RadioRoryOk, they’re not really alike but they were the three topics I wanted to cover in this last post about Tasmania.
The prison and mass shooting story go hand-in-hand, tragically. For a good chunk of the 19th century, Port Arthur was a British penal colony that morphed into an industrial complex staffed by inmates who operated sawmills and built ships. They got trained, converted, and rehabilitated and the Brits got an income that partially offset the prison’s cost. Everybody wins, sort of.
There were all the horrors that you’d expect to find in a 19th century prison and, in the 1860’s, it became a pauper’s prison and asylum. Early in the 20th century, after some devastating fires, locals recognized the site’s potential for tourism and it’s been preserved in varying degrees ever since.
Unfortunately, the atrocities at Port Arthur weren’t over yet.
In 1996, a gunman went on a shooting spree at the visitor center’s cafe and other locations near the prison complex. When it was over, 35 people were dead and a dozen more injured. The shooting led to a radical change in Australia’s gun laws and they are now among the strictest in the world. It’s also the shooting you may have heard about in comedian Jim Jefferies‘ popular Netflix special.
The walls of the cafe still stand and now I wish I took more photos of it. At the time, though, when standing on what feels like holy ground, the last thing you want to do is whip out a camera and snap pics of the scene of so much bloodshed. In fact, people are discouraged from asking the staff questions about the shooting because it stirs painful memories. Instead, they should read the memorial plaque or take a brochure from the visitor’s center.
And finally, a note about baseball. I was in Tassie for game seven of the World Series between the Cubs and Indians. Given the time difference, it was 10 in the morning when the first pitch was thrown, so finding a sports bar showing the game wasn’t an option. Instead, I went to the always-open casino but it didn’t have the game either! The bartender had to lower giant but inadequate shades in the lobby and fire up a projection set on a huge wall. It was hard to make out the picture and the audio was out of sync too. The whole thing was a mess. Just one other local guy was there to watch the game. By noon, we were both fed up with the a/v problems and he took me to his favorite pub that did have the game on. I never imagined I’d be explaining the rules of American baseball to a pub crowd in Tasmania.
Then again, I never imagined the Cubs would win either.