It was a little breezy this morning and quite a bit cooler than Sydney although the sun was shining so we set off for a walk around the town. Fremantle is different to most of the other towns we have seen in Australia in that it all seems to have been built at the same time and a lot of it remains so walking around you really get the feel of the late 1800s. It is Western Australia’s chief port and was founded on 2nd May 1829 and named after Captain Fremantle who claimed the west coast of New Holland as British Territory. We walked to the station then around to the town hall which is home to the visitor information centre where we picked up some leaflets and a slightly larger map then continued walking around. They still have what looks like an indoor market but unfortunately it is only open on Friday, Saturday and Sunday so we may have to come back to have a look at that. We walked up the hill to Fremantle Prison which is the last of the world heritage prisons we will be visiting. Almost 10,000 male convicts arrived as a labour force to build the Swan River Colony and their first task was to build the prison which would become their home. It was later renamed Fremantle Prison and is the largest convict built structure in Western Australia. It was built to hold 1000 men and they say that it was one of the more comfortable prison regimes however having walked round it and looked at the tiny cells they had and the fact that they had limited ventilation and no heating it must have been baking in the summer and freezing in the winter! In 1888 Perth Gaol closed and Fremantle was handed over to the local authorities and became Western Australias primary place of confinement for men, women and children. It remained in use as a prison until 1991 despite a number of riots regarding the conditions. It looked like the only concession to the 20th century was to enlarge the cells knocking two into one and adding electricity. The only way you can go into the prison is on a tour so we decided to do the Convict Prison tour which covered the convict era from the 1850s to 1886 which is when it became a maximum security gaol. It was fascinating to go round and with so much that was still original it was easy to imagine what it would have been like to be there in the 1800s although the prisoners wouldn’t have actually been in the cells during the day as they were out working from 08:00 – 18:00 when they came back to the prison and were locked in their cells and not allowed out again until the following morning. The only area of the prison the prisoners didn’t build was the solitary confinement cells as the punishment was total sensory deprivation and because they didn’t want the prisoners to know what it looked like on the inside the guards built this one, they had two cells, one where they spent the day and one where they spent the evening and they had a mandatory one hour exercise per day which seemed to be them running between two walls as instructed by the guards. The two walls were numbered 1 to 29 although there wasn’t a 6 or 16 and the prison guards would call out numbers that the prisoners had to run between. The reason there isn’t a 6 or 16 is due to superstition, the 6 was thought to represent the hangman’s noose and the 16 the hangman and the noose. They still used this block as the place where condemned men spent their last two hours before being hanged and the last hanging took place in 1968. There were a number of really interesting things such as the 10 commandments in the chapel, because the church was used by both prisoners and soldiers they have changed the sixth commandment from ‘thou shall not kill’ to thou shall not murder’ as the solders had been trained to go to war and therefore were expected to kill during battle. We really enjoyed the tour and will probably go back for the other one that is called Behind Bars which covers the maximum security gaol from 1887 to 1991. After this it was lunch time so we went to the Monks brewery for something to eat but we couldn’t have much to drink as this evening we are going to the Perth Observatory to hopefully do some star gazing.
