::: HISTORY & HERITAGE
Port Arthur Gothic
By JULIA CLARK | The white box
is dead! This museum reeks of atmosphere— dark,
oppressive, gloomy, some say Gothic. Located in
a former dormitory of the Lunatic Asylum, it loudly
proclaims itself a new museum while whispering
of its past use.
The great prison reformer Jeremy
Bentham provided its theme; his Penitentiary,
on which Port Arthur's system was modelled,
was 'a machine for grinding rogues honest'. Mounted
on a wall at the entrance are schematic representations
of the three main cogs in this machine; the
Bible for religious and moral instruction; the
hammer for work and trade training; the whip for
discipline and punishment.
beds that may once have held the sad, broken
men classed as 'lunatic' — the mentally
disabled, depressed, delusional, demented flotsam
of the convict system
Inside, cases of blackened
and rusty steel, mounted on wheels, march down
the room in two rows. In their fabric and architecture
they refer both to beds and to machines.
Their arrangement mirrors the rows of beds that
may once have held the sad, broken men classed
as 'lunatic' — the mentally disabled, depressed,
delusional, demented flotsam of the convict
system. Each is signed within by an iconic
image that identifies the contents, arranged
under topics like 'Work' or, more surprisingly,
'Recreation'.
These are not historic images as might be expected,
drawn from the many collections of images that
show Port Arthur and its inmates, bond and free,
in their 19th century setting. Rather they are
modern images, photographed by Peter Whyte,
in colour, of men and women in 19th century dress.
One shows a brawny, tattooed arm holding a hammer
and chisel; another, a woman walking up a flight
of steps in a garden. The disjunction between
colour images and 19th century figures is jarring,
confusing, unexpected.
They reach across time
towards us, claiming kinship and familiarity.
They say to the viewer, once we were as you
are. We did not live in a black and white world;
we were not simply two-dimensional figures in
a landscape, distant, mute, anonymous; we did
not only exist on the pages of convict records.
We were once flesh and blood, young and strong,
sentient beings like you. Like you, we worked,
we took what pleasures we could, we ate, slept,
marched, suffered and, finally, died.
This is one of the important lessons that Port
Arthur has to teach us. We do not believe, as
the poet Philip Larkin would have it, that 'the
past is a foreign country/they do things differently
there'. We believe that there is much, too much,
that is tragically familiar.
And saddest of all, those fed into the maw of
Port Arthur's machine are essentially the same
people as find themselves behind bars today
We still wrestle
with the same questions about the nature of
crime and criminality, about how to achieve
both punishment and reform. We still arrive
at the same facile, punitive solutions. We
still build prisons that warp and torture and
break those unlucky enough to be fed into the
machine. And saddest of all, those fed into the
maw of Port Arthur's machine are essentially
the same people as find themselves behind bars
today - the poor, the uneducated, the mentally
ill, the losers in any society, whether it is
19th century or 21st century.
Meet them in the new Port Arthur museum. And
recognise yourself. ¶
Julia Clark is Manager,
Interpretation & Collections,
Port Arthur Historic Site
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