Port Arthur

I had terribly mixed feelings about going to Port Arthur since the massacre there in the 1996.  I expected many memorials to be everywhere as it was such a tragedy and given my intense dislike for guns in the hands of the wrong people, I was not quite looking forward to this visit.  It all turned out good.

No reminders of the massacre and not a single sole mentioned it the whole time we were there.  In fact we were there on two beautiful days.  Got there very late in the afternoon so only managed to make the guided tour and the boat tour around the Isle of the Dead and poke our heads into as many of the houses as we could before they closed at 5pm. 

Had to get back to the caravan park quickly as Alex and Kate were booked to do the Ghost tour that night.  Managed to get some pasta into both of them and saw them off with strict instructions to Alex that if he got scared that was too bad and he had to stick it out the whole tour. (Yeah right – we should have known better).  I still have worked out how much of the tour they actually saw as when Paul went to pick them up at 10pm, they were both at reception waiting to be picked up.  Of course Alex got scared and it didn’t help that people on the tour were banging the walls, but the poor little mite had had enough.  Phone reception being as poor as it is, Kate couldn’t ring Dad to come get them earlier.

Our second day saw us with beautiful weather and the four us enjoyed our walk through the rest of Port Arthur.  Look up the ‘worst’ prisons in the world and you might find out about the ‘Separate’ prison.  Guantanamo Bay is not a new way of incarcerating prisoners – Port Arthur was way ahead of the game!  Very morbid and creepy walking through this section.  We went to the museum and looked up our family names to see if any of our rellies were ever convicts at Port Arthur – there were two John Stephensons (Paul’s family naturally)  and two people with the name Crosby (My maternal grandmother’s side of the family).  Every other name we tried came up with nothing.