Paperbark Forest

(Woy Woy walkies)

Missed the Everglades Wetland talk completely. Buggered off to Point Clare in the morning having completely forgotten the talk was on in Woy Woy. Scampered back in time to see the last of the organisers leaving. D'oh!


Everglades Wetland Woy Woy (Click for embiggened versions)

Everglades Wetland is the proper name of the Paperbark Forest. It is a narrow silver of bushland beside the golf course on Dunban Road in Woy Woy.

This photo is the lagoon. The floating weed in the left foreground is alligator weed, according to one of the Dear Old Things. Got here from South America a while back in the ballast of a ship.

The trees are mostly paperbarks (Melaleuca quinquenervia, with a casuarina (she-oak, Allocasuarina) poking its head up there in the left of the photo. The casuarinas have a beautiful sound, a soft rushing howl in the wind.

The reeds are some sort of reed I can't find anything out about. Can't find much at all on the Everglades Wetland online. This is off some wildlife website:

"The lagoon...habitat for birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals." (CEN, includes map)

So it's home to various native birds and beasties. Plus a few golf balls no doubt, given that the golf course is only a fence away.



The bark of a paperbark in the wetland

The foliage of the local paperbarks is like this and not like the photo at the top of the Wiki page. Smallish flat tough leaves, wee nuts in short rows along the twigs, small creamy white and pale yellow flowers.

The Aborigines used to and still use the bark of the paperbark for all sorts of things from making cradles for babies and shrouds for the dead, bandages for wounds, sleeping mats, humpies (tent-like shelters) and canvasses for paintings. There are some paperbark paintings in Australian art galleries but now most Aboriginal artists use yer bog standard painting canvas.

Modern science is using the oil of the paperbark as an anti-fungal for all sorts of things, including Siamese Fighting Fish. (Wiki)



Casuarina foliage



See original photo at Wiki

Casuarinas have needles instead of leaves. Very fine needles which, if you have a good squint at them up close, have got segments like tiny wee bamboo poles.


Fake raffle targeting Woy Woy's elderly

Tell yer granny not to open the door to strangers.

From the NSW Police site:

"Bogus raffle ticket sellers steal from elderly
26 Sep 2008

Police are urging elderly residents to be on lookout for bogus raffle ticket sellers after four robberies on the Central Coast this month.

On each occasion, a group of teenagers have stolen money from each victims home after offering to sell them what turn out to be fake raffle tickets.

The group have falsely claimed to be selling tickets on behalf of a local youth or netball club.

They have been able to enter each home either by being invited in after gaining the victims trust, or by being allowed to use the victims’ toilet.
...
“We are advising residents to...[ask] to see some form of identification".


Local linkage

Steve's Virtual Tours

Michael's photos of Woy Woy & nearby

The long drop

(WARNING: This post contains photographs of a mechanism of legal execution.)


Embiggen

This is the gallows within the grounds of Fremantle Prison in Western Australia.

The prisoner was brought in through a door out of frame to the right of this picture, escorted by the chaplain and prison warders. He was made to stand on the closed platform of the gallows. The hangman and his assistant, the doctor and the prison governor came in through the second door, in the back right hand corner of the building. The total of people present in the building was thirteen, twelve and the prisoner.




Most hangings at Fremantle Prison were carried out on a Monday morning at 8AM.

The gallows building contains nothing else. It's a tiny building next to the small block of solitary confinement cells, almost unnoticeable in the maze of buildings within the prison walls.

Before the prisoner was brought in, the hangman and his assistant had to test the trapdoor to make sure it would open when the lever was pulled, make sure the rope wasn't stretchy, work out from the prisoner's weight and height how long to make the rope and a few other things.

There was no drawing the thing out. It was to be got over and done with carefully but fast. "Once everything was in place the event happened very quickly. The time from leaving the condemned cell in Solitary Confinement to the actual hanging was around 60 seconds." (Freo Prison website)

The chair was to support a prisoner too sick or too frightened to stand.

The rails were for the prison warders. They each hung onto a rail with one hand and onto the prisoner with the other, boxing him in to keep him from struggling while the noose was fitted about his neck.

There were no family members or press present, no witnesses other than the official ones and the minister of religion requested by the prisoner.

Around the rope of the noose is a sleeve of leather. It prevented rope burns on the neck of the hanged man. This was a consideration for the family of the prisoner. After the hanging was officially declared the body was handed over to the family outside the gates of the prison.



