One of the first places we visited in Tasmania after we arrived in 2013 was the village of Richmond. I remember the day clearly. We only had two children strapped in car seats at the time, and we set off in our silver Nissan with the Bridgewater Jerry snaking to our right along Sandy Bay Road, while the sun made another spectacular entrance into our lives.
It was a wonderful family day out and a memorable one, especially for the children who categorically refused to come off the monkey bars at the playground.
I remember feeling like I had stepped back in time when I entered Richmond Gaol, catching a glimpse into Governor Arthur’s penal system within the sandstone structure built to accommodate the lives of those who lived there, both free and incarcerated. I have always had a strong sense of place, and historical buildings have a way of making me visualise the past and its people.
It was on Boxing Day 2021 that I was reminded of that visit to Richmond. We were invited for a roast at a relative’s property in Abingdon-on-Thames, in Oxfordshire. We entered the newly converted penthouse, which was once used as the market town’s prison. Prior to being converted into flats, this building was a leisure complex with a swimming pool and roller-skating. It was strange being in a place where much of my own childhood was spent pirouetting and having birthday parties. I imagine that it would be stranger still for the old detainees of the Victorian era to imagine their cells would one day transform into a leisure centre, let alone luxury flats.
We spent a wonderful afternoon laughing and magically making the contents of sparkling wine bottles disappear, and the ingredients of a classic Northern Hemisphere Christmas were in fruition. Before long, I was standing on a stool and casting a sleuthing eye over the wrought iron bars of the old cell windows. They are the only features, along with the old prison walls, that haven’t been touched since the structure housed the town’s offenders.
My heart sank to see old carvings and failed attempts at excavating the brickwork. One window had the name “Jim” carved in a fluent and legible Victorian handwriting.
On my return home, I decided to do a little bit of investigation, and it seems that England needed more prisons in the middle of the 19th century as transporting convicts was becoming an increasingly archaic system reviled by modern society. Australia had already become an established colony and settlers had made lives for themselves – they no longer wanted the subjects of Santa’s naughty list making their way to Botany Bay and Port Arthur.
I did eventually find the James I think I was looking for, who had spent 18 months at Abingdon’s Old Gaol. Whether or not this was the same Jim who had defaced his cell window will remain a mystery. James Child was eventually released in Abingdon but didn’t delay in committing another crime. He became one of a total of 1,431 convicts convicted of house breaking and transported to Australia. He boarded the Chapman destined for Van Diemen’s Land, arriving in Hobart on July 27, 1824.
The contrast was astounding and incongruous – I was guzzling Tasmanian Jansz in Abingdon’s Old Gaol, in the same spot our mysterious Gentleman Jim spent time, just over 200 years ago, and whose footsteps I would follow from 51° North in Oxford, all the way to Tasmania, 42° South.
Clarissa Horwood grew up in Oxford, courtesy of her English father, and spent all her childhood holidays with relatives in France, courtesy of her French mother. She has a keen sense of the ridiculous, and can swear better in Spanish than either English or French. Despite being so thoroughly European, she married an Australian and moved to Hobart in 2013. Their three children are adept at switching accents. The family returned to Oxford in 2020 to be with Clarissa’s mother during Covid-19, and the move was such a major upheaval that it looks likely to be permanent. Her column, Letter from Oxford, will be about memories and connections between two cities a world apart, but it will be written in a Tasmanian accent.
