When prisoners were being sent to Australia, Port Arthur had the reputation of being hell on earth. The reputation was deserved, sometimes more than others. But it’s important to note that Port Arthur was not a penal colony. It was a place for secondary prisoners. England sent prisoners to a penal colony, where they provided labor, frequently to build colony infrastructure. Those prisoners who repeatedly continued their illegal activities were sent to a secondary punishment facility, such as Port Arthur. So while many of the stories of the brutal conditions at Port Arthur are true, the prisoners who arrived at Port Arthur have already blown their “second chance”. Further, it was still possible for a prisoner to get his “mind right” and get out of the penal system. Finally, while conditions were truly awful, the death rate of prisoners was about the same as the death rate of free people. Life in the 1800s was hard.

This building dominates the view when approaching Port Arthur. But when it was built, it had nothing to do with prisoners. The people of the city wanted their own flour mill. It was costing a lot of money to ship grain to the Australia continent and ship the flour back. Unfortunately, whoever decided to build the flour mill was an idiot. There was nowhere enough flow from the small river to power a mill. They tried adding treadmills which used prisoners to enhance the power available, but the combined power was still far below the needs of the mill. They finally gave up and abandoned the mill building. This project was an abject failure. There were some prisoners ibn Port Arthur, in their own prison building. Besides powering the treadmill, they also did lumbering.

Within a few years, the Australians saw the need of secondary punishment sites, They ended up building three. Port Arthur was the best suited site. Instead of a few prisoners to do logging, they now needed a much larger and more secure penitentiary. They decided to convert the flour mill. England sent prisoners to Australia from 1830 to 1853. While the influx of prisoners stopped, the men already incarcerated still needed to be managed. The prison at Port Arthur continued until the 1860s. It goes without saying that there was more punishment issued at the secondary penitentiaries. In the beginning, the primary punishment was whipping with a cat of nine tails. This punishment was viewed as inhumane. They decided to build the “Separate Prison”, which was very similar to solidary confinement today. Prisoners spent 23 hours a day in small isolated cells. The cells were totally silent. Guards communicated with hand signals. Prisoners were not permitted to speak. Prisoners who still continued to rebel could be moved to one of the punishment cells. These were smaller, had three foot thick walls, were isolated by four doors, and there were no lights. I didn’t get a decent picture of the Separate Prison. This shot comes from the internet.

You won’t be surprised to learn that shortly after they started to use the Separate Prison, they had to build an asylum. As the picture shows, the asylum is in remarkably good shape. Shortly after the penitentiary was shut down, the free people living in the area renamed their city Carnarvon and converted the asylum to the town hall.

Conditions at the penitentiary depended on the commandant. There were ten commandants. (The museum did a nice little riff on the ten commandments). The commandant had his own house for himself and his family. Each commandant modified the house to suit their needs. As a result, the commandant’s house climbs up the hill as the house was extended.

Most of the penitentiary buildings were destroyed or severely damaged by brush fires in 1895 and again in 1897. Eventually, the town found there was money to be made in tourism. They renamed their city Port Arthur. It was never very successful. There were insufficient funds to maintain the property. Eventually, the entire area was sold to the Australian government, and the last few people were moved out. Here’s a shot of the penitentiary from the back side.

As you can tell, we had an absolutely wonderful time in Port Author. Tomorrow is a sea day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We sailed into the city of Hobart, state of Tasmania, country of Australia. We got a very abbreviated history. The indigenous people came her about 60,000 years ago. It’s the oldest continuous civilization in the world. 12,500 years ago, Tasmania separated from the Australian mainland. Europeans arrived much later and never got around to importing rabbits, pigs, and other non-native animals. The long separation allowed independent evolution of unique species such as the Tasmanian Devil (with it’s square, stackable scat) and the Tasmanian Tiger (now extinct).

We took an hour and a half bus ride up the Huan river — with a stop for a lovely morning tea, of course. It isn’t that far as the crow flies, but we had to drive around to the other side of the bay.

Our objective was an elevated treetop walk. It’s sturdy and safe, but one can feel the catwalk swaying when 30 people are on it. Our guide pointed out major things of interest. Apparently one can do quite well in a forest if they are knowledgeable.

The most impressive and prized trees are the Huon Pine. These were damaged by a brush fire in 2019. The trees depend on fire to propagate. Seeds are in a small pouch and can’t germinate. A fire pops the pouches open like popcorn, allowing those seeds to germinate. It’s amazing that fire is required for some species to survive.

