St. Helena Island is located in Queensland, Australia, 21 km east of Brisbane and 4 km east of the mouth of the Brisbane River in Morton Bay. Originally used as a prison, it has now been turned into a national park. In the 19th century, St. Helena Island was a quarantine station which became one of the most profitable prisons in Queensland's history. The island was used to house prisoners and staff for 65 years. Many of those who participated in the 1891 Australian shearers' strike were imprisoned there alongside murderers and bushrangers.
St. Helena Island is located in Queensland, Australia, 21 kilometres east of Brisbane and 4 kilometres east of the mouth of the Brisbane River in Morton Bay. Initially used as a prison, it has now become a national park. In the 19th century, St. Helena Island was a quarantine station that became one of the most profitable prisons in the history of Queensland. The island was used to house prisoners and staff for 65 years. Many of those who participated in the 1891 Australian shearers' strike were imprisoned there alongside murderers and bushmen.
For more than 60 years, starting in 1867, St. Helena Island was a place of confinement for hundreds of society's outcasts, as it housed the main male prison of colonial Queensland. In the early 1860s, as Brisbane's prison on Petrie Terrace became increasingly overcrowded, about 30 prisoners were transferred to an old vessel named "Proserpine", anchored near the mouth of the Brisbane River. In 1866, as part of their work, prisoners were ferried each morning by a sailboat across the waters of Morton Bay to St. Helena Island, where they were made to dig wells, clear shrubbery, quarry stone, and build housing for a new quarantine station. Each night they were returned to the "hulk".
The government's plans to build a quarantine station were later cancelled the same year, as conditions in the Petrie Terrace prison became so intolerable that the prisoners from the "Proserpine" were instead sent to build the prison. On May 14, 1867, the Governor of Queensland signed a proclamation declaring the island "a place where convicted offenders could be confined to hard labor or imprisonment". In the following years, St. Helena Island was to become Queensland's main prison.
The first years on St. Helena Island were undoubtedly the hardest, and the ruins on the island testify to the hard work that the prisoners had to do. These were also years of harsh punishments - floggings, horrible dark underground chambers, gags in the mouth, and energy-consuming drill exercises. It was during these years that St. Helena Island acquired its daunting reputation as the "hellhole of the Pacific" and the "Queensland hell." But in those days, harsh measures were applied because some of the country's most heinous criminals were kept on St. Helena Island. For example, in 1891 there were 17 murderers, 27 men convicted of non-premeditated murder, 26 men convicted of stabbing and shooting, and countless individuals responsible for attacks, rape, and similar violent crimes.
Because of this, St. Helena Island was supposed to become a secure prison - and so it was, thanks to its isolation and iron rule. During its existence, less than 25 serious escape attempts were made by the prisoners. The majority of the approximately 50 people involved in the operations were caught, although three disappeared without a trace, two drowned or were carried away by sharks in Morton Bay, and several people were caught several years later.
At the turn of the century, the institution on the island of St. Helena had grown and now housed over 300 prisoners in a labyrinth of buildings surrounded by a high, palisade-like wall. It functioned as a self-sufficient settlement and even exported some of its products to the mainland, including bricks for many buildings in Brisbane, clothing for sale in Brisbane, and white rope for ships, which was made from imported sisal plants. In the workshops on the island, prisoners were taught trades such as carpentry, shoemaking, tailoring, tinsmithing, saddle making, bread baking, and meat cutting. The island boasted a prize-winning dairy herd that had received many awards at shows in Brisbane. The island was actively farmed, especially in the later years of the prison's existence. Corn, potatoes, alfalfa, and other vegetables flourished on the rich volcanic soil, and by 1880 the sugar mill was processing over 75 tons of local sugar annually. In many respects, St. Helena was considered a model prison of the time, and it was highly valued by visiting penologists from both states and abroad.
By the 1920s, the prison began to show its age. In later years, after most of the prisoners and workshops had been transferred to Boggo Road prison on the mainland, the island became a prison farm for believers, where several dozen local prisoners stubbornly dismantled the ageing building. Many prison buildings have been preserved. The last prisoner left the island on February 15, 1933. The last governor of the prison was Mr. Patrick Walsh. "It is impossible," wrote a visiting judge in 1869, "for prisoners to escape from St. Helena Island. I am convinced of this. They would have to sail three miles." In fact, history was to show that the island was almost impregnable to escape.
Over six decades, more than 50 prisoners were desperate enough to attempt escape, but despite several superhuman efforts, their attempts were futile.
Several people tried to swim. They were doomed to fail due to the dangers associated with tides, coastal winds, rough seas, and sharks. Some swam on roughly hewn rafts made of fins and logs. One man tied a door to two pine stools. They even tried a bathtub. One couple planned to swim across the bay on two horses with themselves as passengers. They were thwarted by a vigilant guard.
Then there were those who switched to boats. One of them seized a sailboat after throwing a guard into the water. Others found boats that had broken away from the docks on the mainland and sailed unnoticed through the bay to the mangrove thickets of St. Helena Island. Thirds tried to break into the prison barge. Several prisoners died in this attempt.
One of the most high-profile episodes in the island prison occurred in November 1911, when inmates Henry Craig and David McIntyre disappeared for almost two weeks. Most people believed they had escaped to the mainland, leading to searches throughout southeast Queensland. Guards searched every inch of St. Helena Island every day. Police and "black trackers" patrolled hundreds of kilometres of coastline on the mainland. On the twelfth day, the prisoners reappeared. They had been hiding in the ceiling of the tailors' workshop on St. Helena Island, where an accomplice inmate supplied them with daily food and water.
However, most escapees rarely made it beyond the mangrove and shrubbery of the island, where they were either caught by search guards, supplemented as necessary by police from Brisbane, or driven out by hunger or unbearable swarms of mosquitoes. In fact, only one person was never caught after escaping from the island prison. Notorious gunman Charles Leslie was whisked off the island early one morning in 1924 by accomplices waiting for him on a motorboat on the shore.
Today, the island is a tourist destination for both schoolchildren and visitors to Brisbane.
