Fremantle Prison

The children only did one short tour of Fremantle Prison but Greg and I did four tours spread over two days so I have done a special Fremantle feature blog.

Fremantle was initialy established as a free settlement by the British who were worried the French would colonise the West coast of Australia if they didn't colonise it first, so originally there was no convict population. However the settlement struggled without enough labourers to build roads and other infrastructure so in 1849 the farmers met to discuss the issues. The result was that a letter was sent to England requesting convicts be sent to Western Australia. England was only too happy to oblige and immediately shipped out more than 70 male convicts. Unfortunately they overtook the mail ship carrying the letter heralding their arrival so when they arrived in Fremantle convicts and officers were forced to remain on the ship in the waters off the coast of Fremantle until accommodation could be arranged.

The convicts were initially accommodated in an empty warehouse and set to work building the Fremantle Gaol, which would eventually become their home. Under the supervision of the Royal Engineers they quarried limestone from the site on which the gaol was built and after five years the South Wing, officer quarters and external wall were complete and they were able to move in. They then went on to build the Anglican chapel, North Wing and other miscellaneous buildings as well as working on the roads and other infrastructure the colony required. Part of the building was later converted so that a separate Catholic chapel could be included. Local limestone and jarrah timber was used to construct most of the building but the cast iron doors for each cell were specially made and shipped from England. Much of the railings for the stairs and balconies were stripped from the ships on which they had sailed to Australia since building materials were in short supply.

The main cell block was designed to accommodate 1000 prisoners in individual cells approximately 7ft by 4ft. Each cell had a hammock to sleep in and a bucket to use as a toilet. The cell block was four stories high with rows of cells along each wall and open corridors in front. From the fourth floor it was possible to jump the railing and commit suicide by falling to the ground floor until a suicide net was finally installed in the 1960’s. There were no common areas shared by prisoners, so if they weren’t working or praying they were in their cells, this included for meal times. When convicts were close to the end of their sentence they were moved to the Association Room where around 60 convicts slept in hammocks in the same space. Having lived in social isolation for the duration of their sentence this period of time allowed them to begin forming social connections again in preparation for their re-entry into society.

The first administrator of the prison, Henderson, was a reformist and didn’t believe convicts needed further punishment beyond what they suffered through being transported to the other side of the world and serving their sentences, working excessively long days on very limited diets and without any luxuries. Initially the “Convict Establishment” as the goal was known in the early years had no solitary confinement or corporal punishment facilities. Under direct orders from his superiors Henderson was eventually forced to introduce these measures but he used them sparingly and on average only 4 prisoners a year would receive a lashing under Henderson’s reign. Later, under Hampton’s administration, convict lashings rose to 40 a year and solitary confinement became a popular form of punishment. Disturbingly, flogging remained a legitimate form of punishment in WA until 1943 when the public outcry after the lashing of escapee criminal Sydney Sutton resulted in the laws around flogging being changed.

One significant project the convicts worked on was the construction of the water tunnels underneath the goal. The natural aquifer running under the prison provided fresh water to the prison via wells. Soon pipes to the docks as well as a reservoir with a capacity 191 000 L were constructed by the convicts. Ships were able to take on board fresh water hand pumped by the convicts and this increased the popularity of Fremantle as a seaport. Due to poor sanitation, limited natural resources and the population boom caused by the gold rush Fremantle was rapidly running out of clean sources of drinking water so the town turned to the prison water supply as a solution. The wells could not keep up with demand so kilometres of tunnels were built underneath the prison and a hydraulic pump installed so that the whole town could be supplied with fresh water. Unfortunately sea water rose through the water table and filled the tunnels turning the sea water brackish and the water became undrinkable. By the beginning of the 20th century bores had been installed under the direction of C.Y. O’Connor, the chief engineer responsible for many of WA’s early projects.

By this time the prison was under the control of the government since penal transportation had ceased in 1868. While convict numbers slowly dwindled after this date criminals from the WA justice system began to fill the prison and it soon became over crowded. The women’s prison was added and New Division was built. Women could find themselves in goal for any number of petty crimes such as “use of foul language” or “sleeping in a public park during the day”. The New Division building also contained the death row cells where prisoners destined for the gallows were detained.

The last person to be put to death on these gallows was Eric Edgar Cooke, the infamous Night Caller responsible for the Australia Day murders in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. He confessed more than once, the last time only 10 minutes before his execution, to two murders for which two other men had been charged and were serving time but it was not until 2002 and 2005 that these men were finally acquitted of those crimes.

