, ocean sports and interesting indigenous species such as the wallaby and the Tasmanian devil. Being in the Southern Hemisphere, Tasmania provides a summer playground during our winter. Its coastline has dramatic features such as Devil's Kitchen, a fissure from the ocean up through hundreds- of-feet-high cliffs, and Tasman Arch, another natural feature in the high cliffs.

Of all the places to see in Tasmania, however, the most compelling by far are the ruins of the prison at Port Arthur on the far south coast. It brings back a past of extreme contrast to the present.

Port Arthur today is scenic and serene, a sweep of green from the hills down to the gentle water of Mason Cove lapping against where black wharves once stood. Port Arthur's mottled, yellow-brick buildings stand nearby in 19th-century stoicism. But such is the history of these mute walls that they were almost once removed in an effort to erase the stain on humankind that took place here in a previous era.

Instead, a laudable civic effort has restored Port Arthur and made it a tourist destination visited each year by thousands of people.

For tourists visiting this calm locale, guides harrow up the past of a prison that makes America's Alcatraz or Joliet seem like summer camps. Their stories re-people the old brick buildings, filling the mind's eye with images of convicts in irons or under the lash; in lunatic confines, or breaking stones. One can almost hear a clanking here, a muffled groan there as one tours the penitentiary, guard tower, the separate prison, hospital, paupers' mess, asylum, church and other buildings where 12,000 sentences were served between 1834- 77.

By night, tourist boats putter across the cove scouting for historic ghosts that need not be seen to be believed. They putter past the Isle of the Dead where some 1,000 "Cool Hand Luke" types are interred in unmarked graves.

A proper British sounding place, Port Arthur was in the 19th century the literal end of the world and last resort for the worst of the worst of those sentenced by the crown.

Between 1830 and 1854, some 70,000 male and female -- and child -- convicts came by sea passage to Van Diemen's Land, as Tasmania was then known. While here, they supplied labor to build ships and provide timber and ironworks for many important projects, becoming an important pillar of the Australian economy. The ride aboard ship to Van Diemen's Land -- ships often made at Port Arthur by prison labor - - was itself a sifting and sorting process. Those who were well- behaved were often assigned to private masters and did much of the labor to establish the colonies. Most of these learned quickly that good behavior was rewarded. Their masters already preferred convict labor, for prisoners were cheaper and more subordinate than freemen in servitude. These convicts wore no leg irons and could win freedom in a few years.

The rest of the convicts were placed under government supervisors in state works throughout Tasmania. The best of these slept out-of- doors, and had Saturdays to work for themselves. The lower tiers of behavior -- the worst-behaving convicts -- worked in skin-effacing, leg-ulcerating irons of various weights. Those exhibiting the most incorrigible behavior were kept separate from the others.

The sixth, or lowest class -- the worst of the worst -- of men in behavior were considered so dangerous and degraded that they were removed. They were put back on board ship and sent to the prison at the far end of the world's end, the southern face of the island where dwelt those who often slipped beyond the scope of humanity, either from without or within.

This was Port Arthur, home of "severe punishment."

The prison started in 1830 in a sheltered bay surrounded by forest. The first 50 convicts arrived in 1833, built barracks and in a few years the prison was fully functioning. At its peak in 1840, it reached a population of 2,000.

In 1834 to separate and protect "impressionable boys" from hardened convicts, a boys' prison on a nearby island was established. This prison, Point Puer, was the first of its kind in the British Empire, and from 1834-1849, some 3,000 youths age 9-18 were sent here. Boys at Point Puer were taught a trade and received a basic education. They worked hard clearing land, quarrying stone and cutting timber. Productive lives awaited some while misbehavers continued a life in prison. Discipline was strict in the prison setting that for the young was close to Hades itself.