After a fire, the Huon Pine might need an “energy boost”. They get it with a temporary growth on the side of the tree. These leaves provide extra sugar through photosynthesis. When the tree has recovered, the side growth drops off the tree. Our guide gave us the name of this growth. Twice. I was too embarrassed to ask again. When I got back to the ship, my favorite expert Google failed me. The growth will remain nameless for now.

These are big, tall trees. The trees in this picture are about 75 feet tall. At full maturity, Huan Pines can reach as much as 150 feet. The oldest known tree is 3,000 years old. The penalty the tree pays for the excellent wood and long life is slow growth – about an inch a year. Fortunately, Huon Pines are protected in Australia.

Nature has many wonderful and amazing tricks. We enjoyed this trip very much. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We took a trip to the Healesville Sanctuary, about an hour and a half bus ride outside Melbourne. On the way, I got a few pics through the windows of a moving bus. The first is of one of the more attractive skylines.

It’s not uncommon to see murals painted by local artists. Here’s a striking example. The building is a half dozen stories tall. The entire wall is painted with this design.

One might think that no two cities can have less in common than the French-inspired New Orleans in the US and the gritty, practical, and much newer Melbourne in Australia. But the two have at least one unusual feature in common. Melbourne calls them Single Fronted Houses. These houses are narrow and long. They have little natural light, making them feel cold, damp, and uncomfortable in the winter time. But they have been gentrified. If you want one, it will set you back a cool million dollars. New Orleans calls them shotgun houses because you could open the front and back doors, then shoot a shotgun blast through the house without doing any damage. It turns out that it’s no mystery how both cities ended up with an unusual and similar architectural feature. Both governments taxed frontage feet.

The sanctuary had an an open amphitheater where they had a bird show. Birds were trained to fly low around the theater so everybody could get a good look. Each bird had a natural behavior they were trained to exhibit. They flew both prey birds and raptors, but of course not at the same time. They had to delay the show because a wild eagle visited the area. The sanctuary had all the Australian animals we wanted to see. Instead of posting a bunch of boring pictures, I’ll focus on just a few.

This is called an Echidna. I didn’t know about this one. It’s pretty much a marsupial porcupine on steroids.

Somehow I didn’t get a pic of the Wombat. These are a kind of groundhog or mole, but they are larger, more muscular, and have a very thick and strong skull. They also poop rectangles. It seems that nobody knows precisely how they manage to do that. I understand that they stack their scat to attract the opposite sex. They also have a well-earned reputation for doing serious damage to your car if you manage to hit one.

The Platypus is well known but way cool. They are nocturnal animals, so the exhibit was in a dark area. They mostly stay in the water, they are very fast and extremely agile. I had no hope of being able to get a pic. They are much smaller than I expected them to be — between one to two feet long, depending on the sex. They are somewhat like a smaller otter.

Today is a sea day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We took an all day excursion to examine the history of the city of Adelaide. I was totally surprised by our first stop at the quarantine station. I expected to see a miniature Ellis Island. It was much more. Each of the Australian states had a quarantine station, all of them similar. It started out with the need to hold immigrants for two weeks to ensure they didn’t have a serious communicable disease. But they went far beyond that. Australia used these stations to help fight communicable diseases through the 1970s, especially cholera. At its peak, this station could hold up to 500 people, although the population seldom went over 200. Every point of the quarantine process had a clean and foul side. People and belongings when through a cleaning process. Accommodations morphed over time. They weren’t luxurious, but they were comfortable by the standards of the day. People organized their own entertainment. They helped on the vegetable gardens. They fished. They prepared their own “comfort food” meals. The process had an important inflection point in the 1950s as air travel gradually became practical. The stations were kept open with full time care takers until they were finally closed in the 1980s. When asked about the widespread corrugated iron construction, the guide pointed out that Australia has almost no lumber industry. Wood has to be imported from the US. That’s still largely true today. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures.

City history started before we reached our second stop at the maritime museum. City fathers had to address two major issues. The port wasn’t deep enough for larger ships, and much of the city was on highly undesirable swampy ground. Their solution was to dredge the harbor and use the dredge material to raise the city ground level. They added three meters to the height of the town. Preexisting buildings found their ground floor was now an underground basement. They had to convert the second floor into the street entrance. When they were done, they had thee distinctive basement windows on the major buildings, as you see in this photo.

