Erik Skye Travel Journal

20 Jan 2012

For the map, click here: Google Maps – Wizard of Oz

Car’s trip odometer: 8,200 clicks (km)

“Geology had conspired with Lieutenant-Governor Arthur to give the prisoners of the crown a moral fight as their ships hauled in. But once inside the landlocked bay of Port Arthur, the impression melts. Or so it does for the modern visitor, who sees green lawns, the ivy-covered remains of a Gothic church and the enormous bulk of a penitentiary. In its soft tones of pink brick, far gone in crumbling, it seems an almost maternal ruin.”^25

As I paid the $30 entry fee for the Port Arthur Historic Sites, I was handed a playing card and told ‘go find your convict’ in the maze of modern exhibits below, which I promptly did. My card (an ace of clubs) matched the one on the display of a life-sized, smiling Thomas Dickinson who was sitting in a tidy little cell room. I was to identify with convict life by imagining I was him, given information about his past and the settings depicted. I could try on over-sized (play size?), shiny chrome, overly round-edged shackles, see rooms mocked-up to show the working conditions of various convicts (i.e. a blacksmith in a shop, a cook in a kitchen, a laborer carrying a bundle of wood), and read facts and history and quotes throughout. In whole, I began to feel as if this was Disney Land – a place for enjoyment. I then wandered aimlessly through some of Port Arthur’s real ruins where the experience felt more authentic, yet still empty and impersonal. As I turned a corner of the roofless and crumbling penitentiary building, I noticed a sign that read “Today’s Convict Plays”. There was one showing left called “The Shingle Strike”, so I sat down and waited.

Four actors soon emerged (three dressed as convicts and one as an overseer) and began bantering light-heartedly with the crowd and joking about floggings for some of the straggling tourists arriving late. My interest began to peak and (combined with the theme park-quality exhibits and neutrality I felt towards the ruins) my overall attitude shifted to amusement. The play began with the convicts full of joy for life -proud and unbroken; innocent in nature. I started to wonder – ‘when I read The Fatal Shore, did I take it too seriously for my position in the modern world, for here are Australians themselves seeming to poke fun at the whole thing.’ I thought maybe the answer was ‘yes’ and continued to enjoy the superb acting, which drew me in and left me thinking ‘I need to go to more live theatre in the future!’ I was totally engrossed and charmed.

But let me pause here to share some real accounts of early Australian convict treatment:

“One prisoner named Joseph Mansbury had been flogged so often – some 2,000 lashes in three years – that his back appeared quite bare of flesh, and his collarer [sic] bones were exposed looking very much like two Ivory Polished horns. It was with some difficulty that we could find another place to flog him. Tony [Chandler, the overseer] suggested to me that we had better [do it on] the soles of his feet next time. A sentence of 200 lashes was called a ‘feeler’; one did not forget it. All the medical treatment the convict received was a bucket of sea water on his back, an operation known as ‘getting salty back.’ ‘Many were relieved by death from this treatment,’ Jones wrote. ‘It would be impossible to detail the torture received… [from] the commandant, his servants and overseers. One of the favourite… punishments was to make the leg irons more small each month so that they would pinch the flesh.’ There was also a black isolation cell, and a water pit below the ground where prisoners would be locked, alone, naked, and unable to sleep for fear of drowning, for forty-eight hours at a spell.’ ^26

Continue

The play was about an Irish poet named Francis Macnamera who stood up to the cruelty of his overseer and paid for it many times with isolation and the flesh off his back. The turning point (i.e. when the play went from depicting simple adversity to cold cruelty, hopelessness, and despair) came when Macnamera stopped an overseer from flogging a smaller man who couldn’t carry his heavy burden of roof shingles. The characters continued to vividly portray how the overseer took advantage of his authority to satisfy his personal grudges, such as humiliating the smaller man by forcing him run in circles with a load on his back; unfairly making the load to be carried heavier than required by regulation, and tricking Macnamera into thinking that the younger man had “ratted him out” while Macnamera was away in solitary confinement. I began to recede from amusement and to intensely sympathize with the convicts again, as I had done a year before while reading The Fatal Shore. I then walked away satisfied that I had experienced something meaningful and real - as true to the convict past as can be recreated today.

Have you seen the movie The Princess Bride? There’s a scene where Westley is attacked by an R.O.U.S. (immediately after declaring ‘personally, I don’t think they exist’). R.O.U.S. stands for “Rodents of Unusual Size”, and in the movie they were basically noisy, clumsy, man-sized rats. Well, the Tasmanian Devils I saw today (at the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park near Port Arthur) where like little R.O.U.S.’s! The devils hobbled around, growled, fought, and slept – a lot. ‘Bad disposition,’ I said to the woman next to me, as we watched the devils with fascination. I heard another man remark sarcastically ‘beautiful manners’. The personality of the character “Tasmanian Devil” (a.k.a. “Taz”) in Looney Tunes is not far from reality. The caretaker threw in a wallaby forearm and paw, and I watched one of the devils crunch the whole thing up and swallow (including the bones and claws) as if it were you or I eating a granola bar.

Tasmanian Devils got their name from the first Europeans to arrive here, who heard their terrible growling in the woods for the first time and literally believed they were devils. Eighty percent of the devil population has been eliminated in the last 15 years by Devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), and they fear wild devils will soon be extinct because of it.

For my videos of the Tasmanian Devil brothers, click here:  Tassie Devils, Tasmanian Devils Take Meat, Tasmanian Devil Meat Chase

The food here in Hobart is incredible by the way.

For song of the day, click here (let website load briefly, then click orange “play” next to title): Yeasayer – O.N.E.

For access to archived Erik Skye Travel Blog articles, click here: Archive

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Footnotes:

25. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (Collins Harvill, 1987) pp. 399.

26. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (Collins Harvill, 1987) p. 115.