…Though Tasmania is a lovely island now, its landscapes serene and its pride disarmingly genteel, patches of harsh memory disfigure it. By the 1820’s there were European settlements at both ends of the island. A fine road ran from north to south, and many free settlers were living in distinctly gentlemanly style in substantial country houses on prosperous estates.
Yet the basis of its society remained punitive: this was a place of exile, a criminal island, and its life was organized around the fulcrum of its penal purpose. In a suggestive way, it may still be so. Though transportation to Tasmania ended in 1853, the most compelling sight on the island, to many, remains the celebrated penal settlement of Port Arthur, on the Tasman Peninsula in the southeast.
—The home of the artist John Glover was a few miles upstream from Cottrell’s place, on the opposite side of the River, beyond the future township of Deddington, which never became much more than a surveyor’s dream. His work is well represented in the principal galleries of Australia, and in particular, the painting The River Nile, Van Diemen’s Land, in the National Gallery of Victoria, is one of the best known from the early colonial period.
It was painted about 1838, a few years after Anthony Cottrell and his assigned servant Thomas Beswick had left the area. Together with the earlier Milles Plains in the Tasmanian Gallery, it represents a new immigrant’s perception of the open bushland character of Cottrell’s farm where it came to the river near the crossing about where Deddington was planned to be. As Gleeson observed in regard to Glover’s appreciation of the typically open bush parkland which was so common in much of South Eastern Australia—Read More:http://www.beswick.info/besfam/cottrell.htm
This was not the severest of the several prisons on Tasmania. The worst was at Macquarie Harbour, onthe west coast, where the prison buildings stood on a reef unapproachable by land except at low tide, and recalcitrant convicts were sometimes confined for weeks at a time on uninhabited rocks in the estuary. The hinterland there was so terrible that of the hundred-odd prisoners who ever escaped from Macquarie Harbour, sixty-two died in the bush, many of starvation, and nine were eaten by their comrades.
Port Arthur, though, was much larger and better known, and was a tourist site almost from the start. A tramway used to take visitors down the steep slope of the Tasman Peninsula, its trucks pushed along by convicts; at one time one could still discover the ruts of its tracks in the bush. At the bottom, the first thing one saw was the square English tower of the interdenominational church, looking rural and rooky, surrounded by English elms and oaks and by the neat verandaed houses of the governor and his assistants.
—When Glover arrived in Hobart in 1831, the thirty-year conflict between the Tasmanian Aborigines and the European settlers was nearing an end. During this time George Augustus Robinson – the appointed Protector of Aborigines – had been relocating the majority of two hundred Indigenous people to Flinders Island. Only two months before he left Hobart for his new property of Patterdale in northern Tasmania, Glover made two group portraits showing twenty-six members of the Big River and Oyster Bay Aboriginal tribes before their transfer to Flinders Island. They became the subject of a number of significant paintings. Painted in 1832, the year of his move to Patterdale, A corrobery of natives in Mills Plains is Glover’s finest and probably earliest Aboriginal subject.—Read More:http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/turnertomonet/Detail.cfm?IRN=128979
Just around the corner, the granite buildings of the prison were grouped with a terrible dignity around their harbor. Though mostly ruins, they still hold a grim authority. Here is the watchtower , around whose ramparts the sentries perpetually tramped, and here the flogging wall, and here the lunatic asylum….( to be continued)…
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