Lock down

On the 4th September 1884 the British Government formally ceased the practice of transporting prisoners to penal colonies in Australia.

Between 1786 when the first ship arrived in Botany Bay, and the final convict ship load in 1868, 165000 souls were sent off to make a new life for themselves in often pestilential colonies across Australia.

In Western Australia, Freemantle Gaol was built using convict labour in 1859 and continued as a penal institution until its closure in 1992. It is now a heritage site and tourist attraction with grizzly reminders of the death penalty such as the gallows last used in 1964.

My eldest brother John was an assistant governor and head of the riot squad in Freemantle Gaol until he retired, when I visited him in 1987, he gave me one of the original cell door locks as a momento of my visit.

In 2008 we visited the prison as tourists and found it a cold and forbidding place, the atmosphere was chilling and there was a lot of evidence of the brutal regime that convicts and indeed later inmates suffered under.