Port Arthur: Australia's Infamous Penal Colony

this episode is brought to you by curiosity stream a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles right now you guys can get 25 off the cost of a subscription more on them in just a bit on a southeast peninsula in tasmania lies one of australia's most chilling sites built in the 19th century port arthur was the penal colony to end all penal colonies an outpost of british justice located over 17 000 kilometers from the heart of the empire here on this remote windswept outcrop convicts were funneled in by their thousands working-class men poor women from rural areas children who'd committed some minor infraction sent south over wild seas they arrived to face prison almost legendary for its hardships it was here that convicts were put to work building great ships that sailed to the world here the utopian ideas of criminal justice reform created a separate prison infamous for its psychological cruelty yet there's more to port arthur than just a history of transport and torture a key arrival point for many who came to tasmania port arthur was one of the seeds from which modern australian society grew a place that prepared some for a life of new riches on a new continent even as it trapped others in a cycle of poverty and despair brutal beautiful iconic haunted this is the story of australia's infamous penal colony [Music] 51 kilometers southeast of the tasmanian capital hobart lies a collection of striking ruins seen today port arthur historic site is starkly beautiful a series of crumbling old buildings from the dawn of the colonial era yet behind that beauty lies a complex tortured history one that involved transportation exploitation and violence even as it laid the groundwork for modern tasmania yet the story technically begins back in 1827 when the lieutenant governor of demon's land as tasmania was then known looked at the peninsula and thought lord struth this would make a bloody good place for a bean or colony wouldn't it but really the story starts a few decades earlier in the 1780s and it begins not with the founding of port arthur but with a decision taken at the highest levels of british government the decision to start transporting convicts to australia at the time the british had just recently lost the american revolutionary war losing a potential place to send their unwanted criminals with a lack of space to keep them at home london's political elites had a brain wave why not combine punishment with some good old-fashioned colonial expansionism back in 1717 james cook had charted eastern australia claiming it the king and country but keeping that claim would be a lot easier if there were some actual british people there to enforce it people like arthur philip an experienced sailor and administrator philip was told in 1786 to take hundreds of prisoners down under and establish a new penal colony they landed in new south wales in 1788 and while everyone came damn close to starvation eventually they created a functioning society they also succeeded in convincing london that this model was worth expanding because for all of its faults it really did work the stroke of genius was its non-permanent nature those who arrived in the colonies were prisoners certainly but they could see a future ahead of them a future in which they would become free and be entitled to land grants in other words keep your head down do your time in a few years ka-ching and so the great era of convict transportation to australia began one which today informs the family background of some twenty percent of the population but it wasn't just mainland australia that saw these colonies spring up by the early 19th century the first transports had arrived in what we today call tasmania but what the british called van diemen's land sadly for the dylan's indigenous population the arrival of the british was less the dawn of a new era and more the extinction of everything that they had ever known by the late 1820s and early 1830s so many tasmanian aboriginals have been murdered that scholars today refer to it not as colonization but as genocide it was only toward the end of this era of bloodshed that the local lieutenant governor george arthur was able to observe the wild tasman peninsula and declare a penal colony should be built there by this point convict transports were arriving regularly in modern-day hobart and launston a number that was only increasing now that britain had severely reduced use of the death penalty in favor of sending people to the land of drop bears but george arthur had more in mind than simply giving london another place to send its criminals the area he'd selected was surrounded by vast forests and perched right on carnival bay meaning ships could sail in to load up whatever the area produced rather than a simple colony arthur envisioned an industrial harbour place that would fell trees export lumber and even get into the shipbuilding game and convict transports would supply him with the forced labor needed to make that dream a reality [Music] at the moment of its birth in 1830 port arthur was nothing like the unesco-listed site that we see today on the country it was merely a small timber station an outpost of industry on a peninsula wild with woodland yet it wouldn't take long before this tiny outpost began to shape the landscape around it to grow and expand like a living creature spreading across the bay the key to this transformation the convicts themselves those sent to van diemen's land were usually young and usually poor originally from either remote rural areas or the slums surrounding england's dark satanic mills they were also usually male with women making up only 20 of the convict arrivals nearly all of them had been