Embiggen

It is from the gallows the expression "the long drop" comes and this picture shows you just how long a drop it was. Thirteen feet from the platform (open in these pictures) to the floor below. Such a long drop is to help make the hanging quick.

After the drop the hangman and the doctor went down the thirteen steps into the pit and checked that the prisoner was fully dead. The last rites were then carried out by the chaplain or whatever minister of religion had been nominated by the prisoner.

The gallows building in Freo Prison was "only place of legal execution in Western Australia between 1888 and 1984. During that time 43 men and 1 woman were hanged there."

Every prisoner hanged was hanged for murder.


The only woman hanged at Fremantle was Martha Rendell. She was tried in 1908 and hanged on the 6th of October 1909. She was convicted of the murders of her children by "swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid after they had complained of sore throats because she was jealous of the attention her husband gave them. Rendell protested her innocence to the last." (Freo Prison website)


Eric Edgar Cooke was the last person hanged at Freo Prison. They did him on the 26th of October 1964 and he's buried in an unmarked grave at Fremantle cemetery. Same cemetery where most of my family are buried.

Cooke was a serial killer. My Nana used to tell us horror stories about this guy when we were kids. In Perth in January 1963 there was a series of random shootings in the wee hours of the morning.

It was summer and people didn't lock their doors then apparently. Perth was considered a very safe place to live. On the hottest nights some people even slept out on their verandas. Cooke went round with a rifle and shot random strangers, most of them in their beds asleep. People were terrified and locksmiths were suddenly doing a roaring trade and politicians and police commissioners were hauled over the coals in the newspapers every day.

They caught him in November that year and tried him for a single murder. He confessed to more than eight more murders and five hit-and-runs. (ADB)


After Cooke, sentences for hanging were commuted to life imprisonment and no-one else was hanged in Western Australia. Capital punishment was taken off the WA law books in 1984. (Freo Prison website)


The last person hanged in Australia was Ronald Ryan in 1967. He was hanged in Pentridge in Victoria.

Ryan went straight after a bit of teenage petty theft but in his late twenties he got into debt gambling and started forging cheques. He was convicted but got a good behaviour bond instead of a stretch in the nick. But he kept offending and lead a break-and-enter gang turning over shops and factories. He was picked up again twice in the next few years and his missus divorced him while he was inside the second time.

In 1965 Ryan and another prisoner broke out of Pentridge nick and killed a warder in the process. They were picked up in 1966. It was Ryan who picked up the rifle and fired the shot and it was Ryan who was done for murder. The other guy got manslaughter.

Ryan was hanged at 8AM on the 3rd of February 1967 in Pentridge gaol. "Calm and composed on the scaffold, he addressed his last words to the hangman... 'God bless you. Whatever you do, do it quickly'. He was buried with Catholic rites in an unmarked grave in the grounds of Pentridge gaol." (ADB)

Mucking out

The indignity starts here.

Get yer gear off, stand on the H and grasp yer knees while the warder puts the latex glove on.

This is the intake area of Freo Prison, built in the 1940s, used until 1991.

Your particulars were taken down, you were photographed, made to strip, cavity searched, deloused in the showers through that white door on the right, issued a green shirt and trousers and a slop bucket, and banged up.

(The bloke in the Driz-a-bone is the tour guide. And an otter*.)



Interior of One Division or Two Division

Muster was at 7AM. You had 15 minutes to get dressed, grab your razor and your slop bucket and stand by your door.



Left to right: 1850 to 1960s, 1970s, 1970s to 1991.

Yer looking here at the toilets used by convicts and prisoners in Fremantle Prison from its opening 1850 to its closing in 1991.

The one in the middle is a chemical loo, introduced in the 1970s. Wasn't a huge success. The prisoners either smashed them up or drank the chemicals.

After the fiasco of the chemical toilets in the 1970s, it was back to the bucket system. The only upgrade was from metal to plastic.

You and yer slops bucket and water bucket spent 14½ hours of the day and night together in a cell, and God help if you pissed in the wrong one at 3AM.



Division Yard

After muster you marched into the division yard with your razor and slops bucket, emptied the bucket into an open drain and had a wash and a shave.

The yard was where you stayed all day, rain hail and blazing bloody heat. In the yard there was an open drain. You emptied yer slops in there and it was also the daytime dunny. Buckets were cleaned by the new guy.


This is Two Division Yard, dining room and outdoor bathroom. You spent your day in it with around 100 other men plus one warder in that mesh cage in the back right hand corner.

