Houses on a homestead at Longford near Launceston in Tasmania. Picture: Jody Steele Source: Supplied
the convict past remains an ever-present part of the Tasmanian story
PERHAPS the most quietly horrific room in Australia is a stifling little attic behind a locked trapdoor at Woolmers homestead in the Tasmanian Midlands. Here, in the 19th century, four assigned convict maids slept on narrow iron beds hunched together under the angle of the roof. Pasted to the paint-scabbed walls are magazine cuttings; scraps from the Girl’s own Paper, faded reminders of a home they would never see again.
Among the junk-room cast-offs in the attic are a convict-hewn rocking horse ready for the knacker’s yard, a tin hip-bath and the maids’ now rusted beds. Conservators recently found one girl’s hidey-hole under a loose floorboard. in it, wrapped in a sugar bag, a ragged shawl that she never collected and the mummified rats that had been gnawing at it.
Search your mind for an image of the convict system’s horrors and it is the savagery of Port Arthur that comes to mind, not country house domesticity. it is jail cells and mine-workings that seem the natural habitat for humanity’s darker streak, not homesick young women suffocating in a garret an impossible seven-month voyage from their past. as assigned convicts they were probably better fed and better clothed than if they had remained home in the slums of a rapidly industrialising Britain. but they were not free. If a maid became pregnant — willingly or not — she was sentenced to a term at the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart, where her baby would be forcibly weaned by six months. More than 1100 of the infants died as a consequence.
Last year UNESCO recognised the importance of the Australian convict story to world history by inscribing on the list of World Heritage sites 11 locations from about 3000 Australian convict sites. They join the cathedrals of France, the temples of India and the depots of the West African slave trade as belonging to all the peoples of the world, irrespective of the territory on which they are located. the inscription cites the global phenomenon of convictism: forced migration of people to colonies and its association with the global ideas and practices relating to punishment and reform. Australia was the world’s first attempt to build a new society on the labour of about 166,000 transported prisoners.
On the mainland, the designated sites are Fremantle prison in Western Australia, and Hyde Park Barracks, Cockatoo Island, the Old great North Road and Old Government House in NSW. there is also Norfolk Island plus the five Tasmanian locations: Port Arthur and the Coal Mines Historic Site on the Tasman peninsula, the Cascades Female Factory, Darlington Probation Station on Maria Island and the Brickendon-Woolmers Estates.
The whole of Tasmania, however, was effectively an open-air prison and the island is still defined by the physical reminders of the forced-labour economy that built the nation: the coalmines, the apple presses, the woolsheds. Until now the sites have often been seen as individual tourism destinations but the whole of the Tasman peninsula, including Port Arthur and up to the Midlands homesteads, was built on the convicts’ back and is in many ways a cultural landscape in its entirety. From appealing country towns such as Ross and Longford to courtyards of unmarked babies’ graves, Tasmania’s topography and architectural fragments explain more tangibly than anywhere else the origins of modern Australia.
Tourism Tasmania’s Melinda Percival acknowledges the lingering stain was once part of the reason for the neglect of the physical convict heritage of the island, especially outside officially sanctioned memorial sites such as Port Arthur: "there was a lack of respect for it as heritage. there was a stain, so in some ways the destruction of [convict buildings] was deliberate. [Tasmanians] didn’t want to see it and it was a very useful building material.
"but," says Percival, "it is the basis of our culture, our economy, our psychology." Shirley McCarron, a Hobart resident and longstanding voluntary custodian of the Cascade Female Factory’s ruins, goes further: "One could call them the mothers of our nation," she says of the former inmates.
Maria Stacey began work as a guide at Port Arthur and decades later is its director of tourism. a descendant by marriage of a Port Arthur convict executed for murder, she is proud of the UNESCO designation and feels a strong connection to the place. "it is terrific for Australia," she says. "it is our identity."
In Stacey’s circles the UNESCO declaration is something to be proud of: "the convict stain was never an issue for me but it certainly was for my dear old father-in-law, who lived here all his life. He thought Port Arthur should be bulldozed to the ground," she says.
It is hard to measure the degree to which today’s Tasmanians incorporate the history of these convict sites into a sense of themselves or whether these places are kept contained as a history apart, as safe tourist attractions that don’t impinge on a sense of self. but the strong tradition of ghost stories on the island certainly suggests history is present at least in the subconscious.
The fashion for genealogy has a part to play, too. Percival thinks searches by Tasmanian baby boomers exploring their family history through now digitised convict records are helping change attitudes: "it has become more personal. ‘How do I fit into this story?"’
