AUSTRALIANS have become tragically acquainted with the phenomenon of mass gun killings in the past decade. But the security and beauty of the island state, Tasmania, must make it one of the last places people would have expected such a thing to happen.
Yet it is in a grisly way appropriate: Port Arthur's ghosts are the most tortured and bloody of any from Australia's convict history. Robert Hughes, in his bestselling account of transportation (the mass dispatch of convicts from Britain), The Fatal Shore, calls it "Australia's Dachau".
This was the point of no return during the late 19th century: once a prisoner was sent on to this isolated penal colony in the southeast of Tasmania, he had nothing to look forward to but cruelty and death. The location alone gave the prisoner a sense of doom. The only access then was by sea, and even if one escaped, there was nowhere to go.
"Port Arthur," Hughes writes, "has always dominated the popular historical imagination in Australia, as the emblem of the miseries of transportation, the `Hell on Earth'."
It was named after an early governor of Van Diemen's Land (as Tasmania was then known), Sir George Arthur, "charged by the British Government with the task of rendering all transportation a perfect terror to the criminal classes of Great Britain". All sorts of men ended up here - Hughes mentions "a Scottish clergyman and an Irish attorney" - but they were the hardest cases, the recidivists.
Persistent offenders, convicts who continued criminal habits even while under sentence in other parts of the colony, were sent here for their ultimate punishment. Chain gangs, floggings with a cat o' nine tails and spells in solitary confinement were only some of the more direct measures used to subdue them. More than 12,000 men passed through Port Arthur between its establishment in the 1830s and the 1880s.
Australia, once termed "the lucky country", has grown up fast since the second World War. But Tasmania, with its World Heritage wilderness areas and crisp climate, always seemed a little bit gentler, more remote. During the height of the Cold War, a number of anti nuclear protesters and environmentalists from more "sophisticated" Western countries made their homes there, saying that Tasmania was about the safest place to be in the event of the dreaded nuclear holocaust.
But, as the ghastly events in a small Scottish town called Dunblane showed the world only a month ago, it is impossible to hide from modern Western society in 1996. Nowhere is safe.