2000/02 Australia trip - Port Arthur |
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Thursday January 27th
The next day was a slow start, with Sandie doing the washing and me cooking bacon butties, but eventually we set off again to Port Arthur, this time to do the normal tourist things. We took the boat trip around the Isle of the Dead, feeling very superior, as we’d done it under our own steam. The weather had improved from “rainy with bright periods” to “sunny with occasional showers”.
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Port Arthur (15.51) |  |
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Port Arthur was where the British kept the transported convicts in the middle 1800s, thousands crammed into a converted flourmill. Much of it was destroyed and burned after it was closed by people who wanted to erase the memory of those days, but there’s enough restored to see what the buildings were like. Even the recent history has been grim with 35 people killed there by a mad gunman in ’96.
But it doesn’t look grim or dismal. The area’s naturally beautiful, and with the yellow stone, neat lawns and flowerbeds, it all looks very picturesque, and fails to convey the image of the most feared prison colony in the Empire. I’ve since read the famous novel about the place (“For the term of his natural life”) and that really emphasizes the horrors of the place.
After lunch we headed west through farming country. Tasmania has lots of road signs, unlike most of Australia, and it needs them, as the roads twist and turn in all directions. I think that the “rolling English drunkard who made the rolling English road” must have been transported to Tasmania. They even keep to the English numbering system with A, B, and C roads. Even the C roads are mostly sealed with ‘bitumen” (“blacktop” in USA, “tarmac” in England), though they don’t have road markings and they do have some single lane sections and bridges. We drove past Brighton to New Norfolk, which is a pretty place on steep hills around the Derwent River, but nothing like Norfolk!
We wasted a lot of time trying to pay someone at the town’s very casual campground. We were going sightseeing and just wanted to make sure we wouldn’t have any problems coming in after dark. So we left the fee with one of the campers to pass on.