Tasmania in two days

A funny thing about planning for Australia trip was reading the TripAdvisor forums? People would say things like, how long should I spend in Tasmania, and the response would be like 4-6 weeks is necessary to see everything. Ok, I understand that Tasmanians have a lot of pride about their homeland. And Australians apparently love to be sarcastic? And they also like to have a laugh at others' expense? I have a hard time picking up on sarcasm, but these forums would also just be filled with what I imagined to just be pure misinformation. It made me wonder, who is writing this stuff? I have never visited a place whose TripAdvisor forums were so full of essentially trolls. What is up with that, Tasmanians.

The first couple days I spent at a private residence with my new friend A and her friends. Things I learned are that for some reason it's very easy to get sunburned in Tasmania. Also, we eat freshly slaughtered pigs. Also, eggs always go on toast and get eaten with a knife and fork. Also, the local legal system and local governments seem super corrupt?

There are legitimately road signs warning you to not run over Tasmanian devils, and apparently they are getting close to critically endangered because they're all dying of a contagious mouth cancer that they spread because they're always locking lips and exchanging saliva when they fight. The tumors get so big that the devil actually starves to death.

After hanging out with locals a couple days chatting and getting to know each other, I spent most of my time in Hobart staying in the Argyle Accommodation house, which is patterned after an old boarding house and itself is in a historic building. It's super cheap, nice, and I liked the boarding house vibe, especially since I was up to history on this leg of the trip. The first day in town I went to the Museum of Old and New Art, which is essentially carved three stories into the rock and features extensive collections related to sex and death and sex/death. I recommend taking the ferry, which is a lovely trip up the river.

I also really recommend the Pennicott tours of the Tasman Peninsula, especially if sea cliffs are your jam, like they are with me. You can add on a tour of the Port Arthur prison site. Maybe some of you are more familiar with Australian/UK history than I am, and you can correct any falsehoods I make in the comments or skip what I'm about to say. Australia was a prison colony, I think that's pretty common knowledge. The Industrial Revolution upended the British economy and people who were able to make a decent living in agriculture suddenly found themselves without a marketable skillset. The prisons started swelling and the British first started putting the overflow in beached old ships called "hulks", which apparently were fetid rotting masses of humanity piled on top of each other. But this is how society treats its undesirables. Think Les Miserables and hard labor for stealing food to feed your family. After a few scandals, the British needed somewhere else to send their unwashed masses, so they started forcibly "transporting" them to Australia. If you are familiar with the story of Sweeny Todd, you know that he was fortunate enough to escape and get back to England, although most people who were transported spent the rest of their life away from their homeland and friends and family. Men had it rough, ok, but women prisoners were like forcibly raped the whole time and blamed for being sluts and getting extended prison sentences because of it.

But where do you send the truly badees? They chose the island of Tasmania as a prison within a prison for the hard cases, specifically the isolated end of the Tasman Peninsula at Port Arthur. At its heyday, they guarded against escape by literally setting up a string of angry dogs about every five feet across the most narrow stretch of land connecting the Peninsula.

At various points in the history of the prison, prison conditions were ok and not so ok. The worst was when prison reformers decided that physical punishments only made criminals more hardened, so the key was to go after them psychologically. I'm not 100% sure how he is involved, but utilitarian wunderkind Jeremy Bentham is credited as the origins of these ideas (also invented the prison design the Panopticon.)

What they got up to, then, is the "separate system" or model prison in which all prisoners are kept in isolation of each other. When they go anywhere outside their cell, they wear masks. They exercise in little individual one person yards for a short period, all alone (see photo below). Everything they do is done alone. Even when they go to church, there are walls separating each little seat so they cannot see their fellow man. One thing I read suggested that this came in part from I believe Calvinist beliefs that when bad men associated with other bad men, they got worse, so the key to their rehabilitation was making sure that they were kept apart. The result was a huge spike in the number of insane convicts, such that they had to build an actual asylum right next to the separate prison.  You can see the separate prison and the asylum has been converted into a little cafe.

This was my second prison tour on my little travels (the first, Alcatraz, I'll come back around to that), but this one I took more personally. I was astounded by the hubris of the people handling the welfare of these people. I was a little disgusted with how callously society treated them. These men and women were allegedly wrongdoers, but what was done to them seemed in every case so much worse than what they did. In the prisons were little stories of the prisoners. One was Leonard Hand, sentenced to 15 years after attempted sodomy. He was later punished inside for using pages from a bible to communicate with another prisoner named James White in a way that was characterized as being "of an abominable and disgusting character". After he was sent to the separate prison, his mind deteriorated until he became "childish and silly". He died aged 24, socially undesirable.

There were many other prisoners whose seemed clear victims of circumstance. And then there were others whose personality traits I recognized as being sociopathic, even in the brief descriptions. For instance, Henry Laing, a skilled surveyer who caught the eye of the Governer's wife, Lady Jane Franklin. Lady Franklin described Laing as "a very handsome man . . . who has the disease of picking and stealing and seems to labour under (an) absolute ability to do otherwise". But as I was reading this and other descriptions of my sociopathic brothers and sisters I wondered, aren't they also victims of circumstances?

When you ask the question of who was this prison meant to serve, the answer if clear in its histories -- it was meant to isolate people whom society would rather ignore away from the normal people that did not want to have to deal with them in person or even think of them anymore.