Last Stop: The Tasman Peninsula

We finally made it to the Tasman Peninsula in the very southeast corner of the state, and only about 50 miles from Hobart Airport from which we would eventually depart Tasmania.

The Penninsula is another beautiful area where we hiked along the coast with amazing views and had another chance encounter with our funky friend the Echidna.

We visited the "Tessellated Pavement," which is a naturally occuring rock formation where the rocks look like tiles laid right along the ocean, and later climbed down to the Remarkable Cave.

But all of that natural beauty is not even the star attraction on the peninsula. The main reason to visit is Port Arthur, which was the largest prison in Tasmania during the 19th century. The Port Arthur site is huge (about 100 acres), and it is well preserved compared to a lot of the prisons we saw. In some ways, it is better to think of it as a convict settlement rather than a prison. From its opening in 1830 until it was closed at the end of the 1870's, Port Arthur acted as a secondary penal site, meaning that convicts were generally not sent directly there, but were transferred there from other prison situations if they offended while in custody. 

At Port Arthur, the prisoners were forced to work in many industries including timber collection and boat building.

Of course, the conditions were terrible, and prisoners attempted to escape. We took a tour that showed us a bit of the site while telling us some of the wild escape stories. In many cases, prisoners got away from the site, but ended up back at the prison because they could not survive in the wilderness. And, while there were some successful escapes, they were definitely few and far between.

For us, the most interesting part of the visit was learning about the Separate Prison, and the mid-19th century debate about the proper way to punish and rehabilitate prisoners. In the early days of Port Arthur, the prisoners were given hard work and religion (of course) while being locked up at night. The Separate Prison was built later, and was what we would consider a supermax prison where prisoners spent 23 hours a day in their respective cells, in silence without any human contact (still with religion though). It was particularly interesting to learn that shortly after the Separate Prison opened, the people had already started to note the extreme psychological impact of such punishment on some prisoners. Amazing that we still use this form of punishment more than 150 years later!

After our visit to Port Arthur, we returned to Hobart for an excellent birthday dinner for me, and to fly on to our next destination, Malaysia. More on that in the next post, but first, just one more photo from Tasmania: Shana among the lavender at a lavender farm where we had lunch.

More to come soon.

Jeff and Shana