sentenced for non-violent crimes but where life at port arthur was different is that few were first-time offenders unlike most of the island's other penal colonies port arthur was designed for repeat offenders or those who'd arrived only to commit more crimes and the colony's commandant charles ahara booth was determined to make them pay their social debt through back-breaking work beginning in 1833 the great task of creating port arthur was shouldered by its new inmates that meant hacking away at the landscape helping fell trees and construct buildings that would turn it into a viable settlement starting with charles booth's grand house yet the point was not to cause suffering port arthur may have been a hard place in a hard time especially by modern standards but it was at least supposed to be also something else a way to give britain's criminals a future one thing to remember throughout this entire video is that it's taking place against a backdrop of endlessly evolving thought on the nature of justice so the idea of being shipped to australia and made to work failing timber might sound appalling to us but at the time it was considered a massive step up from just chucking people into overcrowded dungeons the convict support arthur would be worked to the bone certainly but they would also learn new skills trades they could apply for profit once they'd served their time the toughest of these trades was timberwork from his earliest days port arthur was a leading source of lumber with great convict gangs chopping down trees and sawing them into transportable chunks it was nasty dirty work with the trees so massive saw pits had to be dug underneath them where they fell with two convicts then slicing them up with a pit saw this meant he then spent the day getting sawed us sprayed all over him yet this discomfort was only the beginning the log sliced it then had to be carried to the waterfront where the real soaring sanding and refining was done fifty odd men would hoist the damn thing onto their shoulders slow walking in across the colony from afar people said that they kind of looked like a centipede and woe betide anyone who tried to avoid the work charles booth was of the if it hurts it works school of encouragement during his reign slackers were beaten with a cat nine tails or else held into a dark chamber for some enforced sensory deprivation from a purely business point of view though his methods were a success right up to 1846 when it was surpassed by another penal colony port arthur was the region's main timber producer yet felling trees was just a sideshow to the colony's real specialty the thing that would make its name and supply its convicts with a real serious skill they could use we're talking about one of the 19th century's greatest trades of all shipbuilding alright we'll get back to today's video in just a moment first here's a word from today's sponsor curiositystream curiositystream is a subscription streaming service that offers thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles from some of the world's best filmmakers including exclusive originals think of it as the netflix for nerds the hulu for history buffs curiosity 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per month per year which is an incredible deal so again curiositystream.com forward slash biographics 25 off making it just 14.99 for the whole year and now back to today's video [Music] from 1834 when port arthur's docks were built right through till their closure in 1848 this one bay in tasmania's southeast was the busiest shipyard on the entire island over their lifetime the docks produced over 150 vessels ranging from small light boats to 15 great ships that plied the waves across the world in many ways these docks were the fulfillment of charles booth's mission to improve the convicts while also working them those the colonies masters considered well-behaved could go there with no experience in shipbuilding and learn on the job gaining a truly valuable skill as such many of those sent there were convicts on the younger side including plenty of boys from the nearby juvenile colony point pure for a while this industry was the jewel in port arthur's crown a place famous down under for its engineering quality and the durability of its ships sadly it was also the first major part of the colony to be phased out following a huge economic slump in the 1840s people in the regular shipbuilding business began to question why they were being undercut by a bunch of bogans working for nearly free on a government site they complained people listened and that was that yet even as port arthur lost its biggest industry its convict population continued to grow like a waistline after a lifetime of tim tams a trend that only increased with the arrival of probation probation is the name we give to the second phase of convict transportation to australia following the earlier assignment era basically convicts prior to 1839 were assigned to either colonies or private settlers where they worked out their sentences the trouble was this meant convicts had wildly different experiences some might arrive to find a hard-assed cat and ninetales wielding full metal jacket drill sergeant waiting for them while others might get the tasmanian equivalent of mr rogers since everyone could agree that this was super unfair van diemen's land's new governor sir john franklin came up with a compromise in 1837 he suggested that rather than assign convicts randomly they should all be sent to stations on the basis of where their labor was needed most known as probation this new system was sound in theory but from the moment it was implicated in 1839 it ran headlong smack into problems the biggest of which was new south wales