Albany revisited – 7 to 8 April 2010

We drove from Cape Le Grand to Albany and stayed at the Middleton Beach Caravan Park, set on a lovely swimming beach. The park is popular with families and a great pit stop with very hot water and a good laundry.

Albany has a beautiful natural harbour, best viewed from the top of Mount Clarence where the Princess Royal Fortress was built in 1893, to provide artillery protection.

The fort was decommissioned in 1956 as missiles made the old style guns obsolete. It is now a tourist site. The Cafe provided a lovely lunch, they have recreated but modernized the style of foods that would have been served in the past and upgraded the coffee to espresso.

The American “Great White Fleet” of President Theodore Roosevelt visited Albany from 10 to 18 September 1908 on its around the world voyage.

The first and second convoy of troops for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps [ANZAC] assembled at King George Sound in Albany Harbour. The first convoy of thirty-eight ships, thirty thousand troops and seven thousand five hundred horses, embarked on 1 November 1914 for Egypt and then landed on April 25, 1915 at Gallipoli in Turkey. Evacuated from an untenable beach head after eight months they fought on the Western front in France until the war ended. It is sobering to reflect that of the thirty thousand who departed, twenty thousand did not return.

It is fitting that the first dawn Anzac Day service took place on Mount Clarence.

The Desert Mounted Corps Memorial, originally erected in Port Said, was reconstructed on Mount Clarence after it was vandalized in 1956 during anti British riots resulting from the Suez crisis.

We viewed the Albany Gaol Museum. This was a convict hiring depot from 1852 to 1876. In WA the convict system was based on rehabilitation, so convicts had their ticket of leave and were mostly hired from here by free settlers to work on farms or as labourers for the fledgling Port of Albany. The depot was built in 1852, became a gaol and eventually a museum.

It was believed that the discipline of rural labor was beneficial to reform. Good behavior meant a convict could qualify for a Ticket of Leave, Certificate of Freedom, Conditional Pardon and Absolute Pardon with increasing degrees of freedom. A ticket of leave meant a convict could earn his keep and live independently. He could acquire property. This saved money and was more effective than floggings in securing good behavior.

Marriage effectively freed a woman convict as it was believed she was most productive having babies, populate or perish an imperative even then. Although there were abuses this system worked well.
Transportation was abolished between 1850 and 1853, the British view being that as most of the convict population were not locked up, it did not inflict the necessary pain to act as a deterrent.

In front of the Gaol is a replica of the sloop “The Amity” which brought the first convicts and free settlers to Albany. They arrived on December the 26th 1826

We then drove out to Frenchman’s Bay, the site of an active whaling station until the 1970’s and from there to Torndirrup National Park to see the Gap and the Natural Bridge at sunset. The Coast here is spectacular.

At this point we are standing on the edge of Antarctica as these rocks are paired with the rocks at Wheelbarrow Bay where once the two continents were joined together. As John says timing is everything.