Australia's National Heritage
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Coal Mines Historic Site TASMANI A The Coal Mines Historic Site contains The punishment rate was high. In 1847, 14 000 punishments were meted out to 400 convicts. These the workings of a penal colliery and included 728 solitary confinements with bread and water convict establishment that operated and 672 punishments of flogging, sentencing to chains from 1833 to 1848. or periods of solitary confinement. The site’s alternating solitary cells are the only remaining example of this form of convict punishment. It is associated with British convict transportation to Australia and is one of several probation stations The Coal Mines became a key focus in anti-transportation established on the Tasman Peninsula. debates. The dark recesses of the underground workings were believed to be ‘sinkholes of vice and infamy’. When The Coal Mines Historic Site demonstrates the economic Reverend Henry Phibbs Fry ventured down the mines in value of convict labour. It was one of several places 1847, he reported: established to exploit natural resources and is the only surviving penal coal mine with remaining surface features “Having had full evidence of the deeds of darkness relating to extracting and transporting coal. It also perpetrated in the mines, I contemplated the naked provides a grim insight into one extreme of convict life in figures, faintly perceptible in the gloom, with feelings the Australia colonies during the mid-1800s. of horror. Such a scene is not to be forgotten.” The Coal Mines site was reclassified as a probation station As a result of Reverend Fry’s efforts to control in the early 1840s. The probation system was based on the homosexuality and the inefficiency of the mining idea that convicts could make amends and be redeemed operation, the Comptroller-General decided to close the for their crimes through systems of controlled labour. mine. On 8 April 1848, an advertisement appeared in the Newly arrived convicts were placed in government work Hobart Town Courier and Gazette seeking private tenders gangs for a fixed period, after which they became eligible for the lease of the site. The coal mines were then leased to for a probation pass. The pass entitled them to work for a private operator who used the convict labour assigned to settlers, for wages, with certain restrictions. him until as late as 1854. After a period of good behaviour in this capacity, the National Heritage List: 1 August 2007 convict was eligible for a ticket-of-leave and a pardon (conditional or absolute). The system continued, with some modification to 1846, until the cessation of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1853. The probation system was never tried elsewhere. The probation system provided punishment and reform through hard labour, religious instruction and education. By 1842–43, 579 convicts had been sent to work at the Coal Mines site in the dark, hot, damp tunnels. 6 2 AUSTRALIA’S NATIONAL HERITAGE.