The Separate Prison, And All The Things I Didn't See.

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 beside the Separate Prison to provide care, kindness, and light healing labour and exercise to counterbalance the previous mental torture and deprivation.  Hmm.

From the hospital ruins, overlooking the paupers home, the asylum, and beyond the circular exercise yard of the Separate Prison.

Asylum, now a museum.

Eventually everyone moved to new digs (penal, medical, or old-age) in Hobart, many of the wooden buildings burned down in bushfires, and just the ruins were left.  Oh, and the solitary confinement model of incarceration was thankfully consigned to history's bucket of Bad Ideas. Mostly.

After the asylum we visited the cottages once inhabited by accountants, clergy, and visiting officials. Buffered from the actual prison by the prison farm, the houses enjoyed a beautiful view across the Government garden and the still water of the bay to Dead Island (oops, sorry, that was its name before prison authority decided that Isle of the Dead was more poetic) and beyond it Point Puer where up to 800 boys aged 7 - 16 were incarcerated separate from the adults.

We wandered through the ruins of the Anglican Church which all convicts attended every Sunday until the Catholics mutinied and endured both solitary confinement and the cat o nine tails until they won the right to their own clergy.

All that wandering completed our circumnavigation of the site and I for one was quite historically prisoned out by then.  We had a breakfast date in Bicheno the following day so we had to get a move on, but we still managed to see a few sights as we headed north along the east coast 

The blowhole at Fossil Bay wasn't blowing due to the mild weather and calm seas.  Being tightwads we didn't want to pay the $40 for National Park single day access, so we skipped the tessellated pavements which were the highlight of a day I spent exploring on the Tasman Peninsula 30 years ago.

Calm seas.

In Dunally we discovered the Denison Canal. which allows small boats to cut through the East Bay neck and skip the tedious journey around the Peninsula from Blackmans Bay to Norfolk Bay.  Roger then discovered Ralph's Bay Canal, which would have allowed small boats to cut through the half mile neck at Ralph's Bay to the Derwent River and Hobart.  Construction of the canal was interrupted by WWI and plagued by cost blowouts and inconvenient movement of sand into the canal such that everyone gave up by 1924, the canal remains not quite finished to this day, and everyone still has to go the long way around.

A tale of one and 3/4 canals.

The sea fog rolled in when we met the ocean at Marion Beach. We droveup and over forested ridges and past lookouts that promised fantastic vistas should the fog go away. We drove past beaches and headlands and quiet reaches of water patrolled by black swans, all of which would have been lovely had the fog gone away.

We stopped at the spikey bridge to appreciate past engineering, one of us overtaken with awe at the excessive width of a bridge built in days prior to motorised transport.

The fog went away by the time we arrived at our Air Bnb in Bicheno, where we sat out to watch the end of the day as blue wrens twittered in the bushes and lambs bleated for their mothers in the paddocks below.

A good day.