Fremantle

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Drove up along the coast to Fremantle which is at the river mouth south of Perth. Walked along the seafront and booked our tickets to go to Rottnest Island on the Monday.
Walked through town and went in to the Fremantle Markets. Realy nice feel about the place, all sorts of crafts, food etc...
Then went up to Fremantle prison ( it's now closed - to inmates - !!! But open to the public - in case any of you were wondering!!! ). It was a prison from 1850 to 1991 and was built by the 75 inmates that arrived from the UK in 1850, it took around 8 years to finish the 3 main areas. There is a 3 meter white band that runs along all of the walls in the prison, so the bright green prisoner uniforms could be seen by the guards along the roofs.
The original cells were 2.2m long x 1.4m wide - Tiny, they were made bigger about 20 years later, by knocking 2 cells together and put 2 inmates in one room - pointless task!!!
Point of interest: the inmates never had a running toilet, up to the end. They were given an old paint bucket...nice..
There were 4 sections for different conficts, from the junior section for young boys up to the murder's section in death row. Later on another building was built for female prisoners. There was / is a chapel in the centre where they all had to attend and it is still used to this day for weddings etc.. !
The inmates were only aloud to have one shower a week unless they worked in the kitchen (due to health and safety!).
Got to see the Gallows... very spooky and weird, very hard to imagine what it would have been like back then knowing you were going to die/hung. The youngest was only 13 years old and they still don't know to this day if he was guilty... Very sad. The last hanging was in the 1940's but they only out-lawded it in the 1980's!
They don't have any numbers 6 or 16 due to the inmates being very suspicious. They believed the 6 was like a noose and the 16 a man standing by a noose ( i think that is how it's spelt.. sorry! )
The torture room was very interesting... it was where they got flogged with a whip called a cat'o'nine tails. It's a small whip with nine leather straps all knotted at the ends, each would cut through the skin on every lash - nine whips for one. The most anyone could get was 100. After about 30 lashes their backs would be streaming with blood, then covered in salt to seal the wounds then sent to the hospital to recover. Once they were ok they then had to go back for another 30 and so on.... This is where the sayings came from: "don't let the cat out the bag", "not enough room to swing a cat", " a cat has nine lives" this one as a person could only receive 9 sets of lashing before he would defiently die - this happened alot on the navy boats as they would take the prisoner from one ship to the next and was usually dead by the end - this was to show everyone what would happen...
On the 5th Jan 1988 there was the "Riot". Set up by 12 ringlinders, 6 of which are still in prison. Because of this riot the prison got alot of media attention and human rights visitors. The buildings were severly burnt down and the government had to pay out to put back to normal spending millions - to then be told they had to close it down 2 years later.

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Photos

Fremantle Prison
This is the front Courtyard

The paint bucket...
Their toilets... !! Nice!!

A Painting...
This is one of the paintings the inmates were allowed to do inside their cell - a way of chearing them up as they knew that the Prison was closing and thought it would be destroyed... how wrong were they!