Think Australia and up pop images of beaches and surf, joggers and sunbathers, of the magnificent Sydney Opera House and the genteel Melbourne Cricket Ground, of the Great Barrier Reef and kangaroos and koalas. Every country has its set of useful clichés that make for quickie — but entertaining — tourism and endless selfies.
There is a different route you can take to get a peek into Australia. An atypical one which digs into the country’s past and explores how it was first established as a penal colony. My son and I decided to stroll through a few prisons and convict sites (there are 11 of them on UNESCO’s World Heritage List — a clear a statement about their importance for Australia as signposts of their history): the Port Arthur Penitentiary in Tasmania, Cockatoo Island near Sydney (both on the Heritage List), Melbourne Gaol and Old Government House (which served as the Vice-Regal Lodge), also near Sydney.
These convict sites have been neatly maintained as remnants of Australia’s early history, of the places where convicts (the first arrivals from Britain in the late 18th century) were lodged, and of the many reforms that were thought up for them. Remarkably, the Australians have not shirked from informing the world about the terrible conditions that prevailed inside. The story boards (and much of what I write here is based on captions and storyboards that I read) tell you stories about incarcerations, executions, prison routines, the study of phrenology, the whippings and hangings and the art of execution.
It was a tour with a difference in Melbourne Gaol. We, the visitors, were given a taste of jail life as possibly lived in the 19th century. In a grim corridor inside the well-preserved prison, male and female visitors were made to stand separately in straight lines — no stirring and in complete silence. Every ‘inmate’ was handed a board with a number. When the angry Sergeant barked out our numbers we were to stand apart and answer his questions with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. As a punishment for our misdemeanours, we were locked up in two different cells with no benches to sit on, in devilish darkness and stifling heat. No moving, no talking. It lasted long enough for us to have our fill and tumble out, thankful for the experience but glad the ‘real-life’ encounter took as little as five minutes.
Was hanging entertainment, justice or legal murder, we are asked. In what may seem bizarre today, the concerns of the 19th century Victorian, we learn, was “not so much the mortality of capital punishment or the right of the State to take a life, but whether this should be done in public.” For the crowds enjoyed a “good hanging”. They would gather in thousands to watch executions in a “carnival atmosphere” which “made a mockery of the law.” Years after public hangings were terminated… people continued to decry the “degeneracy of modern times in hanging people out of sight instead of publicly.”
Hanging, another storyboard informs us, was an art and not just a “mechanical trade”. “Is not a man an artist who can painlessly and without brutality despatch another man?” In fact, a Handbook on Hanging, written by one Charles Duff, speaks of the long drop as the best method. In order that the convict die quickly as he/she fell through the trap door, the rope needed to be of the right length. As we the tourists walked past the trap door, I tried to imagine – rather fruitlessly – how it would be done and what would happen if mistakes occurred. And mistakes did occur.
“Just about every name in Victorian criminal history has been through here,” wrote Sergeant Peter Williams of the Melbourne City Watch House. Violent, crooked, drunken, ill and destitute prisoners would be locked up for major and minor offences, and sometimes for tiny blunders such as indecent language. Said the penitentiary’s last officer-in-charge as the facility closed in 1994: “This is a monument to human misery.”
Among the stories recorded of executed criminals was one of Fatta Chand, a 24 year-old Indian, who was accused of killing a fellow hawker named Juggo Mull in 1891. The “Hindoos,” the storyboard tells us, “aroused fear among the European population because of their distinctive dress, colour and religion…” Fatta Chand claimed his innocence till the end. He was hanged nonetheless, but the case, it appears, stirred little interest, although close to a hundred spectators attended the execution. On the other hand, the case of Emma Williams was much better known. Hanged when she was 27 for the murder of her baby, The Champion newspaper proclaimed that her case “would exhibit (the state of) Victoria to the world as the lowest and the most degraded of all civilised communities.”
Melbourne Gaol.