The highlight of the maritime museum was a ketch. This is a small cargo boat with shallow draft used to carry goods between the harbor and farming settlements. Ketches used some clever tricks that allowed the boats to require only a 3 man crew — a captain and two deck hands. At their peak, there were over 70 ketches sailing in Adelaide. From a distance, they looked like a swarm of insects on the water, hence their nickname of the Mosquito Fleet. They built a ketch inside the museum. The picture is a little confusing. It was taken from the second floor, looking down on the boat. They were showing video clips using the forward sail as the screen.

Adelaide is in the state of Southern Australia. It was the only state that didn’t import prisoners from England. Passengers arrived on the clipper ships such as the “City of Adelaide”. The original ship still exists. It is being restored. We were able to walk around the inside of the ship. I didn’t realize that clipper ships were built with a wood hull mounted on iron frame. I was surprised at the ship’s roominess. This was built as a passenger ship. We saw an advertisement for a clipper ship that put all the passenger accommodations on the deck, so everybody had natural light and fresh air. I thought that was a great idea until our guard mentioned that deck level accommodations were sometimes swept overboard in heavy seas.

The last pic is of the town tower. You can see a black ball at the top of the tower. The town would drop the ball exactly at Noon. (Danita says 1:00. She’s probably right, as usual.) This allowed captains to synchronize their chronometers to local time, an essential step in calculating latitude while sailing.

Today is a sea day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

This was a confusing couple of days. Both Australia and New Zeeland are very strict about how clean the hull has to be before they let the boat dock in their ports. Our ship’s hull was thoroughly cleaned before we got on. We had no trouble getting into Australia. The captain ordered another hull inspection while we were in port. The divers indicated that we might not be allowed in New Zeeland. They decided to skip Kangaroo Island and steam out to deep waters where we could drop our undesirable hull denizens. When we got there, the seas were too rough to do a hull cleaning. So we steamed back to Kangaroo Island for the afternoon.

We had an “Ocean Safari” trip booked for the morning, and planned to walk around the island in the afternoon. The morning excursion was changed to an afternoon excursion. We decided to decline the Ocean Safari in favor of our afternoon walkabout. We had a delightful time. We walked the sculpture trail. We got up close and personal with a wild Wallaby. And most importantly, we had a game of mini golf.

There’s only this one pic today. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Port Lincoln exports a lot of fish and a lot of grain – mostly to Asia. We took an expedition to visit an historic wool shed. It was restored circa 1920 when wool exporting was king. Our guide worked in the wool shed as a kid. Today, the only thing they still make is scones for morning tea. They still have working dog from the sheep days. The dog is 11 years old, but it’s clear it hasn’t lost it’s working instincts.

They had a lot of old equipment that still works. Here’s a shot of their way-cool wool press. They also had shearing area with a half dozen shearing stalls powered by a leather belt. That picture didn’t turn out. But you can take my word – it is also way cool.

We stopped at beach on the way back. Grain farmers aren’t busy the whole year. Back in the day, they would use a truck to tow their boats to the beach area, then use an old tractor to get them in and out of the salt water. It didn’t take long for the farmers to just keep their old tractors near the beach. Over time, the tractors rusted out and stopped working. They weren’t worth anything, so they were simply abandoned. The government finally put the kibosh on the practice, but there are still a lot of old tractors that nobody wants to claim ownership of. The result is a tractor graveyard.

Our last stop was the railroad museum. They had some interesting information about how grain was transported. Other than that, it was a huge collection of old railroad junk.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Our visit to Albany marks the half way point of our cruise. We took an excursion to a whale processing plant which operated from the 1950s to 1972. This company killed whales with a harpoon gun, then parked the carcus in the bay. They then processed the whales on land. We got a detailed and rather gruesome explanation of how it all worked. It’s hard to get a handle on how big whales are. Here is the skeleton of a Pigmy Blue Whale.

A regular Blue is half again larger. Here’ a picture of its mouth, using actual whale bones.

Albany was founded in 1852 with a ship load of prisoners and prison guards. The ship is called the Brig Amity. Here’s a picture of a replica. The tour guide gave the number of people aboard (which I promptly forgot). How could they possibly put that number of people on a very small ship? It seemed impossible at the time. I found the answer when we returned to our ship. The Brig Amity left from Sidney, not England. That’s rather a shorter sail with calmer waters.

The other highlight of our tour was The Gap, informally known as suicide point. The force of water hitting the walls of the inlet were very impressive, and we were there on a calm day.

