Doo Town, Tasmania

Doo Town

Lookout near Doo Town

Tasman's Arch

On the way to Tasman's Arch is the holiday village of Doo Town. Some of the names on the houses are quite clever. There's Gunadoo, Doodle Doo, Love Me Doo, Doo Us, Doo Me, Doo Nix, Wee Doo, Xanadu, Rum Doo and Doo Little.

Port Arthur, Tasmania

Port Arthur in 1860

1100 people attended church here every Sunday

The Silent Cells

The Settlement


Houses for the Accountant and Minister




The Haunted Parsonage

From 1833 until the 1850s, Port Arthur was the prison from hell. The British and Irish rebellious hard cases were sent here from all over the colonies, men who re-offended after serving their initial sentences. It was described as the ‘final cage for incorrigibles’, and as a place of ‘unvarying and unmitigated misery and desolation’.

Floggings were a regular occurence in this terrible place. You could get 20 lashes for having your hands in your pockets. If you were issued with 100 lashes and you fainted after 20, you would be put into the hospital until your body was healed enough to continue with the balance. The exact amount of lashings issued was always carried out to the letter.

Modern new thinking believed that hard physical punishment such as floggings only hardened the prisoner so the authorities decided to take a different approach and introduced the psychological punishment of the "Silent System" in what they called the Separate Prison. Each new arrival spent 4 to 12 months in the separate prison before being assigned to work outside.

Solitary confinement was particularly cruel. For any misdemeanour a prisoner was locked in total darkness and silence for between several hours to 30 days on bread and water.

For the rest of the Silent convicts, a hood was placed over the prisoner's head when he ventured out of his cell to attend church on Sunday or to go to the exercise yard for one hour a day. The other 23 hours he had to remain silent in his cell without contact with another living soul. The gaolers even wore felt slippers so the prisoners couldn't hear their footsteps. This silent treatment was thought to make the prisoner ponder his bad behaviour which would lead to his eventual rehabilitation but it reality, it sent many inmates to the insane asylum.

People who work here often report strange happenings - a choir singing, ghostly figures and anguished cries of despair. If you are into the supernatural, they even have night time tours that will make your hair stand on end.

Some tales suggested that prisoners committed murder, punishable by death, just to escape the horror. The prison closed in 1877.

Mount Wellington, Tasmania

In February 1836, Charles Darwin (who later went on to enjoy great popularity from his famous book On the Original of Species) visited Hobart Town and climbed Mt. Wellington. In his book "The Voyage of the Beagle", Darwin described the mountain:

......The day was splendidly clear, and we enjoyed a most extensive view; to the north, the country appeared a mass of wooded mountains, of about the same height with that on which we were standing, and with an equally tame outline: to the south the broken land and water, forming many intricate bays, was mapped with clearness before us. ..."

We took the 21 kilometre drive to the top of Mount Wellington today, 20 minutes from the city of Hobart. The weather can be rather unpredictable, there was a solid fall of snow up there one summer on Christmas Day.

The temperature dropped alarmingly as we neared the summit and I was excited to see that the snow, which fell last night, was still on the ground. But when I got out of the car, the wind almost blew me over, my cheeks went numb and the freeezing cold air made me gasp for breath. But it was so worth it.

Bruny Island Photo Gallery

Looking down from the lighthouse

Sand Puddles

Built in 1836

Looking towards lighthouse




Green Island








Moon over Adventure Bay


Majestic cliffs everywhere you look

Goodbye beautiful Bruny.

Truganini, last Aboriginal Woman of Tasmania

Truganini Monument on Bruny Island

Between 1803 and 1830 the Aborigines of Tasmania were reduced in numbers from five-thousand to less than seventy-five people. An article published December 1, 1826 in the Tasmanian Colonial Times reads:

"We make no pompous display of philanthropy. The Government must remove the natives, if not, they will be hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed!"

