Face to face with the devil...

A very dumb travelers mistake I made today... I forgot I was charging my camera battery in the hotel room (aunt Ceacy, i finally needed to use the charger you gave me and it's perfect) so when I was on the road and realized it was left behind, it was too late. I tried to be resourceful and since I had my iPad in my purse, I put it's camera to the test, so all of today's photos are slightly lower quality than usual (but since I'm not really all that skilled a photographer to begin with, I doubt it will be all that noticeable in the size the blog formats them). I also bought a disposable point and shoot at the first chance I got and was verrrry discerning with which pictures I took with it.

Tasmania has a brutal history. I knew it before but after today I really KNOW it.

I booked a day tour today to visit Tasmania's famously cruel convict prison, Port Arthur. This is where the real hardened and unruly criminals went. Most Australians these days shutter when it is mentioned because in 1996 a man went on a killing spree, killing 35 people and injuring another 19. He is now in prison, but mentioning Port Arthur as an attraction to an Australian might be a bit like suggesting Columbine in the states. But, as Australian history is so intertwined with convicts, I decided to go ahead and see the site anyway.

My tour was to be an all day tour and in was joined by two couples - one from the Orkney Islands of Scotland (a fact which our tour guide couldn't get enough of and anytime their was a break in the tour continued to do more research on) and a couple from Dublin, Ireland. We had a lot of ground to cover. First we went to a tiny village called Richmond (which at one point was a real city, or at least town, with the 3rd largest population in Tasmania - when I asked the guide what the 3rd largest is now it really took him a minute- now only has 600 residents). The town shrank when it became obsolete due to the convict bridge that connected two bits of land that no longer needed a longer route AND (to add insult to injury) changed the water flow that the village received - though the ground is still fertile it is no longer the number one provider of wheat for all of Australia. It's now just a cute, semi touristy ghost town.



Georgian era hotel. Tasmanians like to brag that Tassie is the second oldest settlement and has the most old/original buildings (Sydney, the oldest, tore much up to build newer ones).




The oldest bridge that is still in use - IN THE WORLD!

Along the way in the car we "followed" (in a mix of DVD and story telling by our driver ( who owns the tour business and put the DVD together by himself) The stories of the Tasmanian aborigines and three separate convicts who would up in Port Arthur.

First, a bit of history. When the settlers first arrived in Tasmania, they pretty much just killed all the aboriginals they saw. Then, they put a bounty on the head of any aboriginal brought in. Within 100 years, by the late 1800s, the last full blooded aboriginal died. Though there are still partial blooded descendants, that's genocide, I'd say.

What's interesting about the native people and animals of Tasmania is how isolated they were for so long. At the end of the last ice age, as water levels began to rise, tasmania became isolated from mainland Australia. So all of the animals were at one point the same as their mainland counterparts. However, over the last 15,000 years, small genetic shifts took place. Tasmanian Kangaroos are slightly different, the Tasmanian aboriginals looked slightly different than the mainland people, the birds that don't fly adapted differently, etc.

I was so happy that as part of this tour I could visit Tasmania's most famous animal:



The devil! Actually, our cartoon friend has almost no resemblance to the real thing...

You may or may not know this, but the Tasmanian Devil is in GREAT danger of going extinct. In 2000 a rare form of cancer, a facial tumor disease started to spread throughout the species (spreads when mating as they bite each other). It is contagious and fatal and we don't know how it started or have any kind of cure for it. I can't remember the exact figure but something like 1/2 -3/4 of their population have already been wiped out by the disease. There are many sanctuaries aimed at breeding and containing healthy devils. The one I visited houses 20 at the moment. They are a really interesting animal. Like most animals of note (okay that's probably a bad generalization, but you know what I mean), the Tasmanian devils are marsupials. They can have up to four babies at a time and they live in their pouches for months after they are born.




This little guy (about as big as Lucy and Ethel, my bichon frises) I watched for awhile. I feel we had a connection.



His excitement only lasts a few minutes. But later at feeding time... That's when the claws come out. Devils are funny animals - they are carnivores but they don't actually kill (although you'd never know it watching them eat). They are scavengers who look for animals that are already dead. At centers like this one they are fed roadkill.



After having to look at the devils zoo-style, I walked into the kangaroo area and HELLO! There they were. You could get right up in their face, they were on the footpath, they didn't blink an eye at my presence. This one was my favorite. She's got her little baby peaking out the pouch!



The Spotted Quoll - another Tasmania marsupial, and the closest relative to the Tasmanian devil.

And then I was off again. So back to the three prisoners.
1) a big tall man who kept getting off for good behavior and getting to a normal life. Then, all the sudden, he'd get in a fist fight on the street, and unlucky for him, it would be with someone of great importance, Iike the highest judge. Bad luck. This happened to him two or three times.
2) a boy (17 years old) sent for stealing but then refused to work despite lashings and chains. He was sent to the boys prison at port arthur to be reformed. It sounds like eventually - after rounds of solitary confinement, lashings, etc, he was actually reformed.
3) Martin Cash (how can you forget a name like that) who was a grand escape artist. Somehow he was the luckiest convict. The only one to successfully escape Port Arthur (well he lead two others out too), he was eventually caught and sentenced to a hanging (since after his escape he both acquired a gun AND killed a man). Somehow he managed to get a publicity campaign behind him and a judge lessened his sentence. He was eventually freed!

In spite of its violent past, Port Arthur is actually beautiful. It looks a bit like the country in England.



Guards tower.




View of the asylum.



View from the home of one of the political prisoners. This title cottage became many things before it was acquired by the government as a site. Most recently, until 1970, a youth hostel!



The cells in the "separate prison" - where the convicts were sent when they were at their worst. Here they were held in isolation with no light for 23 hrs a day. For one hour they were capped (so they couldn't see or communicate in any way with another convict) and taken into an isolated "exercise" area. This whole isolation idea was meant to be humane and was based on the Quaker religion. Ultimately, it was deemed another form of torture. Many convicts sent here eventually went crazy and were sent to the asylum.

All in all it was a fascinating place to see. Most prisoners did not go to Port Arthur - only 15% of Tasmanian convicts went here. In 1853 Tasmania stopped accepting new prisoners and sometime in the 1870s Port Arthur shut down. However, 70% of all Tasmanians are descendants of a convict, so the history is still very much a part of this state.

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