suddenly closing itself to new convict transports that meant the bulk of britain's deported criminals all being funneled to van diemen's land placing great strain on the system during this era it's estimated that 30 percent of all males on tasmania at any time were convicts in port arthur alone the population ballooned from 1 100 probation's introduction to 3500 by 1844 and all those extra mouths to feed created a cascade of new problems with a colony already struggling to become economically viable it was decided the only way to cope with this influx was to boost onsite food production that meant clearing new ground for agriculture for crops it also meant sinking insane human resources into building their own flower mill and granary from 1842 one of the most common jobs a convict could land was helping build the gigantic water-powered mill that was supposed to transform the colony's fortunes for three years hundreds slaved away making plans for a complex system of dams and aqueducts a reality yet it was all for nothing it turned out that complex system could be better described as useless system the whole time it was operational the mill barely managed to rumble to life much less make enough flour to feed thousands of convicts so the colony cut its losses not long after the shipyard closed the mill was decommissioned and refitted as the penitentiary with it died any hope of making port arthur economically viable but that doesn't mean they'd given up on the colony itself oh no in fact the penal complex was about to enter a whole new phase of psychological cruelty i remember when we mentioned this video was taking place against a backdrop of evolving ideas on justice and punishment well not long after the probation system was introduced another such evolution took place one which looked at the whippings and hard labor under men like charles booth and decided such practices were barbaric instead a new theory was gaining traction one which held that quark contemplation worked better for criminals allowing them space to look inside their souls and decide to change if that doesn't sound too bad though consider yourself warned at port arthur's separate prison these ideas were taken to such an extreme that they crossed the line from punishment to psychological torture opening in 1848 the separate prison took its cue from jeremy bentham's idea of a panopticon a prison in which inmates would always be visible to guards the idea was that the threat of constant surveillance would make everyone behave but just in case they didn't the authorities added additional flourishes on top of bentham's designs the first was the concept of constant silence from the moment a man arrived in separate prison usually transferred in from another penal colony where he'd committed a crime he was plunged into profound quietness talking unless addressed by the guards was absolutely forbidden and prisoners wore hoods outside their cells to stop them from making eye contact with other inmates not that they spent much time outside at separate prison the daily routine involved 23 hours of isolation where you were forbidden from making noise or doing anything but working menial tasks in complete silence outside the corridors were padded and the guards wore slippers so any laugh or scream or sigh could immediately be heard and punished yet even during the one hour of freedom things didn't improve prisoners exercised alone they ate alone and they attended chapel between screens so that they couldn't contact fellow inmates and speaking of eating those who broke the rules of this totalitarian silent retreat would be given only bread and water those who followed them would be given real food keep breaking the rules though and things got considerably worse this being a new supposedly more humane style of incarceration there were no beatings there was no violence instead rule breakers would be placed into next level solitude locked away in pitch-black cells where no sound or sight could disturb their contemplation for up to 30 days at a time it was supposed to be a time to reflect in reality of course it drove people mad while no mental breakdowns were recorded in separate prisons logs there were reports of men hallucinating after being placed in solitary while others seemed to have suffered lifelong psychological problems then there was the utterly dehumanizing aspect of it all with prisoners forbidden from using their own names allowed only to identify themselves by a number thankfully new arrivals at port arthur typically only spent four months there before being sent out to work in the colony proper yet the mental strain of utter silence and no human contact still left traces on their souls but even this panopticon was better than the colony's other infamous prison unlike separate prison point pure was not designed to break people but to improve them built on top of an outcrop of rock across the water from point arthur it housed convict boys sent from britain children under 16 who'd been arrested for petty crime like the separate prison the ideas behind it were enlightened boys would be kept there until they'd learned basic literacy and gained a skill and then released at 16 to rejoin society in practice though point pure was to juvenile detention what rise of skywalker was to star wars movies an epoch defining atrocity the trouble was boys couldn't leave the facility unless they'd learn literacy but point pure didn't actually teach literacy as a skill this meant some were effectively placed in indefinite detention but even those who left didn't fare much better once point pure had succeeded in giving a boy a skill and checked he could read he'd be taken to hobart to start a new life again great in principle but only if