Hobart ... Port Arthur... Hobart. 13th March

Day trip out to Port Arthur.

Left at 8.ooam for a day down to Port Arthur Historical Sites. What an amazing day, all very interesting.  Too much to say in the blog but will try and give you a general idea. Port Arthur was much more than a prison. It was a complete community- home to military personnel. The convicts worked at farming and industries, producing a large range of resources and materials. Very well maintained site and there is so much history. Too nice a setting for convicts although there is no way that they would have enjoyed it like we do today. We started off with a forty minute introduction tour from our guide,which was extremely interesting then we did the walk round at our own pace. This included a twenty minute boat trip around the inner harbour of the Port. Passing the Islands where some of the Officer's and in excess of 1000 convicts were buried. After all of the above after arriving at 9.30am (one and a half hours drive from our accommodation) we had some lunch at 1.30pm before we left the site. We also saw two sites of Tasman Arch and Devils Kitchen which where 10 Km on our way back from Port Arthur.

As we arrived and starting the tour looking down to the Penitentiary.

Looking across to the Peniteniary.

Junior medical officer's House (1848)

The Church (1837)

Some of the trees in the grounds.

The Pententiary (1857) looking back before we got onto the boat.

Just leaving on the boat passing the Dockyard slipway (1834)

Point Puer Boys' prison (1834) Juvenile offenders were separated from the older convicts to protect them from criminal influence. Most of the boys were aged 14 to 17, with the youngest just 9.

Peeping out to the open water of ocean.

The Isle of the Dead (1833) Between 1833 and 1877 around 1100 people were buried at the settlement's cemetery. The Isle of the Dead is the final resting place for military and civil officers, their wives and children and the convicts.

You can see some of the head stones amongst the trees. Of course the convicts didn't have the headstones.

The Penitentiay's two lower floors contained 136 cells for prisoners of bad character. The top floor provided space for 480 better behaved convicts to sleep in bunks.



My cell.

You can see inside, the  recent reinforcements to protect the building from high winds and general bad weather.



The floor space remains of individual cells.



Let me out !!!

Looking up at the Guard Tower

Guard Tower outside the Officer's Quarters (1835) looking over Port Arthur Bay.

Looking out from the Officer's Quarters (1844)

Looking down over the bay.

One of the bays going out to the Tasman Arch 10km from Port Arthur.

Tasman Arch amazing. Over thousands of years this Arch has been carved out by general erosion of the siltstone cliffs.

Looking down into Tasman Arch. It's a lot further down than the photo shows at least 150 feet.

Devils Kitchen looking down about 150 feet. This is a deep trench without an arch which has been carved out by the Tasman Sea. You can't see in the photo that there was a large number of buoys attached to crayfish pots in this very deep water.

We then went a little further on to Eaglehawk Neck which is a little town on The Tasman Peninsular 10km before the Port Arthur Site. The thin strip of land known as the Neck connects Tasman Peninsula to the Forestier Peninsula. It's about 400 metres long and less than 30 metres wide at one point. This narrow entrance to the Tasman Peninsula was once guarded by the dog line, a line of dogs chained together to prevent convicts from escaping from the prison settlement of Port Arthur. Many tried to escape, some succeeded and there's now a sculpture to mark this once brutal barricade. We didn't get a photo of this.

In all a very interesting day. Arrived back to our digs at about five pm.