On Walkabout At: Port Arthur, Tasmania – Part 2

Next Posting: Port Arthur, Tasmania – Part 1

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Besides the penitentiary building the next most prominent structure that catches the eye at the old penal colony of Port Arthur is this impressive looking watchtower:

I walked up and around to the watchtower in order to go inside and get a glimpse of Mason Cove from the guards perspective:

Here is the view the guards at the penal colony would have had as they watched the British ships anchor here and unload their cargo of newly arriving prisoners:

With the most striking buildings of Port Arthur belonging to the convicts and the guards it is sometimes easy to forget that Port Arthur was more than prison but also a community filled with normal every day homes for the various families that lived at Port Arthur:

Considering the squalor the prisoners and even the guards lived in, the homes where the senior officers and prison administrators lived in were very large and beautifully decorated:

Some of the homes had full kitchens staffed with full time cooks and maids:

Here some more pictures of the smaller houses that would have been the homes of civilians and other officers that worked at Port Arthur:

Of course at Port Arthur there was a church as well:

Not only did the convicts build this church, but they were also forced attend services here as well:

Here is what the inside of this long abandoned cathedral looks like:

Out towards the front of the cathedral my wife and I strolled this pleasant garden:

The last thing my wife and I did at Port Arthur was take a boat tour around the harbor.  The boat tour was very interesting and continued to add to the educational experience of visiting this penal colony.  For example we learned that the prisoners used to work on making boats and used these boats to go on whale hunts:

It was in one of these boats that some convicts made an escape from Port Arthur and made their way all the way up the Australian east coast before being recaptured.  Most convicts were eventually released from Port Arthur, but some were left to spend an eternity at Port Arthur when they died and were buried at the Isle of the Dead in the center of the bay:

Between 1833 to 1877 about thousand convicts and civilians were buried on the island.

Here is a close up photo of the graves on the island:

You can actually pay more to take a tour that allows you to walk on the island and view the graves:

We didn’t have time for that and just took the tour around the bay.  Here is the view looking south towards the entrance of the bay and the ocean:

And here is the view looking back towards Port Arthur as the boat circles around the Isle of the Dead and heads back to port:

As the boat came back towards Port Arthur the penitentiary came insight around the bend of trees:

I couldn’t help, but think was the convicts traveling here a hundred and fifty years ago thought as they saw the penitentiary come into view?  Here is a historic photograph from the early 1860’s that does show what the convicts saw when they arrived at Port Arthur:

Port Arthur looks vastly different today from its heyday 150 years ago:

After finishing the boat tour my wife and I headed back to the car park thus finishing our tour of Port Arthur.  We really did not know much about Port Arthur or the convict history of Australia’s past, but this visit really made us knowledgeable about this interesting part of Australian history.

Next Posting: Hobart, Tasmania

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Note: More pictures of Port Arthur can found at Port Arthur’s official Flickr page here.

Also for American readers that may not know Port Arthur was the site of the greatest modern massacre in Australian history back in 1996 when 35 people were killed and 21 more wounded in a shooting rampage that forever changed gun control laws in Australia.  I didn’t want to dwell on it in this posting, but if you can read more about if you are interested at this Wikipedia page.