Transversal Encounters

As the sole passenger on a bus juddering through mist-laced forests I inched my way to Port Arthur, which operated as a penal station for repeat offenders between 1830 and 1877. The site is comprised of more than 30 buildings, ruins, grounds and gardens.
Ever since the closure of the penal station, tourists have been swarming to Port Arthur driven forward by their curiosity about a place that destroyed the physical and mental health of hundreds of men. At the Separate Prison, for example, convicts were placed in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and were not allowed to speak unless spoken to.
Port Arthur has an atmosphere of morbidity that crawls under your skin and stays with you long after you leave. At the police station, I read a letter written by a man who wanted to return a brick he had stolen from the Separate Prison while visiting the place on honeymoon. He suggested that the brick had jinxed him.
Port Arthur has been called a traumascape not only because of the harshness of the punishments meted out in the 19th century. In 1996, a gunman went on a rampage in various places across the site, killing 35 people and injuring 23 others. Later he explained his actions by saying, “A lot of violence has happened there. It must be the most violent place in Australia. It seemed the right place.”
After visiting the main site, I sailed to the Isle of the Dead, one nautical mile away from the mainland and around one hectare in size. Nearing the island I could see that it was covered in trees and part of its shoreline consisted of steep rock face. Seals were lying on their back with their flippers protruding out of the water. Occasionally, the spout of a migrating whale punctured the placid surface of the water.
When the penal station was in operation more than 1,000 people were interred on the Isle of the Dead. The number of graves densely packed on such a tiny island is somewhat unnerving. The Isle of the Dead is a microcosm of society at the time. The convicts are buried naked in unmarked communal graves at the lower end of the island. The free men are buried in the highest part of the island and each grave is marked by means of a stone.
Surveying the tombs and learning the history of the dead, my curiosity was peaked when I stumbled upon a commemorative gravestone for a forger by the name of Henry Savery. I had inadvertently discovered the continent’s first novelist.