Tasman Island Cruise and Port Arthur

Wayne did not recommend the OAT tour because it was too expensive compared to what we could arrange locally, due to the strength of the dollar. We chose to do the Tasman Island Cruise and Port Arthur. After yesterday’s rain, today was partly cloudy, good weather for our boat cruise. At the start, we had cliffs of mudstone, and the wave action created numerous sea caves with names like the Tasman Arch, and the Devil’s Kitchen. As the boat approached some of these formations, the seas gave the illusion that we were going uphill. Tasmania has been dry, so dry that the waterfall we saw today hadn’t flowed in over 12 months. As we headed down the coast, we saw numerous birds: a white bellied Sea Eagle, Albatross, and Australian Gannet. The coast changed from the horizontal formations of mudstone to the vertical volcanic formations of Dolomite. Here we saw the 70 m tall totem pole and candlestick spires and then the  1000 foot Cape Pillar cliffs right next to Tasman island. Tasman Island itself has 3 light houses, but no real landing for ships, so they used a cable system to load people and cargo off the ship, and then a steep track up the mountain. The wildest part of the trip was the return trip to the harbor, the wind was strong, and our boat slammed down between the waves.

1000 foot high Cape Pillar Cliffs

Then the bus took us to Port Arthur, where a British prison was built in the 1820’s. Remember that Australia was already a prison colony. Most people have been sent here because they were banished from England, but hadn’t committed a hanging offense (at the time there were 200 hanging offensesThe people sent to Port Arthur committed another offense while already a convict. The prison was considered a machine to “grind these men back to society”. But British justice during this period was being reformed. Historically, most people had either died in prison or the ones who were released were so hardened that they ended up back in prison. This prison was based on 4 principles: 1) Discipline and punishment. Port Arthur was the first British prison to stop flogging as a punishment, instead they used isolation in the “separate prison” as punishment which was similar to today’s maximum security prison. Prisoners were isolated and lived under rules of silence. 2) Separate and Classify – people with trades or who were literate were put into jobs that could use their skills. Also prisoners would get better or worse accommodations based on their behaviors from cells where they carried 20kg of chains to those where they were in a large common area with lots of sunshine. 3) Industry and training: most were loggers, hauling trees from the forest to the port, but they could be promoted to work in the workshops, learning a trade that could be useful in society and finally 4) Religious coercion. You had to go to the non-denominational services. What was interesting is that even though this was the bottom 20% of convicts sent to Australia, 7 of 9 never returned to Port Arthur. The prison looks more like a park today with remains of many of the prison buildings, But on higher ground, were many of the staff’s houses: the doctor’s the commandant’s, and the reverend’s quarters. While these were good paying jobs, the fancy houses were there to persuade the wives that this was a good place to live. 

The Penitentiary Cell Block