Fremantle Prison captivates tourists

ABC News in Western Australia ran this six-minute feature in November 2011, twenty years after the last prisoners were moved out of Fremantle Prison to the new Casuarina jail. Reporter Clare Nichols tags along on one of the prison’s popular torchlight tours, with costumed actors and talk of a building that seems to “come alive,” and then turns to the history behind the theatrics.

Archive footage and interviews describe what the limestone prison was like to live in right up to 1991: cells first built for convicts, little light, no heating or cooling and no running water, with buckets for toilets. A former inmate is frank about the indignity, and the report recalls the riot and roof fire of 1988 that hastened the closure. It then tracks the prison’s second life — a slow start as a self-guided attraction, the state government taking the tours back in-house in 2002, and growth to more than 175,000 visitors a year — and ends with a long-serving officer turned guide.

The report captures the balance Fremantle Prison strikes as a heritage site: the ghost tours bring in visitors, but the guides lean just as hard on the documented history. That history is grim enough. Convicts built the prison in the 1850s, it was Western Australia’s only lawful place of execution from 1888 until 1984, and 44 people were hanged there, the last in 1964. Its two best-known ghost stories — a 1860s prison doctor glimpsed in a guard tower and Martha Rendell, the only woman executed at Fremantle, said to appear in a chapel window — come from those years.

Accounts like the “dark shadowy figure” in peripheral vision mentioned near the end are typical of what people report in old prisons at night, and are easily explained by darkness, expectation and suggestion. The prison has been on the National Heritage List since 2005 and part of the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage listing since 2010.