While Not Working

We spent a full day in Devonport and while we didn't see the sun it also wasn't raining so that was a plus. I heard the ship's horn at 0500 as the Spirit of Tasmania came in to port, and shame on me I rolled over and went back to sleep. We were downtown bright and early to attend to some business but the town had shut up shop and gone to the races (the Devonport Cup) for the day: business would have to wait. We went out exploring Devonport instead. Devonport from the elevated bridge thingy from which one can watch the cars roll onto the Spirit of Tasmania. Devonport lies at the mouth of the Mersey River and is home to the Spirit of Tasmania, the ferry that travels nightly to and from Geelong on the mainland. The Spirit's more mundane sister, the Searoad, sails out of Devonport as well, carrying freight rather than people and cars. It even follows the same schedule, just 15min earlier. The Spirit with the Searoad behind. We checked out the Spirit of the Sea viewing platf...

Rain clattered on the roof all night long. Our friends got up at cold and miserable hours and went to work, leaving us to our own devices in their house. Being part of the leisured class, we dawdled over cups of tea and forlornly checked the weather forecast, which was unrelentingly wet. Eventually we left, because it would have been embarrassing to still be there when our friend finished the first part of her split shift and came home. Soggy. We ambled in the rain through Deloraine and up to Parangana Dam. At the dam wall water cascaded down the rock walls beside the road, gurgled through a culvert, and tumbled down into the dam. An excavator scraped the gutters, guarded by a lackadaisical stop-go person who struggled to get out of the car to change his sign from 'Stop' to 'Slow'. The weather lifted briefly as we came over the range and there were actual views of the Mersey Valley from Oliver's Lookout. Ribbons of clouds billowed up from mountain valleys, all overs...

I woke to a shroud of fog with splatters of rain, an invisible sea growling below our Air Bnb while invisible birds twittered in shadowy trees. We had a long breakfast in Bicheno, catching up with friends from Qld (yes, every man and his dog is here in Tasmania!), and set out on our way up the east coast. Bicheno in the morning. The word on the tourist street was that the east coast was a beautiful drive, a procession of stunning beaches and bays interspersed with equally stunning headlands, and detours inland over ranges dripping with temperate rain forest. A break in the fog and rain, enough to reassure me that yes, there was a beach there.  Dripping was right. Rain splattered against the windscreen and fog obscured every view.  I took photos whenever there was something to look at, and sometimes when there wasn't. Stunning vistas at Siderling Lookout. We struggled to find a sheltered picnic table at which to lunch and when we did Roger caused himself terrible trauma by maki...

Breakfast was a choice: microwave porridge in the motel room, complicated by the absence of a microwave; or continental breakfast in the dining hall overlooking Port Arthur. Morning view from the dining hall breakfast nook. We were at Port Arthur as the gates opened, ready to finish seeing the sights, namely the Separate Prison and the asylum. The Separate Prison was built as new philosophies of prison management were developed.  Port Arthur ditched the hard labour punishment in favour of a regime of total isolation, prisoners confined alone to silent cells with no human contact for days, weeks, or longer.  This was considered a leap forward in humane treatment of prisoners. Should the prisoner rebel they were summarily deprived of light and fresh air for hours, days, etc as well. The idea was that alone with their thoughts, the wayward persons would contemplate their errors and become better men. Instead, they went mad with disturbing regularity, so the asylum was built besid...

Port Arthur was a penal colony on the Tasman Peninsula outside of Hobart. It was a secondary prison, meaning that everyone there had already been serving time when they blotted their copybook again and got sent off to Port Arthur for extra punishment. Extra punishment at Port Arthur often involved spending long days in leg irons, felling trees and carrying the logs down to the Port to be sent to Hobart as lumber or used within the prison boat yards. We spent a whole afternoon at Port Arthur, walking around the ruins. The most striking feature of the complex was the old penitentiary building. It was originally a flour mill with the mill powered by a water wheel. When water was in short supply (which was most of the time) convicts provided the power, running like hamsters on a treadmill in alternating 15min shifts throughout the day. The whole system didn't work very well, the convicts having an unfortunate habit of dying, getting injured, or simply just not running fast enough to ef...