The Truth About Those Tours "Around" Boggo Road Gaol

A few months back I had a problem with members of the public thinking that the Boggo Road Markets were actually being held inside the old prison, when in fact they are just outside it. They're very good markets and all, well worth a visit, but this was a misconception that left me having to personally inform many disappointed people of the truth.

So I just had to roll my eyes when queries came in last week asking about the tours inside the gaol that weekend. 'What tours?', I asked. 'The tours during the markets', I was told. That can't be right, I thought, and so checked their source of information on this. There, on the Brisbane 'Ghost Tours' Facebook page, was a status update announcing that tours would be held "around the Boggo Road Gaol" on Sunday.

The word to note here is around, because in common English usage it implies a certain meaning. When you look around a house, a garden, a town, a museum, etc, you look INSIDE it. When you have spent an afternoon hanging around the house, you haven't been circling the perimeter fence.

However, what readers of the post would not readily understand was that in this case the word was being used in the literal sense - the tours walked around the outside of the gaol. Was it deliberate use of uncertain language? After all, these tours are (unbelievably) not free. Well, how about this comment under the post:

"Thanks heaps to Daniel at Ghost Tours for all the info today about these tours tomorrow, and the updates about future happenings...much appreciated, I'm looking forward to seeing this site in all it's sinister glory!"

So somebody claims to have contacted Ghost Tours for further information about these tours, and then posted a comment clearly reinforcing the impression that they were going to see the site 'in all it's glory'. I can tell you that this glory is not best viewed from outside the seven-metre-high perimeter brick wall. Again, its all vague, ambiguous language when it would actually be easier to make the message clear and correct (i.e. "tours will be held around the outside of the gaol wall').

"Hello everybody. This tour will require the use of your
(finger quotes) "imagination"."

The thing is, not only is it easy to get these things right, its a responsibility. People don't like feeling they've been duped.

(Speaking of which, I notice that Ghost Tours are STILL refusing to answer people's questions about when the gaol will reopen. Best government estimate: late 2013. You're welcome, ghost tours).

This all relates back to when the markets first opened last year and the advertising described them as being AT the gaol. The word 'at' is another ambiguous term that in this context could easily be interpreted as 'inside', but in that case it was just a simple mistake in promotional material for the markets. The wash-up of that little mistake was that for the first few weeks of the markets we had a regular stream of visitors with huge cameras around their necks rocking up to the Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society market stall and asking how they could get inside the gaol. Most times their response to the news that they couldn't get inside the place was disappointment, although a few times it was outright anger. Some people had made special trips across town just to go inside.

That's why we posted a comment on the Facebook page for Boggo Road Gaol explaining exactly where the markets were located. We were at the coalface and saw the disappointment that ambiguous advertising was causing, and that's why I find myself having to do it again in this blog. Except this time I'm a lot less prepared to believe it was a mistake. Either way, it was quite unprofessional.

What Would Win in a Fight Between a Tiger and a Bull?

Sometimes historical research can go off on a tangent when something interesting catches your eye. When I was writing my article 'Tigers, Roller-Coasters and Special Effects: Brisbane's 19th-century Dreamworld', which mentioned the story of a tiger on the loose in Brisbane's George Street, I came across some old newspaper reports of staged fights between bulls and tigers, and quite frankly I was interested in the result.* The result was, however, that people can be very stupid and very cruel, and animals can be reluctant to fight upon demand. 

1950 Topps card - 'Terror of the Jungle'

I will cover three reports of tiger/bull fights here, although an earlier and supposedly fictional account had featured in the 1858 novel Jack of all Trades by Charles Reade. I say 'supposedly' because judging by later reports of actual fights, Reade's account was based on reality. After being placed in the arena, the two animals were reluctant to fight, and so Reade's protagonist poked the tiger with a red-hot iron to try and provoke it. As will be seen below, this behaviour was all-too-normal at these events.

