23/03/2022 Locking People Up: Old Adelaide Gaol

 

Our last Fringe activity was a night tour of the old Adelaid Gaol.

We learnt all kinds of interesting things at the tour of the old Adelaide Gaol, including that when the colony of SA was started, the planners didn't plan for any kind of gaol at all.  The thinking was that as this was the only colony founded by free people rather than convicts, the good citizens of the colony would all be Very Nice People and therefore a gaol would be entirely superfluous.

This was not the case of course, and before long the new colony had need of somewhere secure where they could keep the colonists who weren't being as nice as they were expected to be.  With need of a quick solution, all the bad people were popped onto the good ship Buffalo and moored out to sea at Glenelg.  This solution lasted barely a year before the Buffalo was recalled to the eastern states and the pressure was on to find a more permanent solution for the problem of good citizens who persisted in being naughty.

In short order the colony trialed other solutions such as: a prison tent with the Bad Persons shackled to  logs (not very effective due to the lack of suitably heavy logs and the tendency of Bad People to pick up their log and run away); and a hastily constructed wooden lock up called 'The Stone Jug' (also not very effective due to Bad People having bad habits such as digging, chipping, cutting, breaking, and burning their way out of wooden lock-ups).  Obviously a more prison-like structure was needed and, Glory be, at least South Australia had a lot of stones so the colony finally got around to building a gaol that was harder to get out of.

Not everybody was happy with the costs of building a gaol, and the unhappy ones were even unhappier when the colony was nearly bankrupted by the construction costs and Governor Gawler was recalled to good old Blighty to Please Explain.  It was a case of build it and they will come, however, and they came so fast that the first inmates moved in before the building was completed.

You can find lots of details about the Adelaide Gaol here.  Roughly 300 000 people passed through the gaol between 1840-1964, and some of them were hanged there and buried between  the inner and outer walls.  The in-house burying custom started after an unfortunate incident involving a hanging which resulted in decapitation, the return of the body (history is silent as to whether the head came too) to the grieving widow, and her display of the body in the window of her oyster shop as a advertisement of her displeasure with the authorities.  The authorities decided to keep the bodies to themselves thereafter.  Nobody knows what happened to the body in the oyster shop window, and the ones executed henceforth in the gaol were laid to rest with merely their initials and date of execution on the wall to mark their resting place. 

The tour took us past all the hanging spots, where we were ghoulishly introduced to the trapdoors and hanging beams.

We also saw the state-of-the-art sky light which was built in the 'new' cell block.  The sky light was intended to provide light for the inmates, which it did.  Nobody thought of summer when they built it though, so the poor inmates had to deal with being roasted along with all their other woes.

Throughout the tour much was made of the possibility of ghosts in the gaol, and we traipsed through spooky dark hallways and into courtyards lit by spooky blue light (to avoid wrecking our night vision of course) all the while hearing a macabre mix of ghostly and ghastly stories.  The teenagers on tour were suitably thrilled and some suggestible tour members insisted that they heard unidentified moaning and removed themselves to have enjoyable fits of palpitations where the light was more conducive to selfies.

I didn't see any ghosts.

Peep hole.

The tour ended with the opportunity to lock ourselves into a cell and attempt to record a ghost.  By that time it was 1030pm and well past our bed time, so we passed on the ghostly opportunity and went home to bed.  

Good night.