No, I didn’t go out on the lash last night and end up here, though if I lived in Western Australia a couple of hundred years ago, I probably would’ve. As well as being drunk, another “crime” a woman could’ve committed at that time also includes using offensive language so I’m happy that I live in this day and age.
The former Prison is a UNESCO site, closed down in 1991 for a breach in human rights. It took a prison riot to begin the process of closing it, during which the prisoners started a fire and found out that the gates of the prison were too small to fit a fire engine through.
I stayed for two tours: one that covered the last 100 years of the prison, and another that went through former inmates and some of the more famous escape attempts. We heard some pretty shocking stories about why prisoners were there, executions and how the prisoners smuggled contraband in.