 

The first account of an actual fight to appear in a Queensland newspaper was in 1898, and told of a fight between a Bengal tiger ('Cesar') and an Adalusian fighting bull in front of 1,300 spectators at the Plaza de Madrid. A seventeen-metre-square cage was erected in the middle of the arena, and the bull was the first to be released into the enclosure:

"The brute immediately began to run round and round his prison, bellowing and throwing up sand and gravel with his hoofs. The instant the tiger entered the cage he gave a roar and bounded on the bull, avoiding the horns, and fixed on his flanks and belly with both teeth and claws. The bull remained still for a few seconds, and then seemed to be sinking backwards to the ground. The spectators thought that all was over, but the tiger let go for a second to take another hold, and in the brief interval was kicked over by the wild plunges of the bull. Before the tiger had time to recover the bull was on him, and, staking his horns into the striped hide, it tossed the tiger into the air. This was repeated four or five times, the bull varying his tactics occasionally by banging his adversary against the bars. When the bull stopped the tiger lay limp on the ground, and the crowd, thinking he was dead, cried 'Bravo, toro.' The bull stood stamping for a moment in the middle of the cage, and then, seeing the tiger did not move, approached and smelt him. But Cesar was only shamming death, and seized the bull's muzzle in his powerful jaws so the animal could not move. Eventually, however, he was released, and, after stamping furiously on the tiger, again caught him on his horns. This time the tossing, stamping, and banging apparently ended in Cesar's death. The cage was then opened, and the bull rushed out and back to his stable. For precaution's sake, the tiger's van was brought up, and, to the general surprise, Cesar rose to his feet, glanced round as if afraid the bull was still there, and then bounded into the van. The tiger was found to have five ribs broken, besides having a number of wounds from the bull's horns. He is expected, nevertheless, to survive. It is said that all wild animals - bears, lions, panthers, and tigers - fare badly in combat with the Spanish fighting bull. Man and the elephant are the only sure victors over these active and ferocious beasts."
(The Capricornian, 12 March 1898)

Detail from Henri Rosseau, 'Struggle between a tiger and a bull', c.1900

Another bull vs tiger fight took place in front of a huge crowd in a bullring at San Sebastian, Spain, in 1904. The fight was staged in a large cage in the centre of the arena. A cameraman was set up behind a barrier to film the event, but he fled in terror when the bull charged him. The Bengal tiger was reluctant to enter the arena, and when it did the Andalusian bull charged him down and gored him, but the tiger caught him in the neck before retreating and positioned himself to pounce. This was repeated occasionally over half an hour before the crowd grew impatient at the lack of action. A photographer climbed into the arena and prodded the tiger with an iron rod through the bars, but the animals simply stood and stared at each other. 

At this point the furious Homer-Simpsonesque spectators "jumped into the arena and shouted all the names they could think of at the animals, hissed, lit squibs, and danced like mad creatures round the cage". This caused the bull to once more gore the tiger against the side of the cage, which made the wall fall over. Now the heroic bogans who had been taunting the animals fled in hysterical terror, and the Gendarme and everyone with a gun "blazed away indiscriminately" at the tiger. One report had eleven people wounded, but another had fifty being hit with bullets, with fourteen severely wounded, three in a critical condition, and one woman dead. The tiger, which had been too badly injured by the bull to attack anyone anyway, was also shot dead. After this it was torn to shreds by 'souvenir hunters', cutting off parts of the tiger's body as keepsakes. All of which proves that the most dangerous animal of all etc, etc. 

'Tiger and Bull' by Alton S. Tobey

The French government moved to ban these fights from taking place in France, although several hundred people gathered in a private enclosure in Marseilles in 1908 to watch just such a fight, this one staged with the intention of filming it. Not all went to plan because although the bull was ready for a fight, the tiger retreated to a corner and stayed there, prompting yet more human stupidity and cruelty. The impatient crowd pelted the animal with bricks and stones, and the attendants prodded it with an iron bar, turned a hose on it, and finally exploded fireworks in its face, but the tiger could not be provoked. It was returned to the cages and a second tiger produced. This one was much hungrier and instantly attacked the bull, which turned and ripped the tiger's shoulder open. The wounded tiger crawled back to its den, after which it was too dark to film any more and the fight was postponed until the next morning. However, when the time came and a tiger was about to be driven into the enclosure again, the police arrived and arrested the promoters, smashed the photographer's cameras, and led the cinematographer away in handcuffs.

