Port Arthur

Port Arthur penal settlement

I am back in Australia. On landing I read that fifty years ago, on 3rd February 1967, Australia sent a convicted killer to the gallows. Ronald Ryan was the last Australian to be legally hanged - in circumstances eerily similar to a British case that has always fascinated me, that of James Hanratty, perpetrator of the so-called ‘A6 murder’. Australia is a country that was colonised by killers, petty criminals and reluctant members of the military back in 1788 when the First Fleet of deported convicts from Britain arrived in Sydney Harbour. Before the United States of America gained independence from Britain in 1776 the British, shipped over fifty thousand convicts westwards across the Atlantic.

There are a number of ironies linked to these three dates not least in a week that President Trump (how that moniker sticks in my craw) seeks to ban some foreigners from his country, for fear of what killing they might do.

Americans then and now have never been too happy that for nearly sixty years from 1718 they received the underclass of British society. Conversely there are many Australians proud of their convict past and even today boast about their ‘colourful’ ancestors. Captain Arthur Philip, who commanded that First Fleet, was followed two years later by the Second Fleet and then a good many more. In the ensuing years coastal areas of Australia were colonised by the British and the authorities began to look for more remote landscapes in which to settle Britain’s convicts. In 1800 the first convicts arrived in Tasmania.

When we travelled in Tasmania in 2008 we found remote landscapes. The people of Tasmania, just 500,000 of them, refer to the rest of the country as the North Island. We happily meandered in our car on unsealed roads; on foot in huon pine forests; and swam in the Pacific Ocean. On the west coast, south of the town of Strahan is Macquarie Harbour. And in the harbour lies the small, desolate and now deserted Sarah Island, home to the first British convicts in Tasmania. 

The ruins of Sarah Island

Here convicts faced not only isolation on a frightening level but suffocating heat, deprivation from decent humanity and a complete lack of privacy. However, it took so long for communications and supplies to reach them from Hobart Town (supplies had to come around the island by ship, there was no overland track) that the authorities looked for a more convenient place to build a penal settlement.They chose Port Arthur.

I have visited some godforsaken spots on this planet but Port Arthur is probably the saddest of them all. Port Arthur prison was opened in 1830 but housed convicts for less than fifty years, being closed in 1877. For some English convicts life inside the walls of Port Arthur prison may just about have been more bearable than if they had been incarcerated in one of London’s grim jails. They had survived the very process of transportation that was devastatingly cruel. Many died from typhus, dysentery and influenza on the ships between London and Australia.

Escape from the Port Arthur prison buildings was possible and indeed not uncommon. But once outside the settlement escapees had to cross Eaglehawk Neck – a narrow strip of land less than 100 metres wide that separated the prison from the rest of the island. The authorities chained a line of ferocious dogs at ten-yard intervals across the Neck. These were fiendish animals trained to attack any unfortunate convict that came near. Men suffered terrible deaths.

Eaglehawk Neck

Following the closure of Port Arthur prison it was turned into a tourist attraction for the ghoulish and genteel Victorian-era gentlefolk who came to celebrate the taming of convicts sent to Australia from their homeland. But what they chose to ignore were the atrocities performed by their forefathers on the indigenous Aborigines. Prior to the opening of the prison British settlers massacred nearly 5,000 Tasmanian Aborigines in twenty years. Yet, not only was this atrocity not seen as wrong by many white settlers, the authorities in Melbourne and Sydney condoned such behaviour for a long time.

Tragedy, atrocity – call it what you will, I will call it the past revisiting the present – visited Port Arthur again in 1996. One Martin Bryant walked in to a café on the site of the penal colony. This 28-year-old man ordered some food then drew a semi-automatic rifle from his bag and proceeded on a killing spree. When he was eventually captured the next day, 35 people were dead and 23 lay wounded. It was claimed at the time, and sustained since, that Bryant had become the worst mass-murderer in Australia's history. This is not true. There were European settlers in the 1800s that performed mass killings against the Aborigines in the states of New South Wales and Victoria as well as on the island of Tasmania.

One good thing came from Bryant’s actions. The Australian government of John Howard subsequently “introduced the National Firearms Agreement — legislation that outlawed automatic and semi-automatic rifles, as well as pump-action shotguns. A nationwide gun buyback scheme also saw more than 640,000 weapons turned in to authorities”.

 So why cannot the United States follow suit? Does the USA have any pretence of being a civilised country? 

One man thought so: President Obama, who in his eight years in office was frustrated in his attempts to tighten gun control, praised the Australian reforms in the days after one US massacre. "When Australia had a mass killing … it was just so shocking the entire country said, 'Well, we're going to completely change our gun laws,' and they did. And it hasn't happened since," Obama said.

I can believe in the second amendment to the US constitution. I would not deny an American’s right to bear arms. But the Founding Fathers could not foresee the semi-automatic and assault weapons behind today’s mass shootings when they wrote their historic document. So surely there must be another amendment.

I am proud that in Britain we shall never have another James Hanratty, killed by the state in revenge. Australia too had the civility to say ‘enough’ we will not kill our citizens any longer. Why did these two nations act so? Not because it was unfortunate (to say the least) if they sent to the hangman an innocent man. Nor because it seemed a civilised thing to do. It was because they have respect for life, hard won after all the lack of it meted out by their ancestors in the penal colonies of the empire.

President Trump (aargh again) does not have respect for many people, especially many Muslims. His utterances and attempts at Executive Actions regarding foreigners will lead to more killings, more hatred and more atrocities. Let’s all remember what Englishmen did to their fellow men on Sarah Island, Port Arthur, and the Maze; what other Europeans did at Auschwitz; and tell Mr Trump how near he is to pushing down a similar path to hell.

The southern ocean at Eaglehawk Neck

If you would like to share your experiences of the places discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.

Since my first visit to Australia in 2005 I have read some superb books, fiction and non-fiction, that capture a part of what the country was and is. In no particular order I can strongly recommend the following: -

Fiction:

·      For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke; 1874

·      The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough; 1987

·      Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough; 2000

·      Voss by Patrick White; 1957

·      A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White; 1976

·      The Golden Age by Joan London; 2014

·      The Rosie Project by Graham Simsion; 2013

·      The Light Between the Oceans by M.L. Steadman; 2012

Non-fiction:

·      The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes; 1987

·      The Longest Decade by George Megalogenis; 2006

·      Island Home by Tim Winton; 2015

·      Thicker Than Water by Cal Flynn; 2016

Books by all the authors referenced above can be bought at: https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk