Cat o' Nine Tails

Supposedly one of the most haunted places in Australia, the Fremantle Prison is now an important site of historic value. It held prisoners until the early 1990s and conditions weren’t great. So bad were they, in fact, that they have been called ‘the worst in the world’.

 

 

I learnt on the ‘torchlight tour’ on Halloween that many British and aboriginal criminals built the prison from limestone originally. There were 44 hangings in the prison and many suicides, as well as both murders and ‘unexplained deaths’ inside the prison.

 

 

It was a place filled to the brim with violence, illness, humiliation and misery. The most violent division was actually often the one for ‘non-violent’ crimes because there, criminals who were practically harmless (perhaps they had not paid their tax once) were kept in quarters with stronger criminals. Upon arrival, prisoners were communally strip searched and washed. They were asked their profession and crime. The Officer judged whether their occupation put them at risk- if they had formerly been a policeman for example, then they would be kept in a single secure cell. Apparently some of these troubled souls still live there, chained to the stones inside which they met their end.
 

With no plumbing, each shared cell had a bucket. With no air conditioning, cells could reach 50 degrees in summer. For me this raised questions about human rights and welfare- even if their crime was horrendous, is it right that they are kept for so long in such inhumane conditions? How much should they be punished? Where is the line?

 

One of the things that struck me was the flogging which took place in a courtyard purpose built for punishment. If a prisoner broke the strict prison rules, they may have been ordered ‘100 lashings’ with a cat of nine tails whip. One strike of that across the back and there would be nine long welts each the width of a finger.

 

There would be a doctor standing by who was there to judge when the prisoner was on the brink of death and to order him down from the wooden posts to which he was tied at that moment. Most could take about 15-20 lashings. Next, the prisoner would be untied and laid on his front so that salt, a cheap disinfectant, could be rubbed directly into the wounds. They would be allowed to recover for a few weeks and as soon as the scars had more or less healed, they would receive the next set of lashings.

And so it would go on…until they reached their 100.

Sometimes it would take over a year.