Despite the cameraman's problems at San Sebastian in 1904, a silent movie short of that event called 'Tiger and Bull Fighting' was produced and screened to Australian audiences in 1906. The filming had reached the point where the tiger was pressed against the cage, but audiences were informed that the scene in which the bull supposedly killed the tiger was 'missing'. This movie was in circulation for a few years, and was quite possibly shown in Brisbane, but in 1909 the Sunday Times of Perth advised the film's distributor that they would...

"do well to drop such films as "Bull and Tiger Fighting," "Bear hunting in Russia", these exhibitions being anything but of an elevating character. Usually the "savage tiger" is an ancient, toothless, doped animal, which can't get out of its own way, and seems glad to crawl into a corner, and die of disembowelment."

Tiger attacking a calf, Roman mosaic, 4th century CE

The movie itself seems to have died of disembowelment and disappeared, as did the staging of bull and tiger fights in general. For the record, it looks like bulls generally got the better of the tigers, but then these were contests between bulls trained to fight and tigers trained to be docile. There were always plenty of idiots to watch them, however, and if the producers of Reality TV shows were given half a chance, they would quite happily stage animal fights and no doubt they would find a huge audience too.

* Unlike the result of cricket match between the Queensland Bulls and the Tasmania Tigers, which nobody cares about.

Getting into Hot Water in a Boggo Road Cell

"He took a roll of toilet paper, unrolled and loosely rerolled a bunch of it, then tucked the bottom up through the hole in the middle, put it on the rim of the toilet bowl, and set it afire. It burned in a cone, like a burner, and lasted long enough to make a metal cup of hot tea."

That's how Edward Bunker (Mr Blue from Reservoir Dogs to you), writing in his book Education of a Felon, described how a fellow prisoner used to illegally heat his water in the Los Angeles county jail in the 1950s.

"We'd kill for a cup of tea"

Here, as a follow-up to my article on illegal prisoner-made tattoo guns, is another piece on ingenious cellblock contraband, although this time I cover the somewhat less-edgier subject of how prisoners got to make themselves a lovely cup of tea while locked away for the night. Kettles and heaters were not allowed in the Boggo Road cells, but a number of objects in the Boggo Road Gaol Museum collection show that some thirsty inmates managed to get around this problem. As with the tattoo machines, it usually involved a bit of imagination and scrounging various items from around the everyday prison environment.

In his book Doing Time, about life in Victoria’s Pentridge Prison, author Barry Ellem described how inmates could rig up a simple electrical device in their cells: 

"Another technique prisoners employ to get hot water is to make up an electric gadget similar to an element in an electric jug. This is called an immerser. If the cell is not a power cell the immerser is plugges into the electric light socket. Electrical shorts and power failures have occured because of this."

The plastic cup below, found in a Boggo Road kitchen, was similarly adapted to work as a mini-kettle. It contains an immerser constructed from matchsticks, electrical wiring, cotton thread and a razor blade. The wiring would have been attached to a power source such as a light socket. 

Queensland Museum item #H-46038

This immersion heater made from a power cord and razor blades was found in a prison cell in Hamburg, Germany.

Image: Marc Steinmetz

The metal jug below, confiscated from a Queensland prisoner, has been adapted in a similar way:

Queensland Museum item #H-45725

This grill, from a Mexican prison, is made from a tin can, electrical wire, dirt and a stove burner surface element.

Image: Marc Steinmetz

Like the one described by bunker, non-electric stoves were a bit simpler and could be made from a couple of empty tins, a few screws, and a bootlace for a wick. The upper tin sits on the three screws in the lid of the lower tin. The wick was coated in lard, which acted as wax does in a candle. The lard was sneaked out of the prison kitchen and rolled into balls so it could be ‘sold’ to other prisoners. When available, paraffin could also be used. The stove below was made from an old coffee tin and used in Boggo Road during the 1980s. 

 Improvised water heater, Boggo Road Gaol
Collection, #1993.54 (BRGHS)

 

So there you have it. Inmate resistance to authority took many forms, not all of them necessarily confrontational. Sometimes getting a hot cup of tea or coffee during the long hours couped up in a cell was one of the little ways in which prisoners got one over the system. 'C'est la tea'. 

