Diary date: Sunday October 10th 2010
In all these posts I have hardly mentioned the weather. That's because it has been reliably sunny and warm every day, with temperatures on a par with those in Southern france. Absolutely delightful - I could stay here for ever!
Well, today, Sunday, I got up fairly early and walked up the road to the Tram stop - another adventure I had planned. It was so early I caught the first tram of the day! It takes one around some of the important sites of the town, including the fishing boat harbour, the old harbour where the £10 immigrants landed in Fremantle during the 50s and 60s, the Railway Station, the Markets, the Town Hall, Monument Hill and the Prison. I went round one and a half times, providing translation services for a French couple on the trip, then got off to visit the Fremantle Prison, one of the most visited sites in WA. It was built by the convicts that were brought over to provide labour to help build the foundling town of Fremantle. Apparently the message saying they were coming was on a slower boat than the one with the convicts on, so there was no accommodation for them when they arrived!
There are several tours available so i decided to go for the lot. Of course I couldn't fit them all in today, so did the 'Doing Time' tour and the 'Tunnels' tour. I have booked to do the torchlight one on Weds and hopefully I will be able to also do the 'Great Escapes' tour the same day. The doing time tour took us around the Prison as if we were prisoners being admitted. First we went to the reception area, where one was searched, valuables were handed in and 'prison greens' were given out to real prisoners. Following that we were shown various bits of the prison, including the exercise yards, (very small), the Prison Chapel, (Compulsory to attend 2 services on a Sunday!), the Kitchens, the Boiler house, where two prisoners spent all their time tending the boiler, sleeping in a room beside it - a rather larger bedroom than most prisoners had, and not so much guarded. We walked one of the wings and saw how it was divided into divisions to try and segregate the prisoners a little, very necessary when the prisoners rioted in 1988! we also saw the solitary confinement cells and observation cells for those on suicide watch and the segregation cels for paedos, judges, lawyers, cops etc! Finally we were shown the condemned cell and a few cells kitted out as they were at different times during the prisons' history. All of them, however, had the 'prisoner's ensuite' - a lidded pail for slops! I had a photo taken of me sitting in the condemned cell before I was told what it was. Apparently it took between 50 and 60 seconds from leaving that cell to the end of one's life. we were taken around to the 'gallows' and it was pretty horrid to walk in and see the rope hanging there, also the trap doors and the mechanism for opening them. That concluded that tour and I then went to the tunnels tour.
To ensure fresh drinking water for the prison a system of tunnels was excavated by the convicts/prisoners underneath the prison where there was an aquifer in the porous limestone. A large reservoir was also created under the prison garden, capable of holding something like 12,000,000 gallons of water. All this was done by the prisoners with hand tools only, by the light of kerosene lamps. It also counted as hard labour, but sometimes a prisoner would be sentenced to hard labour and weights, which meant they had to wear a weighted waist belt of 14 or 28 lbs. The weight was set by the sentencing judge. A misdemeanour could also entail the prisoner being shackled and /or obliged to wear ankle weights. Obviously working under such conditions was very debilitating, especially as it could get very hot down in the tunnels. The first part of the tunnels was a 'dry' excavation , when the general route of the tunnels was mapped out and this was followed by the 'wet' excavation when the tunnels were dug deeper, below the level of the water table, so the prisoners were working in water for all their shift. How long the shifts were isn't known, but what is known is that they were locked up for 14½ hours overnight, so one assumes that they were in the tunnels for the rest of the time.
They had to take their slop pails down with them to use if needed, then carry them up again at the end of the shift. When we went down, we were given coveralls, hard hat, climbing harness with safety lock system, and wellies. The prisoners went down in whatever they normally wore and several cases of trench foot were recorded. The tunnels however were a great success, and the prison was able to supply water to the town, as well as meeting its own needs, until water supply was taken over by a state body. Apparently there were no escapes from the tunnels, although there is anecdotal evidence that a lady was pegging out the washing in the garden of her house in Hampton road, which is over the tunnels area when a bedraggled man climbed out of her well and shuffled off down the side of the house. Normally on tis tour one is not allowed to take cameras, but as there were only two of us our guide bent the rules a little and allowed us ours. The tunnels are only just standing height for someone of my height (5'3") in their highest places and at times even I was almost bent double, so working on them must have been awful. There was no ventilation, as there is now, so the dust and odour must have been diabolical. After walking through the dry tunnels we went on a tour of the wet ones. for this we each had a plastic boat which we had to paddle. It was great fun for us down there and very interesting, but sobering to remember the conditions under which they had been built
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