By the second half of the 19th century, Australia saw itself as an outpost of the British Empire. “British immigrants were strongly favoured, and minority communities were often ostracised….At the same time, Aboriginal population was rapidly declining due to social dislocation, disease (newly imported from the white immigrants) and massacres, strengthening the idea of Australia as a “white” nation.”
There was resentment among the ‘whites’, we learn, because the Aboriginals had taken up jobs in the goldmines and the sugarcane sector. This resentment “was supported by racial stereotypes. Scientific theories were used to argue that some races were superior to others. European phrenologists measured and compared the shapes of human heads in different populations, concluding that European people were superior…”
“In the ’40s, ‘white Australia’ remained the cornerstone of immigration policy, even as thousands of displaced persons from war-torn Europe began arriving in 1947.” While there was enthusiasm for immigration in the post World War ll period, not everyone who applied for asylum/refuge/citizenship was accepted. “Disabled or ill applicants…were rejected” as were those who “simply looked ‘different’ to the Anglo-Celtic ideal.”
Immigration levels had their highs and lows. In the 1960s, “restrictions on non-European immigrants were eased”, the “Commonwealth franchise was extended to Aborigines and the Labour Party’s longstanding commitment to a ‘White Australia’ policy was removed from the party platform. By 1949, Australians were no longer British subjects. In the 1970s, racial discrimination on the grounds of “race, religion, colour, descent and ethnicity” was banned. And in 1997 the ‘Bringing Them Home Report’ “acknowledged decades of government approved removal of Aboriginal children from their families.
The going for Aborigines was particularly tough. They seemed to have been divided into ‘half-caste’ and ‘full-blood’ Aborigines. But by 1925, the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association was formed which requested “full citizenship rights for them (as well as) land as compensation for dispossession.
The Historic site of Port Arthur (a penal and punishment station) in Tasmania is part of the epic story of the settlement of Australia. Port Arthur was more than a prison. “It was a complete community – home to military personnel and free settlers. The convicts worked at sowing logs, farming and industries, producing a large range of resources and materials.” There are over 30 historical buildings here, extensive ruins, beautiful grounds and gardens.
The model for Port Arthur was a “radical new penitentiary” designed by Jeremy Bentham in England which he described as “a machine for grinding rogues into honest men.” “The cogs of this machine included discipline and punishment, religious and moral instruction, classification and separation, training and education.” It broke the backs of many, but others were rehabilitated and acquired skills.
When convict transportation from England ended in 1853, “Port Arthur became an institution for aging and physically and mentally ill convicts. “The settlement was closed in 1877 but the convict stain clung to it. Gradually, convict-period buildings were turned into museums, shops and hotels came up and Port Arthur transformed into a tourist hub.
But in 1996, this peaceful port was the site of a grisly shootout when a gunman shot 35 people and wounded 20. It was the worst massacre in Australian history and led a change in gun laws. Today, a Memorial Garden has been created as a place for reflection and remembrance.
This article is not designed to survey the well-known history of how a country which began as a convict enclave barely 250 years ago is today transformed into a modern multicultural society. Rather, it is an attempt to understand how candid the Australians are when they look back on their past. The heritage site of the Old Government House and Domain states clearly that it represents the “global story of colonial expansion, the forced migration of unwilling labour and punishment of crime in the modern era.” The Cockatoo Island was the “world’s first attempt to build a new society on the labour of convicted prisoners from Britain (165,000 men, women and children over the first 80 years).”
Remarkably, these captions and storyboards and legends do not whitewash the sorry decades when the British set foot on a soil that belonged to the local aborigines. They do not cover up the violence of their ancestors. On the contrary, they face their transgressions upfront, not apologetically, but as a matter fact: See, folks, this is the way it was, and we have now moved on, they tell us. They even have hilarious, eccentric books such as Girt, The Unauthorised History of Australia by David Hunt, for example, which lampoon, poke fun at and often deride themselves and others as they look back at who they are.
Can we do it?
The writer is an eminent film critic, a member of the jury at several major festivals, and an intrepid international traveller