Tigers, Roller-Coasters & Special Effects: Brisbane’s 19th-century Dreamworld

Did you know that Victorian-era Brisbane had a resort that was Dreamworld, Seaworld and Movie World all rolled into one quaint 19th-century package? It was the 1890s, a decade before the advent of cinema, and the citizens of Brisbane loved to get out and about for their family entertainment, heading to parks, theatres, forests, museums, the coast, and anywhere the public transport of the day could get them. If they took the steam ferry from Petrie's Bight, near Customs House, they could visit the Queensport Aquarium & Zoological Garden.

Real Estate ad showing the neighbouring Aquarium Estate in 1889
(John Oxley Library, #97488) 

The Queensport Aquarium, in the Brisbane riverside suburb of Hemmant, opened to much fanfare on 7 August 1889. Public aquariums had been hugely popular in England since the 1850s (following the abolition of a tax on glass!), allowing the British public to see fish other than kippers for the first time. Most seaside resorts had (and still have) an aquarium building, and the craze took off here in Australia too. 

Queensport was more than just a simple aquarium, however, it was a whole resort in itself. Set in eleven acres of landscaped grounds, the centrepiece was a two-storey aquarium with six fish tanks, each one measuring 13 feet long, 4 feet wide and 5 feet deep. Other attractions included a seal pond, a small zoo, fairground rides, a fernery, fountains, and a 1,400-seat concert hall and stage, complete with plush curtains and electric organ, that was the venue for concerts, theatre and opera. There was also a sports field that was mostly used for cricket and picnics, and the grounds were illuminated by new-fangled electric lights.

Where modern theme parks often have 3D movie screenings, the aquarium had its 19^th-century equivalent in the ‘camera obscura’, a primitive optical device in a darkened space that projects a picture of the surrounds onto a screen (see how it works here). At the time, this was considered to be special effects entertainment.

Camera Obscura

The fairground rides included ‘flying machines’ (flying foxes), swing boats, donkey rides, a merry-go-round, and an early form of roller coaster known as a ‘switchback railway’. 

Switchback railway, Folkestone, England, circa 1900. Some brilliant 1904
footage of this contraption in operation can be seen here.

Apart from the fish and seals, other animal attractions were monkeys, apes, snakes, emus, panthers, cheetahs, and tigers named Jimmy, Sammy, Sir Roger and Dina. This menagerie had belonged to Charles Higgins, who had previously kept them at Toombul and also in a flimsy enclosure on the corner of George and Turbot Street in the city in 1888. Needless to say, this all ended badly when one of the tigers escaped and savagely mauled a man, exposing his brain. A newspaper account printed the understatement of the year when it described passers-by being "startled" by the sight of an enormous man-eating Bengal tiger actually trying to eat a man in George Street, and unsurprisingly everybody "hurriedly left the vicinity" (I would think replacing "startled" with "pant-shittingly terrified", and "hurriedly left the vicinity" with "running screaming for their lives", would probably be a more accurate description of what happened). The eventual move to safer cages at Queensport was no doubt heartily welcomed by everyone in Brisbane.*

 

The Queensport venture was initially a huge success, with the public flocking to the aquarium in their thousands. On the biggest days, such as Easter Monday and Boxing Day, steamers full of happy day-trippers would leave the company’s wharf at Petrie’s Bight every half-hour. The owners worked hard to get the public in, providing an array of other novelties in including the ‘Electric Orchestrion’ machine, rifle-shooting and archery exhibitions, Punch and Judy shows, minstrel shows, pedestal dancing, and moonlight trips on the steamers Woolwich and Natone.

 

One notable visitor was ‘Professor’ Christopher Fernandez, a travelling aeronaut whose specialty was ascending half a mile in a hot air balloon, setting off fireworks, and then parachuting back down to the ground. However, not all went according to plan during his appearance at the aquarium in May 1891, when his balloon failed to reach sufficient height and came down on nearby Gibson Island, where the good professor found himself bogged knee-deep in mud. A promised relaunch never happened due to bad weather, although Fernandez did successfully pull off the stunt at other venues around Australia.