The only woman ever to be hanged on these gallows was Martha Rendell who was accused of killing three of her step-children by swabbing their throats with hydrochloric acid. Martha claimed that she was trying to treat the children for Diptheria but public opinion at the time was against her. Today there is divided opinion about whether Martha set out to murder the children or whether she was in fact trying to save them from illness. There is an image on one of the windows of the Anglican Chapel at the goal, probably caused by lead impurities in the glass, which some people claim is the exact likeness of Martha Rendell.

Over the years there were a number of break outs and escapes from Fremantle prison. In the convict era there were regular groups of escapees, but surrounded by bush and ocean there was nowhere for them to run and they were easily tracked down and returned to the gaol for punishment. The only successful escape in the history of Fremantle Gaol that did not eventually result in recapture was a group of convict Irishmen who fled by sea to America and were never recaptured.

Moondyne Joe (John Joseph) is one criminal who was known for his ability to escape from just about anywhere. After one such escape they built him a special cell with a double door, lined with wooden panels and enormous iron spikes. The Governor said to Moondyne if you can escape from here I will pardon you myself. Moondyne was not allowed out of the cell and had a sparse diet and not surprisingly he quickly became sick and was close to death. The doctor was brought in to see him and he demanded that Moondyne be given exercise and a better diet. As a result he was put to work breaking rocks in the yard where they could keep a close eye on him. Over time the guards grew tired of removing the broken rocks so the pile of rocks grew, as did Moondyne’s strength until one day the guard, going to check why Moondyne’s hat on the other side of the pile of bricks was so still, found Moondyne’s clothes and hat propped up on a shovel. Moondyne himself had disappeared through a hole he had dug in through the wall into the superintendent’s adjacent garden.

A more recent escapee from Fremantle Prison was bank robber Brenden Abbott. Abbott had seen and studied aerial plans of the prison whilst in court facing charges relating to the 1988 prison riots. This had allowed him to plan an escape route and he spent the following months making the necessary preparations. He got a job in the tailor’s shop where he and his buddies found some old guard uniforms and made the necessary adjustments to them. They also stole a hacksaw blade from the tool shop and used it to partially saw through the bars on the skylight in the back of the tailor’s shop. When everything was in place they arranged for their guard to be distracted (how they did this is somewhat dubious), broke the bars on the skylight and climbed onto the roof of this single story building. The guard in the closest tower pointed a gun at them and told them to halt but in their own guard’s uniforms they were able to bluff him long enough to run along the wall and jump the 2-3 metre gap to the next building (one of them fell and broke a leg but two of them made it). From here it was easy to jump down into the gardens surrounding the prison and run to the Fremantle bus station where they boarded a bus. Roadblocks were immediately set up to try and catch them but for some reason the buses weren’t checked so they slowly made their escape by bus. Ironically the first stop the bus they chose to get on made was back outside Fremantle prison but they were not identified.

Abbott later served time in Queensland for other robberies and it was only in 2016 when his sentence was up that he was returned to Western Australia to face the escape charges and serve the rest of the duration of his sentence here. He did not of course return to Fremantle Prison which is now a World Heritage listed site. The riots of 1988 which Abbott had been an instrumental part of had finally forced the Western Australian government to agree to close Fremantle Prison and in November 1991 it was used as a prison for the last time.

At the time of the prison’s closure conditions were not much improved from the convict era. Walls had been knocked down between cells, doubling their size, but each cell then contained two inmates. They were furnished with bunk beds and prisoners were still required to use a bucket in lieu of a toilet. Another bucket was provided with fresh water but the two buckets could be easily mistaken in the dark! In earlier decades composting toilets had been introduced but the prisoners had tried to drink the alcoholic solution from the toilets so they had been forced to return to the bucket system. Each morning the prisoners had to empty their buckets into the open sewage pit near the kitchen before collecting their breakfast. Prisoners still had limited communal spaces, although some outdoor yards with metal roofs were now in place. Prisoners were able to undertake different jobs to earn money, the best of which was a cook where you could earn $37 a week and the right to have a shower every day instead of only 3 times a week. There was no heating or cooling and the only evidence of improvements to the cells since the convict era was the addition of electricity and beds with mattresses in lieu of hammocks. It is no wonder the prisoners rioted and the prison was deemed unfit for human habitation.

Three months after the last prisoners left Fremantle the prison was re-opened as a museum and it is now the only building in Australia which is both world heritage and national heritage listed.