The Gap is high on a hill. Here’s an interesting pic of the bay from a high viewpoint. Those rocks in the water turn out to be quite interesting, if you are a geologist. A few hundred billion years ago, Antarctica bumped into Australia. A couple of hundred billion years later, it separated. This left rocks not normally found in Australia, with a perfect match in Antarctica.

This last pic is just a nice view of the harbor.

We have a couple of sea days coming up. After setting our clocks back several times, gaining extra hours to sleep, we will start giving those hours back. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

For our second day in Fremantle, we stayed in town and did a self-tour. Our morning was spent at the Fremantle prison.

It turns out that for many years, it was a progressive prison with an emphasis on reformation. And also forced labor, but hey you have to do something with your day. The prison had a Church of England Chapel. The belief is that the chapel decoration was originally painted by a prisoner. Here’s a pic of some of the wall art he did in his prison cell.

Whatever the prisoner did, it got plastered over. It can’t be restored without ruining whatever it was. So today we see a more modern wall painting for the chapel.

Our other major outing was the shipwreck museum. Thanks mainly to the coral, Australia was a very dangerous place for early sea farers. There are lots of interesting stories about ships that sank, both for ships that have been found and for those who have not. One of the more interesting efforts is one of the very early purpose-built steam engines for ships. The restoration effort was so effective that you can clearly see what the engine looked like. Most of the parts move as intended. They are even able to turn the crank shaft.

That’s it for Fremantle. Tomorrow is a sea day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

We have two days in Fremantle. Today we took the train to Perth. Our first visit was to the mint. When we paid our admission, they told us the mint does not accept cash. One must use a credit card. The tour was quite a show. When first waling in, we saw a million dollar coin. It’s the real deal. The coin is on a platform that goes down into a vault at the end of the day. The gold in the coin is worth 10 million dollars. If I remember correctly, the coin weighs 11 tons.

They did a demonstration of pouring gold. The gold was already in an oven not enough to make gold flow like a liquid.

After pouring the gold into a mold and letting it cool, they got a half-million dollar gold heart. They recycle the same gold over and over, re-making the heart for each tour. Here’s a picture of two women who have a heart of gold.

After that, we went to the Western Australian Museum. We saw a 5,000 year old Egyptian pot. (Take this with a grain of salt. Our guide was quite knowledgeable, but he said some things I know to be incorrect.) How did such an ancient artifact find its way to Australia? Some British captain was stealing collecting items, had a shipping mishap, and it ended up eventually in the museum.

Here’s my piece de resistance. This pre-Columbian Zuni pot was made in New Mexico. Danita and I flew to San Diego, got on a boat that went through the South Pacific, sailed half way around Australia, and saw a bowl made in Mew Mexico.

We took two tours at the museum. The other was an aboriginal tour. It couldn’t have been more different than the highlights tour where we saw the above objects. The aboriginal tour visited several of the same rooms as the highlights tour, but it was totally focused on the history of the aboriginal people, the stories they tell, and their relationship with whites over the colonial and post-colonial period.

As nice as the day was, the evening show easily topped it. The Western Australian Police Pipe Band performed for us. I don’t think you will ever see a finer pipe band, or better dancers.

I hope this finds everybody doing welll.

Yesterday was Mardi Gras. One of the residents made himself the Mardi Gras king.

Today is Valentine’s day as well as Ash Wednesday. If you are in the Australian tourist industry, this is the low season. We visited Exmouth, a very small town of about 1,000 people during the low season, 20,000 in the high season. Their harbor has a lot of very big boats. I think there might be more boats than people this time of year. We took an excursion on a glass bottom boat. Exmouth’s reef is the world’s second largest (behind the great barrier reef) and the world’s largest fringing reef. It is also the world’s healthiest reef of any kind, thanks to generally low ocean temperatures. We saw a lot of sea life — a large oyster, a sea turtle, a sea snake, two sharks, a ray, and of course a lot of fish. The pictures turned out to be quite poor, but here’s one “we were there” shot.

I haven’t written about our evening entertainment. The shows are usually good. There’s a ship’s backup band when needed to support a soloist. They are quite good and very professional. Usually they play John Denver or Broadway or some other simple music. Recently we had a soloist sax player. This guy is remarkable because he likes very complex Latin rhythms. It seemed to me the backup band perked up and had a lot of fun with this. Especially remarkable is the drummer. He’s from Argentina. He was never early, never late, never missed a lick. And he was obviously enjoying himself immensely. So was I.

Tomorrow is another sea day. I hope this finds everybody doing well.