The Road to McCarthy (30 page)

Port Arthur closed in 1874. In forty-four years, despite the horrific brutalities inflicted on the inmates, no one was ever executed here. But in 1996 this remote, sparsely populated place became the scene of one of the greatest mass murders in history, when a lone gunman shot thirty-five people dead.

As I step into the brightly lit visitor center I’m in the grip of an emotion I don’t recall feeling at a mainstream tourist attraction.

Dread.

Much of the original penal complex remains intact, giant Victorian industrial
structures on the banks of a beautiful natural harbor. A church and a host of smaller colonial-style structures are dotted around the partially wooded hillsides. Dominating the view is the three-story stone-built penitentiary situated close to the wharfs. This must be one of the few dockside Victorian buildings in the world that hasn’t yet been converted into luxury loft-style apartments with stripped wood floors, a health club and designer kitchens that nobody cooks in.

“Very picturesque,” was Smith O’Brien’s verdict on Port Arthur. “Surrounded on every side by wooded hills and looks more like a pretty village.” When he arrived here, unshackled, on a boat from Maria Island—a voyage he shared, bizarrely, with Superintendent Lapham, his wife and daughters—he was assigned a two-bedroom cottage with a fifty-yard garden from which he was forbidden to stray. Unlike his cottage on Maria Island it was detached, though this didn’t mean he’d gone up in the world. He was segregated from other prisoners and saw nothing of Lapham and his controversial daughters, who were in any case dismissed from the settlement not long after they arrived. On November 9, 1850, after receiving a petition signed by hundreds of his supporters in Hobart, O’Brien gave his word that he wouldn’t attempt to escape and was licensed for release into the wider prison of Van Diemen’s Land. On November 18 he left for Hobart not by ship, but by railway. In a macabre detail that couldn’t be dreamed up by the Coen brothers, Port Arthur’s railway carriages were propelled not by locomotives, but by four convicts running and pushing, with the perk of being able to jump on board for the downhill stretches. It was said to be arduous in the extreme, but a soft option in comparison with some of the other pastimes on offer.

But the cottage doesn’t thrill me the way the house on Maria did. There, O’Brien was the main act; here, he was a barely significant sideshow. What of the thousands of others who were sent here, more than a quarter of them O’Brien’s fellow Irishmen? Their fate was unlikely to be a detached cottage with a private garden.

Leaves crunch underfoot and there’s a fragrance of unfamiliar vegetation as I wander round the massive site. There’s so much space I hardly notice
the other visitors. Detail after detail hits home with sickening impact. Men who passed out during flogging were doused in salt water in the revival room, and the punishment continued when they regained consciousness. Formal gardens were laid out for the officers’ wives, though while they strolled in them they could still hear the sounds of the beatings. On Point Puer—the island prison for juveniles aged ten and up—the white rocks were the traditional place of suicide for the boys. Convicts assigned to the coal mines were kept in underground cells. An Irishman called William Derracourt sang “If I had a donkey and couldn’t make it go” while receiving fifty lashes. There were 13,253 books in the library, from which the literate prisoners read aloud to the illiterate. A stained-glass chapel window was “the work of a felon lunatic during his lucid periods.” English trees were planted in the garden of the commandant’s house to make him feel at home. By lunchtime I’m reeling, but there’s worse to come in the afternoon.

I walk into the Model Prison and feel a chill descend on my heart. “We are offering you the opportunity to contemplate your past misdeeds,” those incarcerated here were told. “You may meditate upon these.” If you offended again within Van Diemen’s Land you were sent to Port Arthur; offend within Port Arthur, and you were sentenced to time in here.

The block of sixty solitary cells, all under constant surveillance, operated a system of “silent and separate” treatment. No prisoner was allowed to see, speak or in any way communicate with another. Silence was total. The stone floors were covered with matting, and warders wore padded slippers. Those who broke the rules were confined to one of the “dumb cells” situated off the tiny exercise yard.

I pass through four heavy doors hanging at right angles to each other. When I reach the central chamber a guide closes them behind me. I’m in a place of total silence and utter, impenetrable darkness, all the dreadful details I have learned today ricocheting around inside my head. For a moment I’m overcome with panic, even though I know I’ll be in here for a minute or less. Men were left here for days at a time. The shape of the room is slightly asymmetrical, and meals were delivered at irregular intervals, so the person inside would lose all sense of time and space. One man is said to have kept
his sanity by ripping the buttons off his clothing and repeatedly throwing them in the air. Hunt the button, he called it. Thirty days was the maximum sentence, though they say that three or four was enough to break the toughest man. This is truly the Russian doll of penitentiaries, a prison within a prison within a prison within the prison island of Van Diemen’s Land.

Inmates of the Model Prison were only allowed to utter any sound on Sundays. Covered by hooded masks, they were taken in silence to the Model Chapel. At one end of the room pews rise in tiers, like a lecture theater. Each row is divided into separate booths with doors. The prisoners would enter, the doors closed behind them and at a signal all masks would be removed. Once unmasked, the prisoner could see no one but the minister, who could see all of them. Booths were allocated each week by random ballot, so a prisoner could never know who might be his neighbor. All communication was forbidden, and no sound permitted until the time came to join in with the hymns. Participation in the singing is said to have been vigorous and enthusiastic.

I’m struggling to take it all in when I see a notice next to the wall.

“The Separate Principle of quiet and solitary confinement was an advanced concept for its day, and in substituting silence for the lash, teaching useful trades, and subjecting convicts to the moralising influences of religion was considered a model of instruction and reformation.”

This chapel is the most terrible place I have visited in my life. I leave and walk out into dazzling sunshine, feeling physically ill. Handily situated a short walk away is the prison asylum.

