A Trip to St Helena


G'day!


We are just back from a very interesting and exciting trip. We went to St Helena, the prison island, which used to be the Alcatraz of Brisbane. The island is no longer used as a prison. It is now a heritage centre. 


The journey across to the island took 15 minutes. It didn't look very far as we looked back to the shore and we wondered if the prisoners ever tried to escape by swimming away. Our guide told us that in the 1860's, when the prison was set up, very few people could swim. In order to discourage the prisoners from making rafts to get away, the guards would keep reminding the prisoners about the sharks that swim in these waters and would throw meat in the sea to make sure that sharks were frequently seen by the prisoners. 


We soon landed on the island and walked down the long jetty where our boat had mored. 

All the cranes you can see behind the jetty are at the port of Brisbane and are used to load and unload the ships. 

You can just see the boat we came on through the trees. 

The next thing we looked at was a bit of old wall and I began to worry that our visit would be really boring. It soon got more interesting! 

The next thing we saw were the different prison yards where the prisoners were kept during the day if they were not working. The prison discriminated against prisoners who were not white and the Chinese, black and Aboriginal prisoners had a smaller yard and had to do the nastiest jobs like emptying the latrines. Being a Teddy Bear, I know what it is like to be different and I think everyone should be treated the same. 


You've got to imagine what these buildings would have been like before all the wooden bits rotted and got cleared away. 


One of the most feared punishments for the prisoners was to be put in solitary confinement. This picture shows the entrance to the solitary confinement cells, which were underground in a deep cellar. 

Once in solitary confinement, the men were kept in the dark at all times. The guards did not speak to them and they were not allowed to speak themselves. They were kept in these conditions for weeks at a time. They must have felt pretty crok when they got out again. That's Australian for a bit ill. 


Things weren't much better if you weren't in solitary confinement. Here's a photo of one of the cell blocks. The horizontal lines are where the hooks for hammocks were screwed in. The vertical lines are where the wooden cell walls once were. They are not very far apart!  

Later on, we saw a mock-up of what a cell would have looked like.

Look at the bars on the door!

This next photograph shows you a guard standing in the corridor between the two rows of cells. 

This is a photograph of a model of the prison.

You can see the prison yards here, surrounded by a wooden fence that has disappeared by now. 

This photograph shows you what the front entrance of the jail looked like. There is a guard on duty in the watch tower. 


When the prisoners were not in their cells or the prison yard, they did all kinds of work. 


They ploughed the fields and grew all sorts of crops, including sugar cane. 


Here I am sitting on one of the ploughs they used: 

After the cane was harvested, the prisoners would process the sugar cane to make sugar.

 This is the sugar cane processing building where the sugar cane was crushed to extract the juice. . . 

. . . and this is one of the silos where the sugar cane was stored until it was crushed. All three silos were dug out by hand by the prisoners. 

This is the boiler that was used to heat up the juice from the sugar cane so that sugar crystals formed. 


As well as working in the fields, the prisoners also worked in workshops making all kinds of things. 

These men are working in the leather shop making harnesses for horses. Their hats are quite smart, aren't they? 


If you were involved in hard work around the prison you were fed quite well so that you had the strength to work. If you were in solitary confinement or sick in the hospital, you just got light rations. Here they are: 

Can you decide which are the light rations? This chart will help you decide. 

The people who worked at running the prison had a much more pleasant lifestyle. This is the prison governor's house. 

Many of the warders in the prison had families who lived on the island. The museum showed that the families did their best to make their children's lives happy even though they lived such an isolated life. 

They had lots of toys,

tricycles . . 

 . . . and nice bedrooms.

They even attended this school on the island. 


After school, they would play the same kinds of games as you. 

Here you can see some marbles, a toy boat and a book. They would have had TV, radio or computer games though - they weren't invented yet! 

Maybe that's why they had so many books!

So that the guards and their families could swim in the sea without being eaten by sharks, a big square cage was built in the sea. At one time, the swimming pool was surrounded by a wooden deck. Guess who got to do all the hard work but didn't get to swim! 


As you can see, it must have been quite a hard life for the prisoners on this island and quite a nice one for the children. As the prison got bigger and bigger, more and more people were needed to work there and there wasn't room for everyone to have their family living there. To save arguments, the prison authorities decided that only the Governor's family would be allowed to live on the island and all the other families had to live on the mainland. The guards would work on the island for weeks at a time without seeing their families until they were allowed to go home for a visit. I think most of the children would have been quite sorry to leave the island. I know we were. 


Hooroo!


Find out more about St Helena Island here