Great Escapes: Discover Tasmania

As a new trail opens up one of Tasmania’s wildest beauty spots, we explore the island’s convict history and bright future.

- Sarah Baxter

We made our break for it. The boat cleared the jetty, leaving behind the ghostly remnants of 19th-century colonial justice: dour penitentiary, military barracks, lunatic asylum. Straight ahead, a squat lump of mudstone: the Isle of the Dead, final resting place of over 1,100 souls (o cers in marked graves, convicts in mass ones). Beyond that, navy waters, kelp gulls and our destination: Port Arthur inlet’s forested far shore.

However, there was no rush. We spent an hour skimming down the sound and back, past sea caves and fur seals, before edging into the emerald shallows of Denmans Cove. Ramp lowered, we walked onto its squeaky white sand, along a creek and into the bush. Across the inlet, the prison ruins were now barely visible through a smugglers’ mist. Our escape from Port Arthur, once the most feared address in all of Australia, had been a leisurely affair. How times change.

Established on Tasmania’s Tasman Peninsula in 1830, Port Arthur began life as a timber station but soon became a jail for Australia’s worst. Its inmates weren’t fresh-off-the-boat transportees but convicts who committed further offences once they’d arrived. Despite that, it was a prison with no walls. Connected to the rest of the mainland by only a narrow, well-guarded isthmus, tucked into a secretive inlet and surrounded by hostile bush and shark-infested seas, Port Arthur’s geography kept the inmates in.

Despite its horrors, that geography also made it beautiful. The Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company described it about right in its 1887 brochure: ‘A spot as lovely in its position as it is ugly in its memories’. Tourists started visiting just three months after the penal colony closed in 1877, drawn by Port Arthur’s macabre reputation and incongruous natural splendour.