Port Arthur

[aggienaut]

Saturday, February 23rd, 1856 - the small schooner comes into the cove and luffs up, the small experienced crew needing just a few gestures from the captain for directions. Amidships the prisoners are lined up on deck, their chains clanking, under the supervision of red coated soldiers. The forested hills surrounding the cove are starkly beautiful, but also cold and imposing. From the jumble of buildings that make up the penal colony a longboat rowed by prisoners is making its way to the boat. Murray looks at the grim faces of the rowing prisoners as the longboat comes up to take a line from the schooner and tow her in to the dock.
   "It can't get any worse" Murray remembers thinking wryly when he'd first arrived in Australia, "I've already been sentenced to transportation for the term of my natural life!" But he was wrong, it can always get worse. The convicts laborously towed the schooner in to Port Arthur, a place of secondary punishment.


Friday, February 23rd, 2018 - the cruise liner P&O Pacific Jewel comes into the cove lets its huge anchor hurtle down into the water. The passengers line the rails admiring the starkly beautiful forested hills, and point at the ruined buildings of Port Arther. After a few minutes the tenders are ready to ferry interested passengers in to the dock. As the geriatric passengers are helped onto the floating dock they are greeted by smiling guides. Welcome to Port Arthur.

   "Hey, isn't that the ship we saw earlier from the Queenscliff ferry?" I ask my dad, pointing at the white cruiseliner out in the cove. Later discussion with self-confessed shipnerd wantedonvoyage confirms it probably was. We had driven here from Hobart, about an hour and a half across a coastline that was a jumble of inlets and peninsulas, and across the tiny neck of land said to have been guarded by chained dogs to prevent escape from Port Arthur, to arrive here at this most famous of penal settlements.
   Port Arther was "a place of secondary punishment," meaning that if someone had already been sentenced to be transported to Australia and committed another crime, they got shipped here. As well though persons guilty of murder and other serious crimes could be shipped directly to Port Arthur.
   And if someone shipped to Port Arthur needs to be punished yet more? A "Separate Prison"on the panopticon design was built at Port Arthur where the inmates permitted no contact at all with eachother and even the guards didn't talk so there'd be no human interaction at all. And if that's not enough? It can always get worse! Further punishment for these inmates would consist of being locked in a dark closet sized room behind several big doors so there's no light or sound. And after that? They found they had to build one of the world's first psych wards when this treatment proved capable of driving people insane.

   The area is starkly beautiful, with its steep forested and mist shrouded mountains rising from the sea and numerous islands, but I gather it wasn't a very fun place to be sent as a convict. Aside from generally cold weather, the completely alien plant an animal life from their home, with the sheer distance from their home, must have made it feel like today's equivalent of being sent to Mars never to return. The prisoners worked at various industries, timber cutting and sawmilling was a major one, and logs were transported in the area on a tramway pulled by convicts. Among the other industries, they also had a shipyard and built boats until they were forced to close it -- because they were successfully competing with other commercial shipyards that actually had to pay their labor.



   We spent the entire day looking at Port Arthur. As it came time to go I had one last place I wanted to visit. Behind a hedge we found the quiet and contemplative memorial garden, with a reflection pool reflecting the empty shell of the former visitor cafe where 22 people were shot in the space of 15-30 seconds on April 28th, 1996. Nearby a plaque on a small obelisk contains the names of the 35 fatalities in the Port Arthur Shooting. After this shooting the Australian government imposed strict gun controls and there hasn't been a mass shooting in Australia since. This was all the more poignant since it was coming just a few days after the most recent school shooting in the United States.
   One other thing that I've noted about the Port Arthur Shooting -- the shooters name is never mentioned. It is known, it's in the wikipedia article, but I feel like whereas in shootings in the states the shooter's name is emblazoned across all the headlines, a sort of damnatio memoriae has been generally agreed in this case.

Comments

[fluttershy.livejournal.com]

Absolutely beautiful pictures. I have always wanted to visit Tasmania! My fiance, an Australian man, is a gun aficionado and we often discuss the Port Arthur massacre and the consequent gun buyback. The reality is that the country is changing; immigration (primarily Somali) has seen the crime rate increase exponentially, especially in urban areas such as Melbourne, where street gangs dominate the crime sector. Perhaps gun laws will have to be reevaluated soon to fit this new Australian order, because the truth is criminals who want guns will, and do. acquire them. Just ask the Sudanese mother of a jailed gang member who says she needs larger Centrelink payments to stop her six children from taking up a life of crime (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5245937/Sudanese-mother-blames-Melbourne-crime-unemployment.html).

