Port Arthur sits on a peninsula in south-east Tasmania, about 97 km from Hobart. It was founded in 1830 as a timber station and named for the lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land, George Arthur. From 1833 until it closed in 1877 it was a prison for secondary offenders, convicts who had offended again after being transported.
The Horror
The peninsula was a prison in itself. The isthmus at Eaglehawk Neck, the land link to the rest of Tasmania, was guarded by soldiers, traps and dogs.
The settlement is best known for the Separate Prison, completed in 1853 and extended in 1855. It was built on the reforming belief that solitude and silence would remake a man better than the lash. Under what was called the silent system, prisoners were hooded and kept silent so they would reflect on their actions. The result, historians note, was the opposite of the intention. Many prisoners developed mental illness, a consequence of the lack of light and sound that is described as unintended. An asylum was built beside the prison.
Not every asylum inmate came from the Separate Prison, and the number of broken men is not established here. Popular retellings add detailed figures, such as hours in the cell each day and the length of time in the dark cell. These are unconfirmed.
Point Puer, across the bay, held boy convicts, some as young as nine. Sources disagree on whether it was the first or second boys’ prison in the British Empire.
The Legend
Port Arthur is widely described as haunted, and ghost tours are a staple of its reputation. That is folklore and not history. The tale told to prisoners that the bay was full of sharks, as a deterrent to escape, is likewise told as a warning and not as a measured fact.
The Modern Relic
The Isle of the Dead, a roughly one-hectare island off the settlement, served as its cemetery from September 1833 to 1877. About 1,000 people are estimated to lie there, though records are incomplete and estimates vary widely. The wider record counts 1,646 graves, of which only 180 are marked. The graves of convicts lie in the lower southern part of the island. Headstones were not permitted for them, and the small metal numbers that marked some were lost in the 1920s. Free people were buried at the north-west, often with headstones cut by convict masons. John Barron, an Irish convict, lived there as gravedigger for over ten years until his pardon in 1874. Mark Jeffrey was the gravedigger until the settlement closed.
After closure the township was renamed Carnarvon, and fires in 1895 and 1897 destroyed the old prison building. Visitors were already arriving, and the name Port Arthur returned in 1927. The site is now part of the UNESCO-listed Australian Convict Sites and receives over 250,000 visitors a year. The Isle of the Dead is reached only by boat, on guided ferry tours run by the historic site.