Like most 19th-century riverside structures, the aquarium was subject to occasional damage by the Brisbane River. The big floods of 1890 and 1893 caused considerable damage, as did a gale in March 1892 that blew the switchback railway and several empty tiger cages into the river. Events like these would have added to what must have been considerable costs in maintaining the place, and although the owners soldiered on, the aquarium seems to have become much less popular by the mid-1890s. This demise is not well documented, but in late 1897 most of the content and structures were advertised for sale, including all the remaining animals and their housing. The pavilion and sports grounds stayed in place, however, and still attracted large picnic groups for a few more years. In 1900 the land was actually considered as the site for what later became the Princess Alexandra Hospital, and the pavilion was sold in 1901 prior to the land being subdivided.

The Queensport Aquarium wharf can be seen to the right in this picture of
people surveying flood damage in 1887 (JOL, #66442).

The suburbs of Brisbane would never really see anything like the Queensport Aquarium & Zoological Garden again. 

* The tiger's victim was an Austrian man named Peter Bertram, who survived the attack. A couple of years later he was charged with murder, and so would have spent time in Boggo Road Gaol on remand.

Where are all the "Heterosexual Vampire Killers"?

Just a little rant for this week before another 'proper' history article...

As some Brisbanites would know, Tracey Wigginton was recently released from prison after serving 21 years for the 1989 murder of council worker Edward Baldock. She and three friends lured him to a West End park where he was then stabbed 27 times. During the subsequent trial her co-defendants claimed that Wigginton had 'drank' some of his blood and had a bit of a vampire thing going on, supposedly avoiding sunlight and mirrors, drinking blood obtained from the butchers, possessing 'occult powers', and all that other childish lame crap that vampire-obsessed wannabees do before they grow up.

 

Given the habit of reporters to come up with sensationalist nicknames for criminals, it was no surprise that Wigginton attracted a silly label. Given the fact that the crime was committed in West End and she liked playing vampires, the 'West End Vampire Killer'  might have been expected, but as this was Queensland in 1989, a time when male homosexual activity was actually illegal, then the fact that Wigginton was gay was considered to be an important part of her 'media character' and she was accordingly dubbed the 'Lesbian Vampire Killer'.

A terrible, terrible movie that is either about people who kill lesbian vampires,
or lesbians who kill vampires, or maybe lesbian vampires who kill people.

I'm not going to get into some debate about the length of her sentence or what kind of a person she is, but was does annoy me is the way a whole new generation of idiot reporters have jumped on the 'Lesbian Vampire Killer' bandwagon, using the term in every headline, in every second sentence, and in every story on the case. It annoys me because the nickname is straight-out homophobic.

Since when does the sexuality of a murderer actually get incorporated into their nickname? Ever heard of 'Jack the Heterosexual Ripper' or the 'Bi-Curious Boston Strangler'? Of course not. It seems that the sexuality of murderers is only worth mentioning if they're not straight, like it somehow makes them more evil.

The fact that this woman is gay is of no consequence and has nothing to do with the crime she committed. So why push the word 'lesbian' to the front of every story about her? It is not 1989 anymore, and its about time some reporters realised that.

Young, Shipwrecked & Black: Australia's unlikeliest hangman

A historically unique event took place in a prison yard off Brisbane's Queen Street one cold Monday morning in July 1857. In fact, not only was what transpired there unheard of in the rest of Australia, I have yet to find anything similar taking place in Britain or 19th century USA.

What happened was the judicial execution of a prisoner, and although a total of 94 people were hanged in Brisbane and Queensland, this was the only time that the executioner was black (African-American, to be precise), which was all the more surprising because the prisoner was white. I say surprising because in the 1850s Brisbane and the surrounding districts were gripped by the racial tensions of the frontier, with some newspaper editors practically advocating race war to remove what they saw as the 'Aboriginal threat'. Aside from this, Chinese/European relations in the colony were also very bad. In a racial sense, capital punishment was a one-way street under western laws: Whites executed non-whites (and other whites of course). 

