I drove out East this morning, my goal being the Port Arthur penal settlement, or the ruins that are left of it. It’s roughly 100 kilometers, if you don’t do any detours. But detours I had planned plenty.

First stop: Richmond. A tiny cute little town, basically a couple of houses along the main street. Nothing spectacular, if Richmond was not the site of Australia’s first ever bridge!

Or better: the oldest bridge still in use. It’s made of sandstone, and during its two year construction between 1823 and 1825, it was built by convicts.

It’s a very picturesque view, the village built a little wooden platform into the river. A sign advises potential love birds that any ceremony on the platform needs a booking! It’s all cute. I doubt the village would still be there if the bridge had collapsed at one point. But they made quite a good living out of it.

On towards Port Arthur, via Sorrel. My book mentioned Sorrel for some reason I forgot, and driving through the town with its cafés and warehouses and Seven-11’s and McDonald’s, I had little intention to stop. I was late anyhow, so I ditched it. Better not check what I missed out on.

 

Up and down the hilly land, the fields yellow golden with crops or dried grass, but lined with trees or bushes… fertile farm land it seems, even though it was dried out by the summer heat. Bush fire danger is high, I had seen one on the horizon across the river in Hobart on my day of arrival.

On to Dunalley, where I crossed over on to the Tasman peninsula. I learned about the Tasmanian Devil at a little station and various info points across the peninsula.

I made a little detour through the Tessellated Pavement State Reserve, with beautiful vistas on Pirate Bay, the massive waves and its surfers, and a rugged part of Tasmania’s coast line.

I learned about the Tessellated Pavement, and how nature created these geometrical shapes in the rock, I saw the Blowout hole, wandered on the beach… but also skipped a few things due to the advanced time… And I need to keep a few things for the trip I’ll be having with my sister….

 

So I finally arrived at Port Arthur, the site of Tasmania’s convict system. Today only ruins remain, after the site was abandoned and then burned down in a bush fire at the end of the 19th century…

It is only recently that Tasmania wants to deal with that dark spot in its history, for a long time the place was forgotten, renamed, banned from memory. It is somewhat ironic that settlers who descended from convicts, send to the biggest penal colony in the world, would set up a similar site for their own penal system.

The place is haunting – and may actually be haunted. At the very least, they have a night time ghost tour. If there are no ghosts in this place, then there are none, anywhere.

 

The prison ran from 1833 to 1877. I don’t want to go into the details of the penal system, the atrocities and unfair treatment people received, the physical and also psychological forms of punishment.

Some inmates were convicted for crimes that were so minor you can only be amazed. It was also a boy’s prison, some of the kids as old as nine.

To add to it all, the site was the place of the Port Arthur massacre in April 1996, a killing spree in which 35 people were killed and 23 wounded, mainly at Port Arthur prison colony. It led to a national ban on semi-automatic shotguns and rifles.

My visit was rather short, as I was quite late. When I arrived, massive dark clouds hung low over the peninsula, and soon it began to rain. But somehow, I found that all quite fitting for the place.

I didn’t buy any of the postcards in the shop, showing the ruins lit up in sunlight, with blue skies… It just didn’t seem to match this place.