PORT ARTHUR

An intersection in time and space where cruel indifference to human suffering, desperate tragedy and heart-rending scenic beauty have all too often collided.

Port Arthur

80 drive south-east from Hobart

Not since I stood looking at the outlines of the steps to Gallows Gate set into the stone walls of the prison at Kingston on Norfolk Island, and in that moment understood the full horror of death by Capital Punishment, have I been so awfully struck by the capacity of mankind to execute abhorrent sentences to enforce or coerce atonement of the wicked for their acts.

Here, as with NI, is a place of heartbreaking beauty, which in the purist sense of the word should always have been a paradise, bearing the burden of its past with gentle grace, though steeped in the suffering of so many.

There is a strange tranquillity to be found in the garden between the churches, or by the boat landing, looking across the bay to the barracks area; but a discernible change descends on mood when entering the barracks ruins. It’s one thing to read accounts of the prisoners’ conditions, another thing again to see the size of their cells, the flaying stocks and gallows.

Even the many horror stories of rum, sodomy and the lash, of drunken soldiers and guards whose conduct distinguished them not at all from those they guarded, pale beside the experience of The Silent Prison.

Those for whom the lash held no more sting found a new form of punishment, dehumanised by prohibition from any form of direct human contact or communication, save for Hymn Singing in Church, breach of which was punished in the total silence and inky-black isolation of solitary confinement.

Port Arthur, church, silent prison, Tasmania

This was the last prison built at Port Arthur, is the most complete and to my mind the most terrifying for the coldly calculated mode and manner of its dealings. Many prisoners passed through the other prison barracks, served their sentences and went on with other lives on emancipation. Not so those unfortunate souls and broken psyches of The Silent Prison roll.

There is a more recent history of suffering at Port Arthur, of which I will say only that the indulgence in violence of an idiot costing the lives of thirty five innocent people, the wounding of another twenty three and the lifelong scarring of all of their families, and the community of Port Arthur and Tasmania underscores my earlier comments about how society deals with the wicked and penalises their acts.