History and how we feel about our past appears to becomes more real the more it is linked to place and to artefacts, even if this can be illusory. "it is one of our challenges to impress upon people that this is not how Port Arthur looked in convict times," says the site’s director of conservation and infrastructure, Jane Harrington. "We get criticism," she admits, for Port Arthur’s bucolic landscape, the groves of trees and lawns that drift down gentle slopes to felt the bay’s edge. During the convict period this parkland would have been an industrial zone with docks, the largest shipbuilding operation on the island and the shore area divided up by fences into stockades.
"but what would you have us do?" asks Harrington. Port Arthur’s board has considered re-erecting fences and stockades across the site but worries about the authenticity of such a move. International conservation practice is to avoid attempts to re-create the past or confuse genuine ruins with modern facsimiles.
The Port Arthur team has pushed this philosophy to the limit in a recently completed phase of repairs and reinterpretation at the Separate Prison building on the Port Arthur site. for years it had been largely derelict and roofless. the original single-storey building was a panopticon with a central room from where guards could observe the three spoke-like wings.
It was an attempt to bring humane practices — the Pentonville system — to prisoner reform. Inmates were encouraged to contemplate and repent. the result was psychological torture, with prisoners known only by a number, forbidden to speak, and hooded when outside their cells. the prison’s architecture was devised to allow as little human contact as possible. in the chapel, pews were arranged like a little stadium of sentry boxes to prevent prisoners communicating. it drove men to insanity.
Decades of decay and the removal of walls meant a visitor’s sense of this utter isolation and regimentation had been lost, its original purpose and conditions hard to detect. using heritage-sensitive architects Tonkin Zulaikha Greer, the Separate Prison’s perimeter wall and individual exercise yards have been rebuilt and its cells with their silent communication system of pulleys and flags restored to their original appearance. two of the three wings have been restored; the third will be left as a ruin but roofed over. it is now a powerful evocation of the prison conditions, but to various degrees it is a facsimile.
"it was a difficult decision to rebuild in that way," says Harrington, "but I think it was one of the best decisions we’ve made."
Across the lawns towards the bay are the remains of Port Arthur’s largest building, the multi-storey sandstone Penitentiary whose ruined silhouette is the site’s defining image. it is also in need of urgent conservation work but changes to its appearance will be much more limited than those at the Separate Prison: "It’s an iconic building for Tasmanian identity," says Harrington. "If we changed it there would be an outcry."
Re-creating more of Port Arthur’s past in an attempt to increase comprehension of it would be problematic. it would mean, notes Harrington, ignoring the site’s longer life as a tourism destination and as the post-colonial town (briefly called Carnarvon) that took over the buildings after the prison finally closed in 1877.
Following World War I, the Scenery Preservation Board assumed management of the land, gradually buying back those properties that remained after neglect, destruction and the terrible bushfires of 1895 and 1897. then in the 1970s the final push was made by the national parks service to relocate the remaining townspeople — some descended from prison guards or inmates — over the hill to a new settlement, Nubeena. Port Arthur was re-presented as a tourist park. Prettified ruins in parkland and the houses of the colonial elite remain.
The 70s clearance is still a cause for resentment among some older locals and it is a heritage approach unlikely to be followed today. there is almost a traditional-owner attitude among Tasman locals to the site: "the community got the perception that they were kicked out of Port Arthur," says Stacey, "but at the time people couldn’t believe their luck. there were new council chambers, a brand new oval, the caravan park was relocated and the post office was relocated from the old parsonage. some people got new houses built for them." Ill feeling remains, she admits: "They only realised their lost sense of community and place after they moved."
IN contrast to the lost continuity in the built record evident at Port Arthur or the Female Factory, intact Woolmers and Brickendon tell family stories like no other place in Australia.
The neighbouring Midlands farms which sit among hedgerows either side of the gentle Macquarie River, near Longford on the road to Launceston, were founded by the English Archer brothers, William and Thomas, two of four brothers who emigrated from Hertfordshire between 1811 and 1833 and who worked the land for generations, using assigned agricultural and domestic labour. after Thomas Archer VI died in 1994, hilltop Woolmers was handed to a trust to administer as a museum while Brickendon, down on the water meadows, is now farmed by Richard Archer and his wife, Louise, both keen heritage advocates: "Thomas died never having admitted that convict labour has been used at Woolmers," says Richard. "the word convict has never mentioned."