The roof wasn't added until the 1980s or '90s so you got wet in winter and roasted in summer. Behind the camera are the drinking trough, the open drain-cum-toilet, the slops buckets cleaning spot and the wrecked plumbed dunnies of the 1970s.

Other than your morning shave and wash behind the earholes at the trough, you got 3 showers a week, in one of them big open-plan tiled mass shower thingies. Like the one on Oz but with half-wall stalls. Mind you, 3 showers a week was a fucking luxury compared to the convicts, they got a bath once a week. Christ.




In the 1970s portable chemical dunnies (toilets) were put in cells and plumbed dunnies were built in the yards, against the back walls. Trouble was the prisoners either rammed things down them, smashed them up or, and I'm quoting the guidebook here, "drank the chemicals". Hopefully before someone had weed---I think we'll stop that train of thought right there!

So the cell dunnies were confiscated, the yard dunnies were stopped up with concrete and the slop buckets re-instated until the prison closed in 1991.

The plumbed dunnies in the yards had half-doors. This was so the warders could see if there was one bloke in there or two or three. But of course if the bloke in there stood up, another bloke could easily reach over the top of the door and give him a hand. Thus proving that horny blokes with time on their hands are more inventive than blokes who design prisons.


In the women's part of the prison, which housed up to 16 prisoners, things were about the same. Except that some prisoners were pregnant when they came in so you had stinking nappies and screaming sprogs to add to the delights of being banged up. After a bit the babies were taken away and handed over to relatives of the prisoner or made wards of the state.




Warders on duty in the main yard were allowed to pee. Provided they didn't take their eyes off the prisoners. So their loo was in the middle of the yard and had windows all round. On the other hand it had shelter and shade and wasn't a bucket. Sheer luxury.



Ouch

Some poor bastard fell off Woy Woy railway platform on the weekend. "He was struck by a southbound freight train moments later and killed instantly," says Central Coast Live.

18 years old. Jesus. My sympathies to his family.



* Otter. Hairy bloke. Related to bears. Bears are chubby hairy blokes. But not all chubs are bears. Otters are never chubs but always bears.

The Round House

Freo was Manjaree, Nyoongar people's land, before it was a British settlement. The Swan River Colony started in 1829 with free settlers and the convicts started coming in 1850.



But the first permanent building was a prison anyways, built in 1830 to house local white crims.

They bunged it up on Arthur Head, a knob of high ground looking out to sea, over the mouth of the river and down to Cockburn Sound (Map).

Out the back they bunged up navigation lights and signalling. Near Arthur Head they built cottages for the harbour-master, the pilots (boat pilots) and the lighthouse-keeper.



The guards quarters above the entrance and office. The well in the foreground. If you look carefully through the entrance on the big version you can see a view down High Street to the pointy tower of the Town Hall.

When the convicts came in 1850 the Round House was too small to hold them and they were put to work building their own prison a couple of kilometres away. That was Fremantle Prison and it held convicts then crims until 1991.

(Go to the Ducktionary for the difference between convicts and crims.)



A cell (right), stocks (wooden thing) and yards for washing and so on. In the left foreground is the well supplying the building with water. You can see them better in the big version.

Taken from the doorway of a cell and showing the width of the building minus 6-8 feet.

"...[T]he Round House was used as a police lock-up through until 1900. It then became the living quarters for the chief constable, his wife, and their ten children."

How fucking cool would it be living there as a kid? Only living in a lighthouse would top that for PCF (Playground Coolness Factor).



Taken from the back of the Round House, looking out to west.

Garden Island (left), Rotto (centre) with the corner of Success Harbour on the left (middle distance) and what must be the road to South Mole in the right foreground.

Garden Island is a naval base, HMAS Stirling.

Rotto is Rottnest Island, popular local tourist destination and former prison for Aboriginal prisoners. Success Harbour used to be Fishermans Harbour, before the America's Cup business way back in the eighties, and it's still a working harbour. No visit to Freo is complete without fish & chips from Cicerello's at Fishermans Harbour.

That's the Indian Ocean yer looking at, by the way. The next major landfall is South Africa.




The red dot at the mouth of the harbour is the Round House.

Back
Round House website

Magic spray

Torchwood started here the other night. It's on Ten, home of Big Bother, so there was some wanky promo for it which pissed me off no end and was pretty irrelevant.

But it's a Dr Who spin-off so it was rather fun. Particularly when that guy uses the Alien Randy Spray(TM) on some chick at the pub and she's snogging him then her boyfriend comes after her all aggro and the guy sprays him as well and then he snogs the guy and they all go off for some three-way action.

More please!