Port Arthur

This was where the British Empire sent the convicts it had already given up on once.

Port Arthur sits on the Tasman Peninsula in Tasmania, about 97 kilometres southeast of Hobart, and it is named after George Arthur, lieutenant governor of Van Diemen's Land. It began in September 1830 as a timber-getting camp producing sawn logs for government projects, which is a mundane start for what it became.

From 1833 until 1877 it was the destination for men judged the most hardened of the transported: so-called secondary offenders, men who had persistently re-offended after already being shipped to Australia. It carried some of the strictest security measures anywhere in the British penal system.

It is now part of the Australian Convict Sites, a World Heritage property of eleven remnant penal sites built across the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries on fertile Australian coastal strips. UNESCO's assessment of them together is blunt: the best surviving examples of large-scale convict transportation and of European colonial expansion through the presence and labour of convicts.

In 1996 the town was the scene of the Port Arthur massacre, the deadliest instance of mass murder in post-colonial Australian history. It is part of what this place is, and the site handles it with care rather than as an attraction.

The Port Arthur Historic Site describes its own subject as a story of many people, and that is the right way in: the convicts, the guards, the families, the free settlers. There are general admission tickets, guided talks, tours and exhibitions, learning programmes for school groups, and a restaurant on the grounds. The site also runs ghost tours after dark, which is its own choice to make about a place this heavy.