Doin' Time

Another day dawns with the sun leaping energetically into the sky to bake everyone to a crisp. Well, that's what should have happened but instead it was a dull, overcast day that made you think you were in England. With parrots. There were no plans for the day so we decided to make use of the fact that we were armed with a car and do some more touristy stuff. In fact, we would head off back down to Freemantle and do some hard time. Oh yeah, into Jail we were going to go; banged up behind bars, chained to the wall - no, hang on, that's something else entirely, forget I even mentioned it. Freemantle prison is a strange tourist attraction in that you can only go in if you're on a tour. It's set on the hill, perched above Freemantle - quite a nice position - and used to hold everything from transported convicts to drunks to Aboriginies to really bad criminals or lawyers as they're now known. We opted for the standard tour of the prison block. The other thing we discovered is that all the tour guides are either ex-wardens or ex-prisoners, but you don't know which is which. My theory is that if the tour party comes back minus a member and there's suspicious blood stains on the guide, then it was probably an ex-warder who took you round (if you came back having had all your credit cards stolen and your wife sold into slavery, it was probably a lawyer).
We entered through the gates and went where we were told, following the guide and asking questions, absorbing facts (and probably some fiction too) as we went around. Our guide, Max the murderer, took us through the kitchens and some exercise yards - inmates would spend the whole day in the yard, in the blazing sun - and along the rows of cells. A number of inmates had painted their cell walls and these cells had been preserved. The colours (no real sunlight to make them fade, see?) and details were amazing. Alot of the cells were laid out like they would have been during different periods of the prison's history and it was fascinating to see how much things hadn't changed over the decades it had been open. The prison also carried out executions in a room too small for many spectators (I think they missed a trick there, a great money making opportunity slipped through their fingers) and we saw the chair and rope that would have been used (they'd taken the body away). All in all it was a fascinating insight into the justice system. Luckily, Max the murderer, decided we'd all been good enough to get parole and he let us back out the gate before going off for lunch with Chris the cannibal.

Coming out of the prison it rained. Alot. We got wet running for the car and Inga ended up looking like a drowned rat. That said, I wasn't much better. When the rain stopped we wandered into town for lunch and then headed back towards Perth, doing our best to stick to the coast rather than the highway. Perth has some wonderful beaches and some equally wonderful houses facing them. What is good is the way that very little is built right up to the beach which means that it's open and available to everyone. We drove along, stopped and looked at views and generally enjoyed ourselves as we headed homewards. We even went and stood by the sea at one point and Inga did her Jamaica Inn impression, looking wistfully out across the ocean, wondering where her true love had gotten to. Not getting any answers she decided to stick with me instead. Tonight we had to pack and clean the house, for tomorrow we were off to Gracetown for the rest of the week, culminating in the reason we were here: Jason & Dani's pissup, sorry, wedding!