About a dozen of you loyal readers checked out my last post regarding Freycinet before I realized I had posted it without finishing it. My apologies, I hit “Publish” instead of “Save Draft”. Kim says I was drinking, and who am I to argue? Regardless, onward we go! That post was completed, so if you are curious, please check it out.
After we finished our Freycinet harbor cruise we jumped in the car (ok, we are getting old, we hardly jump anywhere, but I digress) and headed south towards Hobart. Our first stop was a winery; I know, shocker! We had ordered a bottle of wine in Cradle Mountain that was our favorite of the entire trip, and the winery just happens to be 20 minutes outside of Hobart. This is the home of “Domaine A”.
The visit to Domaine A comes with a funny (and a little bit sad) story. At a restaurant in Cradle Mountain I decided to splurge and order their best bottle, a 2018 Pinot Noir from, you guessed it, Domaine A. This bottle was $170 AUD, or about $108 USD. Not outrageous by California Pinot standards, particularly in a restaurant.
So imagine my surprise when the waitress brings the bottle to the table and tries to open it like a screwcap. It’s actually under cork, which is unheard of here in Australia! So she gets her manager who finds a winged corkscrew, and while attempting to hold both sides down (wtf?) she tries to screw into the cork. She was unsuccessful, and actually ended up destroying the cork. She got another bottle, same result. She got a third bottle of $170 AUD wine and tried again, same result. I then got up and offered to help her, advising I was kinda into wine. She was notably peeved at my offer of help, and said “I can manage”. Well ok then.
How she got the 4th bottle open is a mystery, as she made sure to do it out of my line of sight. Thank god the bottle wasn’t flawed!! Quite the contrary, the bottle was excellent!! I’m very sad she destroyed three corks on her way to delivering this excellent wine! So, with taste buds and funny/sad story in hand, we had to visit. Yes, the wine was still excellent, and I bought a 6 pack to bring home. Here is the view right outside of the tasting facility.
The light was just right as we were leaving. This made for a great photo!
After checking into our hotel we took a walk along the Hobart waterfront. These sculptures memorialize the 13,000 women and 2,000 children who were brought to Hobart via “transportation”. Hobart was the main port for convicts who were then sent on to their final prison location, usually Port Arthur.
The bases at their feet list the sailing vessel arrivals and how many convicted women and children were transported.
Also on the Hobart Waterfront are these sculptures that commemorate the Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi, whose ship “The Southern Cross” left from this spot in 1898. He was one of the first explorers to take photos in Antarctica, and apparently even took selfies with his dog!
These statues of penguins and seals sits adjacent to the sculpture above.
In the atrium of our hotel sits this massive thousand year old Huon Pine stump that was retrieved from the forests near Strahan, on Tasmania’s west coast. It’s covered in tree burls that are highly praised by woodworkers, so it’s surprising they were able to find this portion mostly untouched.
The next morning we drove 1.5 hours to Port Arthur, a site of great historical importance. This penal colony started out quite small, as a timber station in 1830, but quickly grew in size as the convicts started building ships here from the surrounding lumber. The large 4 story building in the below historic photo, “The Penitentiary”, was built in 1845 for grain storage and a flour mill, which was operated by water.
However, when the water wasn’t flowing there was a manual treadmill that was operated by 36 convicts at a time, one of the harshest punishments at Port Arthur. Nowadays people do this crap for free!
The water supply was never enough, and the convicts were needed for other work, so the mill was shut down and converted into a prison between 1854-1857, and housed prisoners until it was closed in 1877. The building was destroyed by fire in 1897. Here is what The Penitentiary looks like today.
Our guide showed us a jail cell inside the main building. While these small rooms seem rather spartan, our guide advised that back in England these people were very poor, so having their own room (and food) like this would have actually been an improvement in their lives. The floor of the cell was once wooden.
Port Arthur closed as a penal colony in 1853, but many of the prisoners had to serve out their remaining sentence here, at least until 1877, when the facility permanently closed.
The building in the background was the Hospital. Port Arthur is a huge space, so we didn’t get around to looking inside each and every building. If you were really into the history here you could easily spend two days seeing it all!
There was another prison at Port Arthur called “The Separate Prison”. This prison operated from 1848 to 1877 with a different mindset than a penal colony of workers. These prisoners were kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, supposedly left to ponder on their crimes and their life going forward.
This photo shows the former walls that separated the individual exercise yards, one man per yard at a time. It had to be a pretty lonely existence. Many of these prisoners ended up going insane due to this type of confinement.
Even when they went to church service they were kept completely isolated from each other via a set of internal doors that kept each of them in their own space.
Here is a photo of Kim in one of those spaces. They had to stand and face forward for the entire service. I never thought spending hours in church could get any worse!
Lastly, each admittance ticket to Port Arthur includes a short 20 minute harbor cruise. They take you out and around the Point Puer Boy’s Prison site (middle of the photo) and the Isle of the Dead (left side of the photo). Point Puer was the site where they kept the young boys from the age of 11 to 18 who were transported from Britain. They originally kept them with the rest of the prisoners, but they were either being sexually assaulted or learning new criminal traits (or both) so they put them on this little peninsula to keep them safe from the older convicts.
The “Isle of the Dead” is the final resting place for more than 1000 convicts, military/civil officers and women/children who were buried here between 1833 and 1877. The free cruise simply wraps around the island, but if you are curious you can take a special cruise that lands there and discusses who was buried here in more detail.
We didn’t have time for the tour of the island, but I was able to get a photo that at least showed a tombstone (or two).
On the way back into Port Arthur I was able to get this shot of the “Clerk of Works’ House” that sits adjacent to the original boat yard. The metal sculpture on the shoreline depicts a ship under construction in the original spot where so many ships were built by the convicts.
The visitor center has a lot of info to absorb. My favorite part is the model of the site, particularly how the “Separate Prison” looked while operating in the foreground.
Coming up next, we visit the sometimes interesting and often bizarre MONA, the “Museum of Old and New Art”, via a ferry ride from downtown Hobart.
I have been to Port Arthur a few times and it is certainly an amazing place – hard to square the beautify of the environment with the harsh conditions for prisoners.