Except this one time. The prisoner was William Teagle, who had brutally murdered his defacto wife in Toowoomba. The Sheriff of Queensland, William Brown, only received official confirmation of Teagle’s hanging just six days before it was due to take place, leaving him no time to requisition an executioner from Sydney, and so two days before the set date Brown went down to the wharves and 'waited in great anxiety’ for the Boomerang steamer to arrive from the south. To the sheriff’s great disappointment there was no hangman on board, so he had to race against time to find one.

This was no easy task, as hangmen were social pariahs at the time, but with one day left a ‘volunteer’ was found. Well, not exactly a volunteer, because the man was a prisoner and his price was a whopping ₤25 (two months wages for the chief prison warder back then) and a free pardon. The sheriff may have been desperate to agree to this, but the prisoner was almost as desperate to get out of Brisbane because during the previous six months of his life had taken some very unexpected turns.

 

His name was Thomas Woodby, a 20-year-old African-American from New York who had previously worked as a cook on the whaling brig Packet, which sailed from Sydney in mid-1856. After eight months at sea and with 150 barrels of whale oil on board, the brig was caught up in a vicious gale several hundred kilometres due west of the northern New South Wales coastline and struck the Middleton Reef. The Packet was badly damaged and before it sank the crew abandoned ship in two small boats with nothing but biscuits and water. They were at sea for four days before finally being picked up by the schooner Ebenezer, which dropped them off at Cowan Cowan, on Moreton Island. They arrived in Brisbane in a ‘most destitute state’ some eight days after the Packet went down and were given shelter and clothing by the locals. It was March 1857.

Woodby soon found a job as a boatman on the Kangaroo Point ferry, but a couple of weeks later he appeared in the police court on two charges of stealing, firstly for a watch, and secondly for a bag of sugar. Unrepresented in court, he was acquitted of the first charge but found guilty of the second and received a one-year sentence for larceny. Initially he was to serve this in Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney, but after a couple of days the judge changed the place of imprisonment to Brisbane.

So it was that in July 1857, only a few months after being shipwrecked, Thomas Woodby was confined in a dilapidated prison in a foreign country, with most of his sentence still before him. When he was offered the job of hanging Teagle in order to obtain a free pardon and a large sum of money, it was too good an opportunity to pass by.

Given the racial mix of the main players, it was fortunate for the authorities that this was to be Brisbane’s first-ever private execution. A couple of years earlier the New South Wales parliament had abolished public hangings, which were felt to be having a detrimental effect on the populace, and so the gallows were erected in a yard of the Queen Street prison instead of on the street outside, as had previously been the practice. (This prison stood on the site of the current General Post Office).   

The gaol on Queen Street, 1850 (John Oxley Library, #153725)

Privacy was still an issue because the tall gallows could be seen over the low prison walls, so a large piece of black calico cloth was draped around the upper part of the gallows to shield it from public view. The execution process itself passed smoothly, except that Teagle struggled on the end of the rope for two minutes after the drop. Sheriff Brown, however, was impressed by the way Woodby handled the job. Thomas Woodby was subsequently discharged from the Brisbane prison in September 1857, his ‘orderly behaviour in gaol’ being noted in the prison register, and with that he disappeared from the local historical record.  

I’d love to know what happened next to that young African-American with £25 in his pocket (assuming the contract was honoured), and maybe one day I'll make a concerted effort to track him down in the records. 

Or maybe someone who knows could just tell me? 

In the meantime, why not take a look at my book No Ordinary Run of Men: The Queensland Executioners.

What Lies Beneath: The Secret Underground History of Brisbane

It occurred to me recently that there is a lot of nonsense floating around about old underground cells and tunnels in Brisbane. If the rumours are to be believed, Brisbane is sitting atop a vast subterranean network of 19th-century hidey-holes and secret passageways, and its a wonder the whole city doesn't just collapse into the ground.

And we all know what happens then.

