Wednesday, Oct 7th, Port Arthur

Greetings!

Long before Britain deported 166,000 convicts to Australia, did you know that she sent 80,000 to America?   While visiting the Port Arthur Historic Site yesterday, where the first separate juvenile incarceration program was established, we learned that until the American Revolution, ships sailed with human cargo to her closest mercantile port.   We'll investigate more about how they were used, and what became of them.

At Port Arthur, British penal program design was developed from 1828 to 1853, and rehabilitation became the key component which began to dominate its future.  For the first time, children were housed and supervised on a small facility across the bay away from adults.  Deportees as young as nine (think Dicken's Artful Dodger) were held there.  Adults were classified, segregated, trained in skills, and employed in timber (boat-building) and mining projects.  The islands were full of some of the tallest trees in the world, first-growth mountain ash.

Today, we head north to Swansea in a four-day swing around this beautiful island.  Here are the photos we took at Port Arthur yesterday.
Wednesday, Oct 7th, Port Arthur

And the photos we took along the eastern coast today.
Wednesday, Oct 7th, Swansea

Tomorrow, we head inland, in search by Saturday, for the world's tallest tree.