Despite that denial, there’s evidence aplenty at Woolmers, which still retains the accumulation of generations of Archers. They appeared never to throw a thing out; from full dining suites of Gillows furniture to the last Thomas’s shaving foam, still in the bathroom cabinet. there are photographs of Thomas V’s wedding, his bride’s wedding dress and the 1913 Wolseley used for the honeymoon tour of the island. it still starts first time. then there are those attic maids’ quarters behind barred windows. it is a unique survivor. Most convict barracks on the island were cheaply built and the first to fall into ruin. Information panels tell the story of master and servant. Sarah Turton from Liverpool — transported for stealing cloth — was a cook at Woolmers who became an inmate of the Female House of Correction in Launceston for six months hard labour after she was caught drinking with one of the male convicts.
Brickendon has an almost storybook quality with 1827 weatherboard barns, scratching chickens and Flora the hairy Duroc pig gruntingly content on her pile of straw. the blacksmith’s forge with all its equipment has been untouched since 1940s. it is as if the smith has just walked out the door in disgust at the advent of welding. the colonial buildings have that easeful, sagging grace that only weather and time can bring.
"We’re probably the oldest farming family in Tasmania," says Louise Archer, "and we are still making our living at it — as much as we can. We’re never going to turn it into Ye Olde Brickenden; that whole mobbed cap thing. It’s not a twee thing, it’s basically real. It’s important that it’s authentic."
She’s convinced the UNESCO declaration will help tell a more balanced story of the convict system beyond the usual rum, sodomy and the lash stereotypes: "So often Port Arthur is thought of as the only location but now this huge story is opening up. I think Tasmania has a huge future from that point of view." Percival is working with the Archers on plans to connect the two properties later this year with a footbridge and 2.8km walkway so visitors can experience both properties as one historic 465ha terrain. Woolmers will concentrate on the stories of the female convicts, Brickendon on the male labourers.
There is an argument for declaring much larger areas as heritage zones: these architecturally focused sites are tiny in comparison with world heritage areas devoted to natural beauty: the South West Wilderness of Tasmania, for instance.
Certainly, the entire Tasman peninsula is a cultural landscape of singular importance. there is Port Arthur itself and the Coal Mines (where sodomy was central to the story of Australia’s oldest pit) but also areas such as Eaglehawk Neck, the isthmus at the gate to the peninsula whose cleared ground was once guarded by soldiers and fierce, starving dogs, and the Georgian brick houses that began life as probation stations and now serve as heritage B&Bs.
In the Tasmanian Midlands too, a wider protective loop could be thrown over the landscape so that the other great estates and towns such as Longford, threatened by unsuitable development, get their due protection as part of this bigger history.
The story is not uncontested, however. the Tasmanian Aborginal Centre has argued UNESCO should not be listing any more white Australian sites while Aboriginal history is being neglected and destroyed. without taking anything away from the value of the convict World Heritage designation, indigenous activists have a point. for instance, the new Brighton bypass on the Hobart to Launceston sites threatens significant damage to an ancient Aboriginal site. such problems could be avoided with adequate resourcing to identify sites of significance ahead of development proposals (Australia spends much less than most Western countries on preserving heritage).
"We have clear international obligations to protect the heritage values of the convict story but we have other moral obligations to respect the other stories too," says Harrington, conscious of the manifold layers of Tasmanian history. "It’s incumbent on us to make sure it’s a penal settlement as much as possible in the landscape, but this place has been a tourist site longer than it was a penal site. We shouldn’t allow the convict history to drown out other layers, including the township period and Aboriginal [aspects]."
It is not just about recording and preserving existing layers: history is constantly adding new sediment to the meaning of place. in Port Arthur’s case there is the massacre of 35 people in 1996 which has magnified perceptions of the sites as a place of pure malevolence amid the beauty. in an act of symbolic destruction, the Broad Arrow Cafe where people were killed was gutted after the attack, but the Martin Bryant story has been deliberately played down.
"Until now we’ve consciously avoided talking about it to visitors," explains Harrington, noting that friends and relations of today’s guides are among those killed. "it is a raw thing involving the staff who were here. We had criticism that because nothing was mentioned it meant we didn’t care, but staff are concerned they will be asked questions that they don’t want to talk about." this is about to change with proposals being discussed for a new memorial and ways of incorporating the massacre story: "We are now close to 15 years on from the event and the board think it is now time to start thinking about it."
With its locked attics and mass murders, infanticide and mental torture, not to mention attempts to wipe out the indigenous race, Tasmania’s history can be as repugnant as its physical legacy is attractive. the UNESCO world heritage declarations mean it is time to start telling the whole story: the small sorrows and the great crimes.
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