Boggo Road has more than its fair share of such stories, but the old Brisbane Gaol that stood on Petrie Terrace during 1860-83 has a couple of its own. One mystery involves the remarkable 19th-century reporter Julian 'The Vagabond' Thomas, who wrote a whole account of his time locked in an underground cell there in 1877. He described in detail of how the gaol governor kindly granted him access to the cell for six hours, his arrival at the gaol, the structure of the cell, and of how he and the governor shared drinks afterwards. However, there is actually no other evidence that this cell even existed. It is not on any existing plans, it is not mentioned in any other records, and it didn't show up during a recent archaeological dig of the area. Now, I'm a bit of a fan of Thomas, who did great work going 'undercover' in prisons, immigrant homes, asylums, soup kitchens, etc, but this one is hard to explain away. Did he just make it up? Quite possibly, but if that was the case then why did the gaol governor Frederick Bernard not rebut his story? 

Another story I heard about the old gaol was that a secret tunnel ran between it and the Lord Alfred Hotel (est. 1870 as the Prince Alfred Hotel), directly across Petrie Terrace. What is now used as the cellar was reported to have been used as a lock-up in the 19th century, but the police have no record of them ever being used in this way. A few years back I actually got to go and investigate this place, which to tell the truth looks much like a regular hotel cellar, but there is what appears to be a short passageway running in the direction of Petrie Terrace, blocked off with a fibro sheet. However, historian Thom Blake, who worked on the archaeological dig across the road, reckons there is no tunnel here and this is just an urban myth. 

Cellars of the hotel, 2006.

Some underground cells that actually did exist were the infamous 'Black Holes' of Boggo Road, but from my time working at the Boggo Road Gaol Museum it is clear that these cells have become a highly misunderstood part of the prison's history, mainly due to confusion of different cells used in different eras. The original No.1 Division was built in 1883 with two underground cells, also known as 'black peters', which were used to hold troublesome prisoners for 24 hours or so. They were down ten stone steps under a trapdoor in the floor. A former superintendent described them in this way in 1982:

"An abrupt left turn and a half dozen paces brought you to the door of the cell. When this door opened, it revealed another door hinged to the inside of the cell wall with a buffer area of fourteen inches between each door. Even with both doors open, the darkness inside the cell was incredible. The air was foul and the floor was usually covered with water from underground seepage. The use of the black peters in this wing was discontinued some years ago. To sentence men however bad they may be, to be locked away in these cells was barbaric to say the least, and their use should never again be contemplated."

B Wing also contained two ‘dark cells’, which were also underground but were better ventilated as they adjoined an external wall. The new No.1 Division, built 1968-74, also had punishment cells, which became infamous as the modern ‘black holes’. Although these were mostly underground, they were built into sloping ground and so had some external ventilation. They were, however, felt to be inhumane and were closed in 1984 under public pressure. In late 1987 the Bjelke-Petersen state government made a controversial decision to reopen the cells in order to contain Aboriginal protesters who were felt to be a threat to World Expo '88. This move sparked major riots across the Boggo Road prisons. The punishment cells were closed by the state government in 1989 as they were in breach of United Nations regulations regarding the treatment of prisoners.

Another subterranean feature of Boggo Road was the tunnel at Boggo Road connecting the two male divisions of the prison, allowing inmates to be securely transferred to and from the No.2 Division workshops. This tunnel was built when the workshops opened in 1929. The roof of this tunnel was removed during 1970s construction work and the tunnel was filled with rubble. An archaeological survey in 2005 located the tunnel, which was fairly well preserved, but it was decided that tunnel was not historically significant enough to warrant preservation. I witnessed this excavation, and here it is:

One of the few real tunnels under Boggo Road
(Austral Archaeology)

The remains of this tunnel were destroyed by construction work on the Ecoscience building next to the prison, but at least it did exist, unlike another Boggo Road tunnel that I recently heard about. This tunnel allegedly ran underneath Annerley Road to the Boggo Road prison, and was used to transport laundry between a convent built on land opposite the Dutton Park primary school and the prison. Is it just me, or would there be risk management issues in digging a tunnel from a prison directly into a convent? Apparently, this this story used to be told by 'Ghost Tours' and so, needless to say, the tunnel was totally haunted. The story, needless to say, is total codswallop.

