The Fifth Capital

Settled in on the 9^th (10^th American) floor of our hotel in downtown Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania.

The morning (logically) started off in Swansea (where the previous night had ended). When I woke up the sun was just coming up and we were pretty treated to a nice sunrise.  After packing up, we headed down to check out the beach.  I think the last three times I have gone to the beach it has been in the winter (and always in Oz); I think some would call that poor planning. The beach was nice, and after snapping a few pictures, we got in the car for our long drive down to Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula (located to the east of the mainland and Hobart).

After departing Swansea, the road got fairly narrow and the striping went away again for a bit.  The road followed the coast for a while, on the plains alongside the beach and then up a bit onto cliffs, before descending back down.

Enroute to Tribunna (a large town – I think around 1000 people), the road turned inland.  Just beyond the town, we entered a smaller town of Orford sited on a river outlet into a small bay.  We stopped for a takeaway coffee and turned up the river valley.  The road was perched in the gorge, with the right side dropping off into the river and the left side (the side that I was driving on) was pressed up against a sheer rock face. The road broke free of the gorge after a few kilometres and we crossed a tiny bridge marking the division of the mainland to the peninsula.

Soon after getting onto the peninsula, we encountered extensive (and fairly inexplicable) roadworks, which necessitated our move to a temporary, unsealed (dirt / gravel) road for a fair bit. The roadwork carried us all the way to Eaglehawk Neck, where the peninsula narrows greatly (to the point that it’s only a couple hundred feet from the shore of the bay to the ocean). Stuart explained to me that in the early days, when the convicts were housed at Port Arthur on the southern tip of the peninsula, there was a ‘dog fence’ – dogs chained up in a line, ready to maul any prisoner attempting to escape north off the peninsula via land.

From Eaglehawk Neck, it was a short trip to Port Arthur, which recently attained World Heritage Site status. We arrived just before midday and had some lunch at the café in the (fairly bustling) visitor centre. As an introduction to the expansive site, we joined up with a 40 minute guided tour at 12:30 to get an overview of all there is to see and hear a bit of background. There was a very contradictory duality of stories which they seem to try to portray – by some measures the prison at Port Arthur was a place of extreme brutality, and yet often the guide tried to paint the place as progressive.  Stuart and I agreed they need to clarify their message a bit; while both portrayals may be accurate, it makes the site seem uneasy about its past.

We had a few minutes to wander around and headed into the old asylum building.  The prison had closed in the late 1870s and the government, attempting to erase whatever history had existed there, divided the land and renamed the place to form a new town.  When people bought the land, the stipulation was that they demolish the remnants of the prison.  It took a while for the land to be sold, and a small town did form. While many of the larger buildings were repurposed (the asylum became the town hall), large bushfires in the 1890s decimated what remained of the prison.  All that was left standing of the various old buildings were the stone walls.

Contrary to the government’s view that the history of the site needed to be expunged, tourists began stopping in almost immediately after the prison closed.  The bushfires and dilapidated state of affairs only served to bolster the lore of the site, and within fifty years of the closure, the government had changed the name of the area back to Port Arthur and began buying back what remained of the prison.  Tourism hasn’t slowed down since.

At 1:40, we boarded a ferry for a short Harbour cruise, stopping at the Isle of the Dead (where 1100 people are buried) and Point la Preuer, the land across the harhour where the young prisoners were kept for rehabilitation. It was a nice ride with good views, including a view out the passage to the Pacific Ocean.

One back on land, we wandered to the various sites for two hours, stopping into the dockyards, the memorial to the 1996 massacre (crazed gunman, murdered 30-something people, resulted in the banning of firearms in Australia – what a concept…), the remnants (pretty much crumbling walls) of the hospital, paupers home, the penitentiary (currently under stabilization works, surrounded by scaffolding), and the church, as well as a few surviving houses and the separate prison.

It was a good thing to see, I suppose, but wouldn’t break my top ten for Australia. Overall, I think it is a bit overhyped (maybe because it is far from anywhere anyone would want to be), and when you get there it is a bit of a letdown.

Around 4:00 we got in the car and drove the ninety minutes to Hobart, retracing most of our drive from yesterday, including the unsealed bit. We got into the city around peak hour, and crossed the Tasman Bridge into the city.  It’s a pretty terrible bridge, carry the bulk of the traffic into and out of the city (of about 300,000), on five lanes between the two directions and no barriers (as the lanes are reversible).

Downtown isn’t too big, and our hotel was just about the tallest thing (with 11 storeys in total). We checked in and unwound for a bit before heading down to Salamanca Wharf, a place along the harbour with old storehouses converted into restaurants and bars. We had a glass of Tasmanian wine at a wine bar before going to dinner at Maldini, a good little Italian place.

After dinner, we stopped into the whiskey bar run by a local distillery, Nant. The whiskey was very good.

Now we’re back in from the cold (this has been the coldest place on the trip thus far) and are sorting out plans for tomorrow.