Port Arthur is the most evocative place in Australia recalling the days of Australia as a �hell on earth� penal colony. At its peak, it housed more than 2000 self-sufficient population. To make some officials feel more at home, touches of Old England were contrived; oaks and elms were planted and blackbirds released to sing from their branches.

Both extreme cruelty and weird forms of enlightenment were features of life at Port Arthur. Floggings were given for the slightest offence, but it was also here that juvenile delinquents received the first compulsory education in the world ! By the mid-19th century, the desire to reform rather than punish led to the building of the Model Prison, whose inmates spent their time in total �solitary�. However, madness rather than rehabilitation was the frequent outcome. With the end of the convict era, Port Arthur was closed down as a penal colony, and in late 19th-century became a tourist attraction. Many of its more substantial structures remain. They include the 1844 building used as a penitentiary from 1857; guard towers; the sinister Model Prison and, looking down from the site from landward, the fine church with tower and pinnacles. Port Arthur is also now reknowned as a very ghostly and haunted place.

Tragedy at Port Arthur, April 1996 A tragic postscript to Port Arthur�s strange and often brutal history was added in April 1996, when a Hobart resident went on a unexplained rampage and killed 35 people, and injuring just as many, in an incident which shocked the whole of Australia.