Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip from a travelogue made in about 1932 shows the large stone ruins of the Port Arthur prison settlement, and re-enactments of convict life. In voice-over the narrator reflects on the early years of the settlement and the convicts who built it. Re-enacted scenes show convicts labouring in chains supervised by guards, entering the penitentiary and going to church. A tour group explores the crumbling buildings. The narrator walks with a companion through the model prison and church. Orchestral music and a hymn accompany the footage.

Educational value points

• As tourism in Tasmania expanded in the 1930s, tours of Port Arthur became popular. The main attractions included the penitentiary, initially built in 1857 as a flour mill and granary, which had housed more than 480 convicts; the church, constructed in 1836–37 and destroyed in an 1884 fire; the hospital, built in 1841–42; and the model prison, built in 1853, where prisoners were isolated. By the 1930s tourism to the area supported three hotels and a museum.

• Director Ken G Hall uses a number of film techniques to make Port Arthur appear attractive to tourists. The re-enactment scenes appeal to the imagination and curiosity of those intrigued by Australia’s convict past. The camera invites the potential visitor to join the tour group as it journeys around the crumbling and ivy-clad buildings, and the haunting lyrics of the hymn 'All people that on Earth do dwell’ swell as the visitors step into the ruins of the old church.

• The clip presents a sympathetic view of the convicts who built Port Arthur. The narrator emphasises their suffering, calling the time the ‘bad old days’, and saying that the convicts were ‘poor devils’, that ‘the hearts of men’ beat under convict clothes, and that some were transported for ‘trivial offences’. The portrayal of the elderly narrator leaning on his stick contributes to the mood of sad wise reflection on Port Arthur’s tragic history.

• Re-enactments as well as the narration re-create the harsh experiences of the 75,000 convicts who were sent to the prison settlement at Port Arthur between 1832 and 1877. Men are shown chained and submissive, engaged in hard physical labour. The narrator describes ‘human cattle toiling and sweating’, ‘always working, working, hopelessly’, and uses terms such as ‘wretched’ and ‘heartbreak labour’ to emphasise the extent of their suffering.

• The narration, voiced by Bert Bailey, offers a sympathetic view of the Port Arthur convicts that may have been influenced by the 1927 film For the Term of His Natural Life, which was about an innocent man transported to Australia and was largely filmed at Port Arthur. The film was a sensational success and may have influenced popular opinion. In the same year as they made this documentary Bailey and Hall collaborated on the enormously successful feature film On Our Selection.

• The clip shows the state of the Port Arthur buildings in the 1930s after bush fires had largely destroyed them in the 1880s and 1890s and before conservation programs began in the 1960s. The penal settlement closed in 1877 and the buildings were gutted by bushfires in 1884, 1895 and 1897. They lay derelict until conservation projects began. Today, reconstruction and refurbishing projects help to convey something of the experiences of inmates.

This clip starts approximately 5 minutes into the documentary.

A montage of re-enacted scenes depicting convict life in the Port Arthur prison settlement plays out with accompanying narration. These convict scenes are intercut with shots of the narrator walking through the site’s ruins with a female companion. Orchestral music can be heard throughout.

Narrator Let us turn back time and look at Port Arthur when those many trees were tiny seedlings in the ground. The tramp, tramp of marching convict feet. Human cattle, toiling and sweating, working, working hopelessly. The ruins of the great grey penitentiary to which every night the prisoners returned. How many were convicts in the true sense of the word? How many were transported for trivial offences? Yet convicts they were because the law said so. But under the broad arrowed coats beat the hearts of men.

The old prison hospital. This great building was of course entirely constructed by convict labour. Gaunt walls, a desolate ruin no longer able to afford the shelter the wretched that it did in days of yore. A model prison in which in the bad old days, the really desperate characters were lodged.

Somehow as I strolled through these ruins, my mind kept wandering back over the years and the masses of tumbled stonework persistently rebuilt themselves until they attained their former majesty. The church at Port Arthur was once a majestic edifice. It was designed by a convict, legend says, who was later pardoned for his work. The hearts of men and artists did beat beneath many of these rustics. Looking down the corridor of time, I could see that church as it was when its Sunday service was a greatly welcomed respite from the heartbreaking labour of those poor devils locked away from the world, and as I entered the portals of that house of God, stately now even in dismemberment, I seem today hear the voices of a phantom choir singing an age-old hymn – the voices of desperate, hopeless men.

A pause in the narration as Orchestral music continues as a man and woman walk through the ruins.

Narrator The echoes died, and with them, sad memories of the past. I was back in the sunshine of a glorious free land, where every man is his own master and life marches on.