Whilst a lot of attention has been paid to the buildings and archaeology of the Port Arthur Historic Site, our 2017-2020 project looked at the landscapes that surrounded the station. Called the ‘labour hinterland’, this is where the vast majority of the convicts spent their working day. In the valleys and hills of the Tasman Peninsula the men were constantly worked in tasks of resource extraction (timber-getting, quarrying, charcoal burning), cultivation and materials transport. The waters that surrounded peninsula were full of brigs, schooners and whaleboats transporting people, food and goods.

Using historical archaeology and a Geographic Information System (GIS), our project investigated how the labour hinterland operated. What did these landscapes look like and what remains today? What comprised a working day? How were the convicts controlled? Could the amount of labour effort expended be quantified? We quarried the records held by PAHSMA and the Tasmanian Archives, extracting vast amounts of qualitative and quantitative data related to the industrial history of Port Arthur. This then led to interrogation of the archaeological landscape, using remote sensing and ground-truthing to aid with reconstruction and analysis.

When we looked at the labour records, it became clear that places like Port Arthur operated as industrial prisons. Indeed, Port Arthur was established in 1830 as a timber-getting station, only becoming a fully-fledged penal station in 1833. Hundreds of thousands of feet of timber (primarily stringbark and bluegum) were felled and manually carried from the surrounding hills for use at the settlement and for exportation. Trees were also used for the production of charcoal. Nearby sandstone outcrops were also tapped for building stone and clay pits opened for brickworks. As the settlement consolidated, the addition of its workshops Penitentiary Workshops Excavations added manufacturing: shoemaking, carpentry, tailoring, blacksmithing and foundrywork.

LiDAR-based archaeological surveys found the labour hinterlands full of labour sites. One particular Tasman Peninsula convict station, Cascades (1842-1855), still has a wonderfully intact timber-getting landscape. Some 56 convict-period sawpits dot the landscape, with which are associated cut-and-benched tramways, a log slide, tracks and working platforms. There is even the stone-built remains of a steam sawmill. Similarly, Port Arthur is surrounded by three large sandstone quarries, with sawpits and cuttings for tramways, tracks and a log slide still to be found on the slopes of nearby Mount Arthur.

By looking at the modern landscape, we were able to quantify all this labour effort. Using LiDAR, we could work out the volume of stone or clay excavated by the convicts, or the amount of earth moved for building works. For example, the large clay pits of Brickfield Hill produced enough clay to make 2.9 – 3.2 million bricks. From labour taskwork returns we know that a convict was expected to make 125 bricks per day. As such, the volume of clay removed represented over 20,000 person days of work. A huge sandstone quarry to the west of Port Arthur, opened in 1848 to provide stone for the construction of the Separate Prison, likely yielded 24,000m³. This would have required 80,000 person days.

It’s not just the sites of extraction we could quantify, but all types of labour sites. The Separate Prison is set upon a large earthen mound – approximately 15,000m³ of material. All of this required the convicts to excavate and cart spoil from another location, accounting for about 4,000 – 5,000 person days. At that rate, it would have taken a gang of 50 men up to 100 days to complete the work. Even small labour sites could yield information. The sawpits at Cascades had been excavated at the point of tree fall and therefore were dug according to requirements. Some were excavated in silts, some in clays. One was even cut through stone. Pits in sand up to 10m long and 1.5 – 2m wide, would have required six to eight person days to excavate. Larger pits, up to 30m long, required over 20 days.

We were also interested with how convicts and administrators engaged with the wider landscape. With gangs daily working deep in the bush, how did stations exert control and routine? We know the working day was divided into regimented hours of rest and labour, but this was meaningless unless it could be imposed. In addition to the watch clocks used by the overseers and constables, stations like Port Arthur also relied upon a system of signalling. From 1836 the Tasman Peninsula had a semaphore network, allowing communication across the peninsula stations and onward to Hobart. Driven by an intricate code system, the semaphores could send escapee alerts, requisitions for material and general news with great rapidity. The semaphores also exerted a network of control over the landscape. Some of them were outfitted with time balls, the dropping of which at a predetermined time would communicate an important temporal marker. In this way an overseer out in the bush only needed to retain view of a semaphore to be linked to the greater station routine.