Where the adults were taken was Hades itself -- the genuine place, in its center. Typically, those who arrived at Port Arthur were sent to barbers and shorn "of everything in the way of embellishment" (Martin Cash, 1842), including their names, given yellow or yellow- and-black "magpie" suits, one blanket, one rug and a bed tick, and set to labor. Days were long here, generally from 5:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Most everything was done by convicts, including washing, cooking and manufacturing. Bread and gruel and salt pork or beef were food staples.

Newcomers were usually assigned to the most severe labor: the carrying gangs. Up to 70 men wearing heavy chains formed long gangs - - centipedes -- to carry felled timber from the forest a mile to the sawpits. Occasionally, a misstep, and a load would slip and send a hapless convict to the Isle of the Dead.

Linus Miller, an American lawyer sentenced for his part in a rebellion in Upper Canada, described his experience of working under a convict overseer:

"Seize them," shouted (the convict overseer) and away to the settlement! My bloody eyes; but this will bring you to your senses! But it is nothing to what I've got for you tomorrow!"

"I selected as light a (timber) as I could, shouldered it with the greatest difficulty, and staggered away, . . ." Miller wrote. "The overseer continually singing out, 'Come on, you bloody crawlers; keep up or go to the triangles.' The moment the loads were deposited in the lumber yard, 'come on' was again shouted and we went back for another load. This time four poor fellows were unable to carry their loads. Three of the four were flogged in less than an hour."

Flogging was common in the prison until the 1850s. Any prisoner could come before the cat-o'-nine-tails, and the whipping could change him for life. The worst was not the physical pain, but the degradation. A prisoner was flogged while tied to a wooden frame, a "triangle." Once, one well-behaved young man was seen with his hands in his pockets "by an old drunken vagabond of an overseer" and sentenced to be flogged. He was given 36 lashes.

"It made him one of the worst men on the station," wrote prisoner John Frost, a Chartist convicted of treason. "He became an entirely different man, and was continually receiving punishment, occasioned solely by the degrading manner in which he had been treated."

Men would be defiant at the lash and would rather die than complain while onlookers applauded their attitude. Of a very mild flogging, wrote prisoner William Derrincourt, the first strokes, "lightly laid on" took his breath away.

But most strokes by a demented convict flagellator were laid on heavy. To be sure, a medical officer was present at the floggings to ensure the man didn't die on the spot, but, the prisoners said, when the offender fainted, the medical officer "wasn't, as you say, particular in the count: grease, (to salve the lacerated back) sirs? yus and very little of that."

Another severe form of punishment was rock breaking. This punishment employed the most incorrigible of prisoners -- in the heaviest of irons, of course -- in stalls. Here they stood chained to an iron post, or to a ring set in a wall, or to a cable. Using rock hammers, they smashed rocks, day after day without changing position.

Derrincourt, who experienced a gamut of punishment, wrote of a convict next to him in the stalls, a certain Minehan. Crazed by the monotonous pain, Minehan battered to death another convict just to be away from the stall. Minehan's dream-come-true sentence was to be hanged and dissected.

"You cannot dissect my soul," he shouted defiantly as he left the dock for his execution.

Flogging was done away with for the simple reason that isolation and silence were more effective in breaking a man's spirit.

Port Arthur was also the incentive for the widespread prison reform that began in 1852 with the construction of the Separate Prison. With matting on the floor and felt slippers placed over boots to muffle sounds, this prison was a primitive sensory deprivation clinic. Bells replaced voices. When outdoors, convicts wore a cap and cloth facepiece to prevent interaction among themselves. Those who received additional punishment were placed in the dumb cell, a tiny room with yard-thick rock walls and multiple doors, completely soundproof and dark. While long sentences could be imposed to those in this quarter, 48 hours of silent night was enough to quail the most recalcitrant of men.

Such was life at Port Arthur. The experience of trodding over its mossy remains is sobering to say the least. And the visit is a reminder to be grateful that one is part of the 21st century, and free.

On the Web . . . www.portarthur.org.au

E-mail: jhart@desnews.com

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