Tassie Day 4, Saturday

On Saturday morning it was a relief to wake around 7 and, instead of getting in the car, walk through the gray morning down to the waterfront. Salamanca Market had just opened, and people were still setting up. My arrival, though, marked a steady trickle of people munching sausage rolls and holding coffees. I bought a plate of tiny pancakes and ate them with butter and lemon as I wandered. Soon people would fill the aisles, undaunted by the rain that spattered fitfully sideways onto the wares, surging in until by eleven I could barely make my way through the happy chattering eating shopping crowds. But while it was still quiet, I saw the handmade candles and wood carvings of Huon pine, locally grown produce, pretty rolls of cloth and facial creams and pure essential oils and handcarved pepper grinders and wall hangings and poster prints and jams—even Bruny Island Cheese Company had a stand and, would you believe, it had cheese! When I couldn’t move in the aisles for the people, I made my way to the tourist centre, waiting in line to buy a Park Pass and eating a round of cow’s milk washed rind cheese with a fresh sourdough roll.



By noon, I was in the car and heading for Port Arthur, unsuspecting that later, I would look back on this day as my favourite part of the trip. At the recommendation of friends, I had been reading Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, a comprehensive history of the convict foundings of Australia, and so I thought I knew what to expect.



I paid my way in—access cost $23 and included a walking tour and a brief boat tour of the harbour. My vague expectations of horror were stirred by my first tour guide, who explained the answer to a frequently asked question—the reason the guides were not dressed in colonial costumes was due to the fear that Port Arthur would turn into a theme park, instead of what it should be: a solemn reminder of a harsh past and a sad history that birthed a country that is, thankfully, better adjusted today.



Anyway, the ruins of the Penitentiary, Chapel, Officers’ Quarters, hospital, asylum and prison were quite creepy enough. Even wandering in broad daylight, I had less than no desire to go on that evening’s after-dark Ghost Tour. The Prison was the worst. Prisoners had their own chapel, where for services each stood, facing straight ahead, unable to look either to his right or his left or speak except to roar out the hymns. Walking down the corridor between the prison cells was like walking a gauntlet. The narrow corridor was built of big rough cobbles and lined with thick, misshapen wooden doors, each with a tiny slit to see into—prisoners were severely punished for looking out— and airholes punched in the bottom. At one end, the roof had collapsed, and the blue canvas cover flapped in the wind, letting in irregular cold blue patches of sky which gave the only lighting in the place. At any moment, I felt, a despairing ghost would burst from one of those huge heavy doors or, worse, one would swing shut behind me and trap me in those silent stone tombs. In a successful attempt at realism, speakers were installed behind the doors so that from every cell came a faint noise as though a punished man still remained inside: the tap tap of a hammer, a faint rustling from one cell, a scratching from another; the worst was one that coughed, listlessly, every few minutes.

The most dreadful was the Solitary Confinement cell, its soundproof stone walls four feet thick, so that to even approach was to walk first through a tunnel, the sound of the wind and the birds cut off as with a knife to leave only the dull quiet of an empty, pitch black stone room. Alone, I wasn’t about to go in—allegedly you were supposed to walk in and close the door behind you and try to imagine—but I could barely get myself to poke my head in, clutching the door with my other hand, humming to myself just in case I would be able to hear faint breathing...and thinking all the time of Lucy and how unwise it was to shut oneself in a wardrobe.



I had managed to thoroughly freak myself out at that point, so I loitered a bit until some other tourists showed up and then followed a big group through the rest of the prison.

In the convict days, Port Arthur was a self-sufficient community, and you probably couldn’t hear the wrens and sparrows and dippers and soughing of the wind through the gums, for the ringing of iron and hiss of fires and shouts of men and thud of axes on wood—but now, the place is returning slowly to nature and it is easy to realize that the men who lived here were six months of ocean, or a lifetime sentence, away from their loved ones and from civilization. They must have felt beyond the moon. The toll of the eight church bells, now a recording, is nonetheless solemn and you can look out to see and feel just one small shiver that is a tiny taste of the desperation, the wishing, and the hopelessness of waiting for a ship to come in that might change one’s fate, for a wife who would earn permission and gather enough money to come live near you, for a response to the single letter you were allowed to send every three months.



Sure enough, for these men, the despair and the hard work, poor diet, and harsh punishment proved too much for many of them. Small wonder that an Asylum had to soon be built to house the unprecedented numbers of convicts who had gone slowly insane. Even the officers and men in charge felt themselves lost in the encroaching wilderness. It is easy to see where they tried to shut out the miseries and emptiness of their new land. They built stone fountains and English gardens, turned their wives’ drawing rooms to face the sea, away from the suffering of the landsmen, and planted wandering roses, pear orchards, and straight lines of blue gums and avenues of English oak. But they could not shut out the sound of the birds, the smell of the wild, and the rush of the wind. It is a lonely place.



It is good to see such a place both returned to the elements but preserved, left to crumble into a natural and austere peace. In this way, maybe, the solemnity and beauty of the place mask the horrors of its all too recent past.



So with a quietened heart, and a prayer for the souls that rest here, I drove back through the sunset to Hobart.