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Published: December 7th 2007
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Arranged to meet up with Kim today to go to Freemantle for the day, Perths Port village and a little quaint place so the guide book tells me...lets go and see....
Grabbed the train down there, sneaking on as a student - I can still pretend I am entitled to Student Discount!! Weather was still a bit chilly after the rain yesterday - and they tell me this is an Ozzie summer???!! hello UK!
Went for a walk about first, the place is really nice with lots of random buildings and different architecture, nothing is the same which is always good! It's quite a buzzing little place with a nice atmosphere, there was a lot of small market stalls and cafe tables in the streets.
We hit the prison first, where as we suspected, we got locked up straight away!! he he! We are the British convicts which were sent over!! Freemantle actuallly asked for convicts to be sent over so they could assist with the manual labour of building and gardening to help improve Freemantle town! interesting theory! We did the normal day tour first around the prison, the inside reminded me a bit of Alcatraz
actually! It only shut down in 1991 which is really not that long ago and it shut down due to the conditions. The paint on the walls and the prisoners didn't even have running water! They had death row as well by hanging and a separate womens prisons which only held 16 prisoners but they never mixed with the men. 44 people were hanged at Freemantle always at 8am on a Monday morning. One woman only was hanged but it is believed (eerie music - du du du duuuu) that the day after she was hanged, you could see an image of what looked very like her in one of the glass window panes in the church. We were shown which window it was and it did look like the face of a woman but from inside the church it just looked like it was a bit dirty and tainted. Very strange!! They have trid to clean the window but can not get rid of it and its been there about 60 years!! It was quite weird going in Death row to think people had dies there....mmmmmmmm moving on...
We did the escapes tour where we heard about the
escpae attempts and were shown where they tried to escape! was quite amusing! 4 of the 16 women managed to escape one time and they were caught 2 hours later in the pub! My kinda girls!!
The whole tour was really interesting actually, they made it informative but entertaining which is always good! some of the escape attempts were very clever. In some of the cells, they allowed the prisoners who they thought it would be therapeutic for the paint the walls of their cells. Some of the work is amazing to see, they had the time to do it I suppose but check out the photos!
There was also an attempted break out and riot and fire in the prison where the whole of Division 3 was on fire. No one died but a lot of the guards were injured. No one actually escaped but the whole block was wrecked and needed refurbing and a new roof was put on. The prison closed down 2 years after that though!There was also one prisoner who called Moon Dine Joe as he was like Houdini and had escaped from Freemantle 3 times before. They built him a special cell
that he would not be able to escape from! Clever Clever!
We then walker to the Maritime Museum of Ship Wrecks, passed the Uni of Notre Dame on the way!. I am not really into museums but they had receovered part of the Batavia ship which had sunk in Ningaloo Reff so it was quite interesting as thats where we had been the previous week!! The trusty guidebook then told us about a memorial fountain so we thought we would take a look.....yes well, let's say it looked more like bird bath with no water!! not so trusty afterall is our guidebook!! he he!
It's a great place Freemantle, a very vibrant village, a nice pottering around place I feel! Glad we went though!
We are starting to play the backpacker game now and learning!! wooo! We have discoverd that Mon through until Friday different bars have backpackers nights on with cheap drinks and free BBQ food! ha ha! So it's great! We can eat for free and socialise with fellow backpackeroos - its like a religion!!! So we met Kim, went to the Euro bar, got our free salad and steak butty (yes real steak not
rubbish stuff!) and met some of Kims pals from her hostel which was cool. Kim's off to Adelaide tomorrow but we will be meeting in Sydney so it's not farewell for long! She's too cool for school!
We got back to our hostel which we are not a great fan of, Our roommate (New Name - Snoring Snoozy - he's ALWAYS in bed asleep whatever time of day it is!! no joke!) anyway, snoozy wakes up - hurray! He's called Ian from New Zealand and is a chef looking for work, I dont know how much looking hes doind. He did say hes been sleeping a lot - NO KIDDING snoozy!!!
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