POINT PUER BOYS' ESTABLISHMENT
VAN DIEMEN'S LAND

Point Puer seen from Port ArthurJust two years before Victoria ascended the throne, a British prison for boys was established on the southernmost part of Australia, the island of Van Diemen's Land. From 1834 to 1849 this most remote of Antipodean prisons, and the only one restricted to boys, functioned at Point Puer, a few miles from Port Arthur.1

At the request of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, James Backhouse, a Quaker missionary, visited the establishment in 1834, accompanied by his friend and colleague, George Washington Walker. The two men lodged at the Commandant's house although the Commandant, Charles O'Hara Booth was away at the time. They visited Point Puer which Backhouse found located on a point of land "access from which to the main land is cut off by a military guard." He found 157 boys in residence who were "formerly kept on board the hulks, on the Thames, [and] are here placed under restraint and coercive labour as a punishment."2

Research into Point Puer was conducted by Dr Bruce Rosen while a Visiting Fellow at Jane Franklin Hall, a college of the University of Tasmania, From July to October, 1998.

  1. Image, Etablissement penitentiaire de Port Arthur (Terre de Van Diemen) courtesy of Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Hobart, Tasmania.

  2. James Backhouse, A Narrative of a Visit to the Australian Colonies (London 1843, reprinted New York 1967), pp. 226-27.
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Last updated: 26 January 2001
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