[nemophilist.livejournal.com]

So pretty!

All the recent shootings have me so depressed. :(

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Its so awful, I was reading about another one that happened the very next week except the kid attempting it his gun jammed after only a few shots, so he only was able to kill one (like a kindergartner, he had gone to the elementary school for his shooting!), so it didn't really make the news. But they say these things literally happen every few days! In the one I was reading about the teenager really idolized past shooters, which is why I thought it was remarkable and probably a very good thing that the Port Arthur's name is largely never mentioned.

[fbhjr.livejournal.com]

Port Arthur is one of the prettiest places I've ever seen.
The look doesn't fit the history.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I felt rather the same way!

[wantedonvoyage.livejournal.com]

This sent me down a wiki rabbit hole. I had to know what a panopticon prison was, and that made me think about a prison in Philadelphia that you can see from I-95. I'd always thought was Eastern State Penitentiary (now a museum), but I learned recently that it isn't It's actually Holmesburg Prison, still in limited use, which was the site of gruesome medical experiments on prisoners, at the behest of Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson and the University of Pennsylvania, into the middle of the last century.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Oh wow!

I love wiki rabbit holes though ( :

[pundigrion.livejournal.com]

This guys that one Doctor Who episode with the Panoptican a whole new layer!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I've only ever seen one episode of Doctor Who. It involved space whales.

[pundigrion.livejournal.com]

That was a pretty good one!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I particularly liked that they used rotary phones on a space ship

[wpadmirer.livejournal.com]

Australia handled their mass shooting SO much better than the USA has any of theirs. (sigh)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Did you see I snuck in the link there to the perennial onion headline "there was no way to prevent this, says only country where this regularly happens?" :/

[loveshanny.livejournal.com]

Never heard of that shooting (live in US). Interesting read.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I'm not sure I had either. It was a young man with an AR-15. Australians were horrified. While I was looknig at the plaque a random Australian tourist who happened by started sharing with me how horrified she'd been when it happened, and all Australians I've met are familiar with the incident. Not like in the States where it's hard to remember which shooting was which!

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

I knew that Australia had had a mass shooting, recalled all its guns in private hands, then never another. If only, in the U.S.

And thank you for teaching me the concept of damnatio memorae. What a useful phrase and idea for making jokes, among other things.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Previous to this I didn't really know any details of this shooting, just that it happened. I read the wikipedia article, and, I don't know, I suppose I've maybe never read a detailed account of other shootings, but the detailed summary was utterly chilling.

Also of note, he used an AR-15, mass shooter's gun of choice it seems.

In re damnatio memorae, I think Roman emperors had a habit of declaring them against their predecessors ;)

[mexpatriot.livejournal.com]

As a criminal, I would cry, "Please don't throw me into the briar patch (of Tazmania)!" What a great place to be imprisoned!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

its one of the eternal ironies, getting transported to lush sunny undeveloped Australia would have been an infinite improvement over living in the slums and gaols for many of those involved. "We're going to punish you by sending you to this really beautiful place!!"

Also interesting, the nearby manor house here, the guy that built it was originally transported here for "stealing three beehives from his uncle," and being as the family was well off in England it kind of sounds like an invented offense to get a free ticket here.

[mexpatriot.livejournal.com]

its one of the eternal ironies, getting transported to lush sunny undeveloped Australia would have been an infinite improvement over living in the slums and gaols for many of those involved.

Yeah! Especially considering the England of Dickens!
Though, there are parts (large ones) of Australia that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Ever see the Aussie film Wake in Fright (1971)?

Though, being sent to Tasmania looks like a boon.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I mean I can see how never seeing any of your old friends or home again could be very alarming, but yeah it seemed like a pretty good deal, especially since there's a fair number of stories of people turning their life around in Australia and becoming wealthy owners of thousands of acres and tens of thousand head of sheep or cattle.

[cazzicles.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the very mention of Port Arthur is virtually synonymous with the shooting, even now, and I'd say that Martin Bryant's name is well known (and was everywhere when the massacre happened), even if the people actively choose to avoid mentioning it when talking of the tragedy. I completely understand why - you don't want to give people like him the infamy he clearly wanted.

Despite being so close, I've never made it to Tasmania. You're putting me to shame, here! I really should do something about that.

PS - I just wanted to provide a counter point to something I read above, and didn't agree with (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-17/what-statistics-tell-us-about-melbournes-african-crime-issue/9336604) - being a Melburnian born and bred myself, I don't particularly care for a certain (incorrect) narrative that's been unfairly spread by certain types of mainstream media with a very clear political agenda! It's an election year, after all.