Citation
Before and After Sunday Afternoon – Reflections on the Port Arthur Massacre, Peter MacFie Island Magazine,Issue 67, Winter 1996, 95-102.
Outline
The massacre at the Port Arthur Historic Site came as a devastating shock to a small community, small island and close-knit continent. As word spread on a balmy autumn afternoon, collective shock set in. An ex-Sydneysider friend commented upon how personally Tasmanians have taken the Port Arthur tragedy. On the following days, Hobart and the surrounding towns and suburbs were hushed; everyone knew what their neighbours near and far were facing. A friend recalled how he stood on the steps of an eastern-shore house looking across the Derwent River toward Hobart and Mt Wellington, the morning of the church service. H e said he could ‘feel in the air’ a communal grief being shared across the river and suburbs. Friends reported broken sleep and nightmares; others phoned from interstate and overseas.
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Excerpt
Before and after Sunday
The massacre at the Port Arthur Historic Site came as a devastating shock to a small community, small island and close-knit continent. As word spread on a balmy autumn afternoon, collective shock set in. An ex-Sydneysider friend commented upon how personally Tasmanians have taken the Port Arthur tragedy. On the following days, Hobart and the surrounding towns and suburbs were hushed; everyone knew what their neighbours near and far were facing. A friend recalled how he stood on the steps of an eastern-shore house looking across the Derwent River toward Hobart and Mt Wellington, the morning of the church service. He said he could ‘feel in the air’ a communal grief being shared across the river and suburbs. Friends reported broken sleep and nightmares; others phoned from interstate and overseas.
Lax gun laws aside, some have queried if the gunman’s choice of the former convict station as the stage for his crime is such a surprise? Just as the bushfires of 1897 were considered by some to have been divine retribution, the 1996 massacre carries strong under and overtones of a similar ‘revenge’ for the misuse of a sacred place.
A loss of innocence some have said, but years before, others lost their innocence at Port Arthur. The allure, the enticement of Port Arthur is the contrast between the beauty of the setting and the barbarity of its use. Political prisoner William Smith O’Brien noted the irony in 1847: a village laid out to punish and reform, with its own hierarchy and services, its own weaponry. As at the site, suppressed tension and division have been the norm in Tasmanian history, not the twee charm of tourism advertisements.
Spending three days on the Peninsula seemed a small gesture. Friends whom I’d worked with at the site for over seven years exchanged hugs and shared tears and endless cups of tea while I listened. On Friday May 3rd, the Peninsula community held a service in the old Port Arthur church. A makeshift altar in the Gothic window lay between those inside and those on the lawn behind. Healing words were spoken as the mid-afternoon sun glowed on the sandstone walls and spires. The plaintive ‘Abide With Me’ was sung by several hundred unsteady voices; a piper whirled ‘Amazing Grace’. Children from Nubeena school each brought a red rose for the Warden to lay down as the thirty-five victims’ names were read out. The names went on and on, and I wanted the list to stop, but no. Outside the church, people cried unashamedly.
Funerals for officers and paupers now buried on the Isle of the Dead were held here, and coffins carried down the oak avenue to the water’s edge. We, also, walked down the avenue and garden to lay flowers on the steps of the Broad Arrow Cafe. Staff had derisively dubbed it ‘Poison Arrow’. Many times in the 1980s w e had grabbed lunch in the cheap cafeteria, musing over what Port Arthur meant to ourselves and visitors. Now all had to think again.
A tourist filming near the massacre later commented, ‘It’s quite feasible the gun shots were part of the show.’ But which show? The Ghost Tours or the military’s annual ‘Beating Retreat’, which ends with cannon fire and fireworks climaxing the 1812 Overture? Port Arthur was a giant backdrop.
Before Sunday, Port Arthur was again being upgraded, made more palatable, more attractive, with restored officers’ gardens, and hot bread and recitals on the Broadwood from the Commandant’s kitchen and parlour. Before Sunday, visitors to the prison were confused by the historical representation of the past in Port Arthur’s outdoor museums. Was it re-created history such as at Sovereign Hill or old Sydney Town? The gentility of the Commandant’s and Doctor’s houses with their restored gardens contrasted with the lunacy of the Model Prison and Asylum.
It was the 1897 fires that changed Port Arthur forever, ‘freezing’ the place in a time warp. The old penal colony was about to become a spa for turn-of-the century tourists. The Reverend Woolnough was converting the Model Prison into an up-market hotel with cells for accommodation and a billiard room in the prison chapel. Once more, Port Arthur was to become ‘Entertainment’, not a place for reflection, education, family history or the discussion of prison reform or social issues, nor for contemplating what is valuable in life, in our cultural inheritance. The new ‘fire’, some would argue, has again blasted the dross from the new attempt to reinvent Port Arthur, making us reassess what we value and hold dear and unnegotiable.
On a rainy winter’s day, or a late summer evening – despite the 1897 bushfires, twentieth-century neglect and more recent manicure – the simmering violence of old Port Arthur still shows beneath its garden setting. The lawns which were once vegetable gardens, residences or workshops cover the past like grass on a battlefield. Hard to believe that Port Arthur was, as Lieutenant-Governor Arthur wanted, ‘a place of misery’. Hard, until Sunday April 28th.
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Indexed subjects
Anglicans
Arthur, Lieut. Gov. George
bagpipe music
Beating the Retreat
black market
Booth, Charles O’Hara
Bridges, Roy
Broad Arrow Café
buggery
bushfires
Catholic priests
Church of Christ
Clarke, Marcus
Commandant’s House
convicts
cultural heritage
divided community
divine retribution
Doctor’s House
effect on local population
emancipists
embarrassing facts
employment economics
entertainment
Federal Government funding
firearms at Port Arthur
firefighters as first response
Flanagan, Richard
flogging
For the term of his natural life
Foucault, Michel
fundamentalism
gay community
genealogy
ghost economics
ghost tours
gun laws
Hallowed ground
hated stain
Hay, Peter
Historical Societies
homosexual punishment
humanitarians
hymns
Abide with me
Amazing Grace
Insane Asylum
Isle of the Dead
massacre
memorial church service
Meredith, Louisa Ann (Mrs Charles)
Model Prison
National Trust
Nubeena school students
O’Brien, William Smith
Parks and Wildlife Department
Point Puer boys
Port Arthur
Port Arthur Management Authority
prejudices
Presbyterians
re-created history
religion
revenge
Royal Society
Rundle, Tony
sacred places
sherry parties
silence as punishment
Tasman Council
Tasman Peninsula
Tasmanian history
theme parks
tolerance
tourism
tourist incongruities
tragedy
unemployment
Walker, Thomas (Mick)
Woolnough, Rev. James B.W.
xenophobia