Thursday, July 18, 2013
Travelled South from Triabunna to Dunalley via a small forest back road. It was beautiful in the early morning mist and completely void of other people. This is a great way to start the morning.
At Dunalley we visited the Tessellated Pavement State Reserve which has an interesting rock formation which only took 100 million years to make. Here we also visited a natural arch leading to the ocean and a somewhat disappointing blowhole.
The highlight for the day was a visit to the Port Arthur convict site and probably Tasmania’s most significant heritage site as well as part of a World Heritage site. Back in the 1830’s to 1850’s this was a great place for the english to send the hardest of convicted British criminals for a little re-education and free labor. They also employed a “Separate Prison” model such that inmates did not talk or interact with each other, and in fact they spend 23 hours of each day just with themselves. This is also the site of Australia’s worst massacre (28 April 1996) where 35 people were killed by a lone gunman and ultimately led to a national ban on semi-automatic shotguns and rifles.
PS: On route to Port Arthur we drove through a tiny town called Doo Town. Some of the names of the houses caught my attention: ‘Doo Us’, ‘Doo Mee’, ‘Doo Little’, ‘Toucan-Doo’, ‘Wattle-I-Doo’, ‘Thistle Doo Me’ and some more I can’t remember (Caroline). I was laughing the whole drive through town 🙂
