“Isle of Many Waters” (1939), Tasmania travelogue by Frank Hurley

Isle of Many Waters is an eleven-minute travelogue of Tasmania made and narrated by Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer and filmmaker best known for his pictures of Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. It dates from 1939 and was released by British Foundation Pictures in London; this copy was scanned from film by the Periscope Film archive and posted to the Internet Archive.

Like many travel films of its time it is mostly a celebration of the island’s scenery and resources: apple orchards, New Norfolk, the port of Hobart and Mount Wellington, the Huon Valley, the mining town of Queenstown and the Mount Lyell rack railway, and the mirror-calm rivers of the wild west coast. According to the archive’s description, the Port Arthur sequence begins at about the three-minute mark and shows the ruins of the penal settlement, followed by a hunting party and the grave of John Woodcock Graves, who wrote the song “D’ye ken John Peel.”

Port Arthur closed as a prison in 1877, and by 1939 its buildings had already been through decades of neglect, salvage and the bushfires of 1895 and 1897 that gutted the Penitentiary and other structures. Hurley filmed it at a time when it was settling into its second life as a tourist destination, decades before conservation work and World Heritage listing in 2010. That makes this brief glimpse a useful “before” picture of the ruins that today’s ghost tours walk through.

There is nothing supernatural in the film, and Hurley’s tone is that of a 1930s promotional travelogue rather than a history lesson. Watch it for the place itself, and for the way the convict past was presented to audiences between the wars: as picturesque ruins in a beautiful landscape.