When a declaration of martial law was introduced in November 1828, whites were authorized to kill blacks on sight and kill them they did with a cruel savagery that's hard to comprehend. A bounty was declared and soon became a lucrative business, five pounds for each adult body and two pounds for a child. This bounty had the desired effect and they were almost completely wiped out. The remaining few were rounded up and placed in concentration camps where they died like flies from the white man's diseases.


In 1830 George Augustus Robinson, a Christian missionary, was hired to round up the remaining Tasmanian blacks and take them to Flinders Island.


Jared Diamond recorded that:

"On Flinders Island Robinson was determined to civilize and Christianize the survivors. His settlement - at a windy site with little fresh water - was run like a jail. Children were separated from parents to facilitate the work of civilizing them. The regimental daily schedule included Bible reading, hymn singing, and inspection of beds and dishes for cleanness and neatness. However, the jail diet caused malnutrition, which combined with illness to make the natives die. Few infants survived more than a few weeks. The government reduced expenditures in the hope that the native would die out. By 1869 only Truganini, one other woman, and one man remained alive."


On May 7, 1876, Truganini, born on Bruny Island and the last full-blooded Aboriginal person in Tasmania, died at seventy-three years of age. Her mother had been stabbed to death by a white man and her sister was kidnapped by white men. Her intended husband was drowned by two white men in her presence. After being thrown overboard and trying desperately to get back into the boat, they cut off both his hands and watched him drown, then they repeatedly raped her. But she refused to die.


"Don't let them cut me up," she begged the doctor as she lay dying. But because the native Aboriginal was considered a curiosity by the Europeans with most even believing they were the missing link between man and the ape, they dug her up and strung her skelton on wires and placed it upright in a box in the Tasmanian museum where it remained on show until 1947.


Finally, in 1976, the centenary year of Truganini's death, despite the museum's objections, her skeleton was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea in the Entrecasteaux Channel.


In 1997 the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter UK, returned Truganini's necklace and bracelet and her hair and skin found in a collection at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 2002 were also returned to Tasmania for burial.

Eco-Adventure Cruise, Tasmania

For a once in a lifetime experience, treat yourself to the Eco-Adventure Cruise on Bruny.

It's three hours of non-stop action on a boat capable of doing 90 kms an hour. But it's hardly a 'cruise', the boat hurtles through the ocean at break-neck speed along the rugged cliffs of Bruny and suddenly pulls up for fantastic photo opportunities of wildlife and magnificent scenery. You feel the power of nature at the point where the Tasman Sea meets the mighty Southern Ocean.

2008 Tasmanian Tourism Award Winner: Tourist Attractions

Only in Tasmania.

Bruny Island, Tasmania

The Neck

The Neck Lookout


Coal Bay

Only a 15 minute ferry ride

Bruny consists of two islands joined by a narrow isthmus called "The Neck". North Bruny is drier and suitable for sheep farming and South Bruny is more mountainous. Both islands have spectacular scenery with deserted beaches and abundant wildlife.

Captain Bligh of "Mutiny on the Bounty" fame visited Bruny Island twice, once in 1788 and 1792. In one visit his ship's log reports that the captain "landed 21 bream on rod and line within one hour". Fishing in the area was so successful in the early days, farmers used to boil up 44 gallon drums of Abalone to fatten up their pigs. Today, Tasmania provides approximately 25% of the annual world harvest of Abalone which is a major contributor to their economy.

Tasmania's first apples were planted here by the Bounty's Botanists David Nelson and William Brown. They also planted breadfruit and vegetables but when William Bligh returned 4 years later, only the apple tree had survived. Later Tasmania became known as the 'Apple Isle' and sent fruit to European markets.


Bruny is a quiet, undeveloped and unspoiled place and I think the locals want to keep it that way, there is talk of buying up land so they can keep the developers out. There's one shop, the bowling club serves meals on a Friday night and there's a pub 15 kilometers up the road. Like us, I think most people are here for the eco-adventure cruise.