I’m walking down the hill in the direction of the visitor center when ahead of me and off to my right I see a more modern ruin. To one side of it a woman is laying a small bouquet on the ground. She leaves as I arrive. This is the café where the first killings took place in the massacre of April 28, 1996. By now my nerve ends are jangling, and I feel I can’t take on board any more grief. I go into the center and find somewhere quiet to sit while I contemplate my fellow countrymen, both English and Irish, who conceived, staffed and populated this dreadful place, while George Eliot was at home writing
Middlemarch
. Remarkable people, the Victorians.

I’m booked
in for the night in a former Victorian probation station somewhere in the back of beyond, only more remote. I phoned at lunchtime to ask for directions.

“Carry on going as far as the sign for the Tasmanian Devil Park. When you reach it you’ll know you’ve gone too far.”

I drive for half an hour and don’t see a single vehicle. “You should try bush walking at night,” an ex-miner told me in Strahan. “It’s as dark as the inside of a cow.” The road tonight is darker than the inside of a cow that’s been stitched inside another cow and put inside a black velvet sack in an underground cave. I reach the Devil Park, turn back, drive for a while, turn round, reach the Devil Park again, turn back, and spot a self-effacing sign in the scrub directing me up a track past a derelict building labeled cell block, to a terrace of three single-story Victorian brick cottages. I’m in the one at the far end. I park so close I’m almost touching it, because if I strayed more than three feet away I wouldn’t be able to see it anymore and might get lost. I get out of the car. Somewhere a dog is howling. Mind you, I can’t hear one, so it can’t be anywhere near here. It’s as silent as a blade of grass in an egg box inside a cow in a quilt in a grave.

The key’s been left under a brick on the doorstep, possibly by a psychopathic shaven-headed Victorian warder who spends his nighttimes mutilating his arm with a bread knife as he weeps for the unspeakable brutalities he’s inflicted on his fellow creatures. That’s the kind of cheery vibe this place has. It’s colder inside the cottage than out. There’s a living-room-cum-kitchen with an open fireplace, a pretty bedroom with an antique bed and multicolored quilt, and a shower room as cold as Pingu’s fridge. I light the log fire that the psychopath has set for me, and wonder how best to have some fun.

There’s a small wooden dresser in the corner. Propped up in pride of place on the middle shelf is a plate with a picture of the
Mona Lisa
on it that has been broken into three pieces and glued back together. On the back of the plate it says “Made in England.” A chipped 1937 coronation cup bears
the legend “Long May They Reign.” Another plate portraying a hunting scene has been shattered into more than twenty pieces and also glued back together. The plates feel like evidence of some unknown crime.

An information sheet tells me I’m in the officers’ quarters of a convict work station. On a table is a laminated copy of an official report by a Quaker who visited in 1853. “The air is so close it makes me feel faint and sickly,” he wrote of the solitary cells here, where men were confined in forty-pound chains. He met a prisoner called Hart, “transported ten years for felony,” who absconded sixteen times, had 291 lashes, 311 days’ solitary and five thirty-day stints in a darkened cell.

“His gloomy countenance and knit brow relaxed after a little conversation. He showed us a book in which he had been copying out some verses and learning ‘Oft The Happy Shepherds.’ He repeated them to us of his own accord …. my soul mourned …. there was nothing forbidding or ferocious here, quite the contrary. A cheerful pleasant smile would play over Hart’s features …. in the evening the prisoners were assembled in the chapel. They were very quiet and orderly.”

The laminated card isn’t sharp enough to slit my wrists, so I turn the tiny portable TV on instead in the hope of an Aussie soap or some one-day cricket, or anything with lots of bright sunshine. Reception is poor, and they’re trailing the program that’s on after the ads, a documentary about an Australian hairdresser who wants to date a millionaire. There’s a clip of her putting on her bra and pouting at the camera and saying, “I’m desperate.” I have been in solitary confinement in my melancholy dungeon at the bottom of the world for less than half an hour, and already I fear I may be losing my grip on reality.

I go to bed, where I am plagued by nightmares.

I wake next morning
feeling exhausted and distressed. The guard has laid on eggs, bacon, bread and an eco-friendly butter-style spread, so I cook some breakfast and thank God for inventing daylight. Though the night air was cold, the bed was warm and comfortable; yet despite the reassuring presence of a Swiss army knife under the pillow and a
chair against the door handle, I did not slip easily into gentle oblivion. Convicts, Irishmen and roadkill populated my dreams, and I returned with grim monotony to that dreadful chapel. Once I was woken by a loud noise, a clang of metal or the slam of a door. I opened the curtains, but was still inside the cow. I must have dreamed the noise. It can happen. You dream a noise and it wakes you up.

While I’m eating I take a look through the visitors’ book.

“Did the hair on the back of your head creep when you entered? Mine did.”

“All quiet on the Western Front until about 4 a.m., when we heard a lot of loud noises, a distant clanging of chains …. we had a great time, but not much sleep.”

“The nighttime noises add to the uniqueness. Thanks for a great stay.”

“No pillow menu,” I write. “Beware the dark brooding underbelly.”

I go outside and discover that the cottage looks out onto a lovely unspoiled bay. Cormorants are paddling in the shallows along a thickly forested shoreline. A man waves and walks down to meet me—not a psychopathic guard after all, but the gentle young man who owns the place. He asks did I sleep well, though he already knows the answer.

“It’s weird. People have no problems in the other two. Just in your one. We tell people, ‘Don’t worry, you’re okay, that’s the one that seems to be haunted.’ It’s fun though, isn’t it?”

His great-grandfather bought the place when the convict days came to an end, and installed a hydroelectric system to power the nearby village. When he retired at night he would lean out of his bedroom window and pull a rope to turn off the power, plunging the whole village into darkness. Crazy place, crazy guy.