Tasmania Part 3: Port Arthur

Port Arthur was a former prison location in Arnhem Land (as Tasmania was then called) that is about an hour's drive south of Hobart. It was an ideal location for a prison because it's located on an isthmus and connected to the rest of the island by a road that is only slightly smaller than the land it's built on, called Eaglehawk Neck.  In the picture below, you can see how hard it would be to get to Port Arthur from any other way but threw Eaglehawk Neck, so guarding the prisoners there wasn't too difficult. If you look at a larger map, too, and see how very little there is around the peninsula, you can understand how isolated this area was.

The prison site is a national historic site, and is preserved pretty well. Some pictures below show various parts of the location. Port Arthur Historic Site offers free tours as part of admission, which I would definitely take time to participate in if you visit, and a couple boat rides that may or may not be of interest to you. Our kids were bored, and I think we would have enjoyed it more had we not been dealing with kid kvetching the whole time.

Ruins of other building son the prison campus

Ruins of the main prison building. It was mostly destroyed by fire in the 1890s 

Some of the rest of the prison area that included a church, houses for guards and the prison warden, gardens and stables.

One of the guard towers (and my two munchkins)

I like this photo because it shows how Port Arthur is surrounded by water and wilderness. Anyone trying to escape from here would have a hard time finding which way to go and a hospitable place to land.

The isolation prison for those who tried to escape or who couldn't play well with others  (and our guide, who volunteers to give tours twice a week)

Prisoners at Port Arthur mostly did logging as their work. There are beautiful Huon pines all around the area.They also built ships - on one of the boat tours they drove us past the ship building area as well as quarantine houses and an island where boys sent to the penal colony could be isolated from the rough men housed in the main prison.

Port Arthur gained modern-day notoriety in 1996 because it was the site of Australia's worst mass murder, in which a man brought multiple guns and shot up tourists and locals. Our tour guide mentioned it, and said if we were interested in learning more about the massacre there was an exhibit in one of the buildings, but even 20 years later said it was really too painful for him to talk about. Port Arthur is a small and close-knit community, and not one person who lives there was unaffected by the killings - either they were related to or knew someone who died.

Photo credit:  monumentaustralia.org.au

This massacre instigated Australia's stronger gun laws. They instituted a gun buy-back from the general population, made security and training requirements for owning a gun more stringent, Aside from a man in Sydney shooting two people in a Lindt store a few years ago, there hasn't been a mass shooting incident in Australia since.


On the way back to Hobart (this was a day trip for us) we stopped to look at some natural wonders called 'The Devil's Kitchen' and some tessellated pavement that strangely I have lost all my pictures of. But it's cool, and a good thing to stop at on your way back to Hobart. If for no other reason than some locals at both sites sell homemade curried scallop pies, which are a Tasmanian speciality. Sounds gross, but they're pretty good!

The Devil's Kitchen is so named because really rough water comes in and out of the cliffs and creates a big blowhole here. Once again, the rough water a convict wanting to escape by sea (since by land would have been guarded at Eaglehawk Neck) would have to deal with would make the journey very treacherous.