Just doin' time

We Breakeys really get our money's worth from museums. So we covered a lot of ground when we visited the Port Arthur penal settlement. We joined a tour, we scrambled all over, we read the displays and spent a whole day there.
What a curious place, partially ruined after bush fire damage, partially 'mined' for a source of bricks and dressed stone, and with some buildings curiously intact.

We were there on a most gentle weather day, almost goldilocks in its just rightness, so it was hard to grasp the brutal terrors of living there inflicted on men and boys to their bodies and minds, by the guards, government, church and by their peers.

The solitary confinement jail, designed to punish their spirit, was awful, and yet somehow some of the men held on to their wits to find ways to communicate and even escape. - others misplaced them entirely.

The chapel in that building was terrible in its ingenuity with each man standing in a coffin sized box that only afforded a view towards the pulpit. With a degree of professional interest, I stood in the pulpit and looked back at all the tourists trying out those individual boxes. They went in to them laughing, but most sobered up fast. All I could see was each face - if they were tall enough, otherwise 2 eyes blinking at me.

This picture was taken when we had run out of steam AND all the food had been consumed. Talk about 1st world problems.