those boys had somewhere to go the majority of them knew no one in the town and didn't have a penny to their names yet they were dumped there with no information and left to fend for themselves unsurprisingly while some did well particularly those who'd picked up shipbuilding skills others spent the rest of their lives marred in poverty not that those lives were very long thanks to malnutrition at point pure is estimated 40 percent of the 3000 boys who spent their formative years there died before the age of 40 on top of the 15 percent who died in the prison itself as chartist leader john frost memorably said if i had 12 sons and it was left with me whether they should be transported or hanged i should at once say to hang them soon rather than allow them to go to point pure thankfully neither point pure nor port arthur penal colony itself were destined to be around for much longer [Music] in 1844 convicts had been arriving regularly in van diemen's land for exactly four decades that's 40 years to give some quick perspective on that 40 years ago chernobyl was a state-of-the-art power plant blockbuster video hadn't even opened yet much less become obsolete and randomly barking the phrases great scott or it's your kid's marty wouldn't be considered pop culture references but early signs that you were having a stroke so for people living in tasmania in 1844 convict transportation would have seemed like a fact of life but that didn't mean they liked it as that year dawned it was on a new social movement springing up one that demanded an end to transportation with so many convicts on the island in the probation era beers began to circulate that they were taking jobs from working-class locals on top of that resentment was starting to build about britain treating the place like a giant dunny for dumping all their drugs in especially since new south wales had recently banned transportation it was from these seeds that the australian anti-transportation league grew a vast movement centered on van diemen's land dedicated to stopping the arrival of more convicts they would have greater and faster success than anyone could have imagined in 1851 van diemen's land was granted its first elected legislative council at the elections that year those who opposed transportation won a thumping majority at the same time another evolution in convict policy had taken place in london one focused on utilizing the new series of prisons now being built across england and so it was that in 1852 britain and van diemen's land came to a mutual agreement to end the transport the last ship of convicts reached the island in 1853 while transportation of convicts to western australia would continue until 1868 in tasmania the practice was over and that meant in turn the slow end of port arthur as a place for repeat offenders from other penal colonies the complex held out far longer than any other convict site but as the 1850s progressed into the 1860s soon even port arthur began to be abandoned by the 1870s the once overcrowded colony of three and a half thousand had been reduced to just 500 convicts those too old ill or insane to be released into the wider community as such it basically spent its last years as a kind of surreal nursing home doing its best to care for the few remaining residents until they passed onto the great penal colony in the sky at last in 1877 with only 160 or so residents left port arthur closed down for good renamed carnavan the site was auctioned off its plots of land sold to create a regular community a couple of decades later wildfires tore through it gutting the old separate prison and penitentiary and so the story of port arthur ended not in ice but in fire and forgetfulness as the world moved on but as you already know there would be an epilogue as australia became an independent state and something like a national consciousness began to awaken people began to become more interested in local history while it would take a long time for australia's convict pass to be officially acknowledged regular blokes and sheilas started visiting the sites of these old penal colonies by 1927 carnivan was seeing so many visitors that it changed its name back to port arthur today port arthur historic site is tasmania's best-known attraction and one of the finest examples of australia's colonial past a collection of grand haunted ruins spread over 40 hectares in 2010 it was even inscribed on unesco's world heritage list alongside 10 other australian convict sites a much deserved nod to its importance in the nation's history of course not everything in port arthur's post-convict history has been so rosy in 1996 the historic area became the site of one of australia's greatest tragedies when a gunman attacked people at the cafe car park and tollbooth killing 35. but while it's important to remember such an awful event this particular video is about the people who built port arthur not those who tried to destroy it and so rather than recount the events of that tragic day we'll leave you with this final thought in the years it was active port arthur saw more cruelty and suffering than most places on earth from the genocide against aboriginal peoples to the pain endured by the poor children of point pure yet it also saw something else something far nobler the beginning of an idea of a common bonding that would soon help forge the sense of australian nationhood its past may not have always been pretty but the history of port arthur is important in uncountable ways as such it's fitting that it's now recognized as one of tasmania's greatest historic sites you

Channel: Geographics

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Length: 22min 14sec (1334 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2022