In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare Page B

the moment they landed in lurid institutions like Port Arthur and Sarah Island. The fact is that these two prisons were designed for men and women who reoffended once they arrived in the colony. The majority of the 76,000 convicts who came to Van Diemen’s Land between 1804 and 1853, when transportation ceased, were sent in gangs to build public bridges, roads, houses and boats, fell timber and make bricks; or ‘assigned’ to settlers like Kemp to work as farm labourers and domestic servants. After a year or so of good conduct, they might be given a ticket-of-leave, and freedom to live and work within the island – so long as they reported to the police once a month and attended church every Sunday. To the majority of convicts, this is what happened. It was a penal system that was open to appalling abuse – and it deteriorated further in the 1840s when assignment was scrapped in favour of probation – but the philosophy that drove it was more humane than one might gather from The Fatal Shore or from Marcus Clarke’s 1874 novel, For the Term of His Natural Life . The potter Edward Carr Shaw writes in his memoirs that people from his district in Ireland were known to steal ‘a loaf o’ bread or some heggs’ in order to be given free passage to this new country full of opportunities. ‘Jus’ make sure you gets caught …’ The truth lies somewhere in the middle, namely that transportation was successful in providing a better life to thousands of men and women who were sentenced to it. ‘Thus it is,’ Arthur explained to the Archbishop of Dublin in 1833, ‘that every man has afforded him an opportunity of in a great measure retrieving his character and becoming useful in society, while the resolutely and irrecoverably depraved are doomed to live apart from it for the remainder of their lives.’
    In Knopwood’s judgment, the men who had attempted to pirate Kemp’s schooner were ‘irrecoverably depraved’. Until 1821, he would have sent Greenhill and Travers to the town jail on the corner of Murray and Macquarie Street, but in that year Sorell established a penitentiary on an island in the middle of Macquarie Harbour, 200 miles north-west of Hobart.
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    I drove to Strahan and took a boat through Hell’s Gates into the large inlet of Macquarie Harbour. Sharp rocks weathered to the profile of frozen surf guarded the narrow entrance and an eight-knot tide was running in from the sea. A couple held on to each other until the Lady Franklin had passed safely through.
    The island where Greenhill and Travers were imprisoned is a tree-covered, 15-acre hump that lies at the far end of an immense sheet of water and four miles from the entrance to the Gordon River. It is hemmed in on one side by a battering ocean that runs, without interruption, to Patagonia, and on the other side by a damp sclerophyll forest more impenetrable than the Amazon.
    In 1822, the nearest settlement – Hobart – took up to 77 days to reach from here by sea. Escape was scarcely an option, although in the first five years of its existence 116 convicts tried it, of whom 75 ‘perished in the woods’. Christened ‘Devil’s Island’ by the convicts, Sarah Island became the most dreaded penal station in the southern hemisphere: associated, wrote John West, with ‘inexpressible depravity, degradation and woe’.
    I stood on the deck of the Lady Franklin , waiting for the island to come into sight. Button-grass plains grew in peaty soil to the water’s edge. Beyond, there spread a line of ti-trees and, further back, the darker foliage of sassafras, laurel and myrtle. The sun had burned off the mist and in the clear morning sky I could make out, to the east, the familiar quartzite peak of Frenchman’s Cap, one of the mountains from which Greenhill took his bearings.
    I had first seen Frenchman’s Cap – so called after its resemblance