Port Arthur: Confronting Australia's Convict History

Port Arthur Historic Site on the Tasman Peninsula south of Hobart is Australia's most significant convict heritage site, a collection of historic buildings and ruins that constitute the physical evidence of the brutal penal settlement that operated from 1830 to 1877 and through which more than 12,000 convicts passed. The site's World Heritage inscription, as part of the Australian Convict Sites serial listing, recognises its outstanding historical significance as evidence of one of the most systematic exercises in European colonial punishment that the nineteenth century produced.

The interpretive program at Port Arthur is among the most sophisticated at any Australian heritage site, using the documentary records of the settlement to tell individual stories of convicts, guards, and administrators that humanise the historical experience and prevent the site from becoming a monument to architecture rather than to human experience. The ghost tours that have become one of the site's most popular offerings provide an experiential dimension that the daytime historical program cannot provide, though the commercialisation of convict suffering that the ghost tours represent has generated periodic critical comment.

The Port Arthur massacre of 1996, in which 35 people were killed by a lone gunman in Australia's worst mass shooting, has added a layer of contemporary tragedy to a site already saturated with historical suffering. The memorial garden created in the massacre's aftermath, and the visitor experience of encountering this more recent history within the colonial heritage site, creates an unusual and sometimes difficult emotional complexity that staff and interpretive programs have had to learn to manage.

The Tasman Peninsula's natural environment, including the dramatic sea cliffs of the Tasman National Park and the extraordinary geological formations at Cape Hauy and Cape Pillar, provides a complement to the historical site that visitors who extend their stay beyond Port Arthur discover. The combination of world-class heritage and world-class wilderness on a single accessible peninsula from Hobart creates a visitor experience proposition that is exceptional within Australia.

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