Hey everyone, welcome to World Heritage Journey.
Today, we're at the Australian Convict Sites, at various locations around Australia.
The modern nation of Australia was founded in 1788 as a prison camp for criminals from
the UK and Ireland.
For almost a century, 166,000 men, women and children were "transported" to Australia,
usually as punishment for very petty crimes like stealing bread.
It's one of the largest forced migration events in history, and it's a really interesting
social experiment in some ways.
This World Heritage Site includes various bits of the colonial history around Australia.
We're starting at one of the most impressive: the prison within a prison - Port Arthur.
Let's go!
Port Arthur lies on the island of Tasmania, just off the southern coast of Australia.
The settlement was founded in 1830 as a logging operation, using convicts as free labour,
but within a few years it had been converted into a prison.
Convicts from around Australia who refused to behave were sent to Port Arthur, and it
quickly developed a notorious reputation as the colony's harshest prison.
At its height in 1840, over 2000 convicts, guards and staff lived and worked in the prison,
using convict labour to produce all sorts of material: construction goods like stone
and timber, consumer goods like shoes, clothes and furniture, and industrial goods like bricks
and even ships!
Port Arthur eventually closed in 1877 as the convict transportation era was ending.
Exploring the site today is a real treat, as most of the buildings from the convict
era are still standing and in good condition.
The highlight is definitely the enormous four-story penitentiary building, originally built as
a flour mill and later converted into a convict barracks as the prison expanded.
Even after bushfire devastation in the 1890s, enough of the building remains that it gives
you a great idea of what life in the prison must have been like.
Another highlight is the large sandstone church building, featuring some of the best stonework
in the settlement.
The sandstone was largely quarried by young boys at the nearby Point Puer Boys Prison,
where children as young as 9 were incarcerated.
Interestingly, the church itself is non-denominational. It was never actually consecrated, so Catholics and
Protestants alike could attend separate services in the same building.
And attendance was not voluntary: convicts were forced to attend as part of their religious
rehabilitation, which explains why the church is so large - it could hold 1100 worshippers at once.
Other highlights include the Commandant's House, which was home to the most important
man in the settlement.
There's also a beautiful Guard Tower which gives great panoramic views across the whole
complex, and there's the ruins of a hospital too.
But perhaps the most terrifying building of all is the Separate Prison, where repeat offenders
were placed in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
Not far from Port Arthur, at the other end of the peninsula, lies another location for
the World Heritage Site, known as the Coal Mines.
As the name suggests, this is where convicts were employed as coal miners.
It was extremely hard and back-breaking work, even by 19th century standards, as the miners
were essentially working by hand in the dark.
Unsurprisingly, the mine struggled with lax discipline (both from convicts and guards),
and the coal produced was of poor quality, so the mine was abandoned after only 15 years.
But it's still an interesting place to visit, in a rugged and remote wilderness area of Tasmania.
Still in Tasmania, our next stop was at the Brickendon and Woolmers Estates complex, located
in central Tasmania.
This is a pair of country estates founded by the Archer family in 1817 after a land
grant from the colonial government. They're included in this World Heritage entry because
they're a great example of how the convict system actually worked.
All across Australia, men were placed on estates just like these where they tended to fields and
livestock, fixed machinery, sheared sheep and laboured to build homes and infrastructure,
while female convicts worked as domestic servants, cooks, washerwomen and nannies.
Almost everything you can see here was built and maintained by a small army of convict labour
(about 40-50 people), and as you'd expect, the minuscule labour costs made the estate
owners very rich - rich enough to import the finest luxuries from England.
The house here at Woolmers is chock-full of fantastic treasures from the 19th century, but unfortunately
you can't take photos inside.
Moving away from Tasmania, we headed next to Old Government House, in the Sydney suburb
of Parramatta.
This large brick building was constructed in around 1799 and completed in 1820, largely
using convict labour, and remains today as one of Australia's oldest public buildings.
It was built as the primary residence for John Hunter, Governor of the Colony of
New South Wales, as it was then known.
Although subsequent governors over the next 50 years made additions and modifications,
the House still exists now pretty much as it did in the early 19th century.
One detail I found fascinating was the walls - although they look like elegant stone blocks,
they're actually bricks covered with a mortar and a stonework pattern scratched into the
surface, to make them look like elegant stone blocks.
Inside the house there's a lot of original furnishings too, including one of the oldest
pieces of furniture in Australia.
Exploring inside is actually quite fascinating, as it really gives you a sense of what this building
was like back in the day, when it was the epicentre of power in the convict colony.
For decades, half of the Australian continent was ruled from this very room!
Our final stop is at Hyde Park Barracks, in downtown Sydney.
Just a few hundred meters from a separate World Heritage Site (the Sydney Opera House)
stands this elegant building, constructed between 1817 and 1819.
As the name suggests, it was built as a barracks but not for soldiers - it was a barracks for convicts.
At the time, convicts were expected to find their own lodgings, which was a difficult
task for most of them, given that they worked six days a week for no pay.
Interestingly, the Barracks building was actually designed by a convict: architect Francis Greenway,
who was sent to Australia for forging documents.
Governor Macquarie was so impressed by Greenway's building that he was given a full pardon after
the Barracks opened.
Although originally designed to hold 600 convicts, it wasn't long before almost 1400 men were
crammed in every night, and it's estimated that around 30,000 convicts passed through
the barracks in a 30-year period.
New convicts stopped arriving in Sydney in 1840, and gradually the building was used
for other purposes, including a hospital for women, an asylum, an orphanage, and various
government departments including law courts.
These days, it is of course, a museum.