Not only was there never a tunnel under the road, there was never even a convent there! The land was the site of Websters bakery from 1880s until the mid-19th century, and some time later the land was purchased by the Sisters of Mercy with a view to putting a hospital staff car park there. There absolutely never-ever was a convent anywhere on Annerley Road. How you get to have a story about a non-existent tunnel running to a non-existent convent is best explained by reading this, this, this, and also this one too.

Well done Jenkins! At last we have a way to transport
laundry across the street! This all makes perfect sense!

There is a certain irony that the Boggo Road reserve is now sat atop some major tunnelling activity. A huge Busway tunnel was excavated directly beneath the prison in 2009, and now there are plans afoot to excavate a rail tunnel right next to the prison. When complete, this tunnel will also be used to transport laundry to imaginary convents around Brisbane.

Some people also believe that at the end of World War 2 the U.S. Army, which had big bases around Brisbane, buried all kinds of their equipment around the city rather than go to the trouble of taking it back home. This great website lists all kinds of stories about this, including military aircraft buried at Archerfield Quarry; Bren guns buried in swamps area near Eagle Farm; BP-38 Lightnings buried at Eagle Farm airfield; buried engines at Banyo; engines, cars, trucks and Harley Davidson motor bikes buried in the Forest Lake area; wrecked aircraft dumped at Johnston Street, Bulimba; Merlin engines from Archerfield dumped near the corner of Cavendish Road and Stanley Street; military aircraft, machinery and surplus equipment dumped in a flooded quarry at Morningside; plus other equipment buried in suburbs such as Herston, Windsor, Norman Park and Willawong.

How much of this is true? Some stories are quite factual, such as the ammunition dump found at Nundah near the Gateway Bridge. Others seem to be urban myths, like the tales of old army jeeps under what is now Fairview Park, in Fairfield. Local residents have claimed the jeep story cannot be true as the area was just lantana scrub until 1955, when it was made into a council dump and later on a park

The problem with what lies is beneath is the fact that it cannot be seen, much like the 'afterlife' or, as once was the case, the surface of Mars, the bottom of the oceans and the centre of the earth, and so vivid imaginations always fill in the blanks. That has certainly been the case with the tunnels of Brisbane.

Do you know of any other local hidden tunnel stories? I'm sure there must be more out there. 

PS: I have recently heard rumours of a mysterious 'Clem 7 Tunnel' near Woolloongabba, and stories that a few people have even driven their cars through it. I haven't met anybody who has seen it, and it is probably just another urban myth, but will let you know if I hear anything else.

2011: A Year of Doing History to Death

It can be tricky writing about a place that's going to be closed until 2013, so looking back at the first full year of the Boggo Blog I wasn't too surprised at the variety of topics covered in the articles here. What I was surprised about was the bloody morbidity of the subject matter - cemeteries, capital punishment, sharks, plagues, ghosts, plagues of ghosts... Still, the Boggo Blog was never going to be about crocheting doilies for scrapbooks about kittens.

The Boggo year got off to a boggy start with devastating floods hitting Queensland and stories of sharks swimming the streets of Ipswich. The old prison itself is on high ground and is perfectly safe from flood damage, barring any biblical-scale deluges, but parts of our other stomping ground at the South Brisbane Cemetery went under, prompting two huge community cleaning efforts in there. these were the 'Sister Suburbs' event in January (below, right) and 'Clean Up Australia Day' in March. Cyclone Yasi hit the north of the state a few weeks later, indirectly affecting the gaol by adding to Queensland's financial woes.   

This was also the year when the Boggo Road Gaol Historical Society managed to get access to the prison for the first time since 2006, first to assist with a couple of film shoots, then to 'inspect' the place in the company of Public Works, and then we began our monthly cleaning bees (above, left). By the time the weekly Boggo Road Markets started up in October I was going into the old gaol every week, at one point four days in a row for different things. 

We also had movement with the whole Boggo Road reopening saga, with developers appointed to come up with a management plan for the place. Watch this space!

A rolling issue through the year, and by the looks of it next year too, was honesty and/or accuracy in the tour industry. One article that had legs was about the claim by Brisbane's 'Ghost Tours' company that National Geographic had voted Brisbane the 'world's second most haunted city'. This alleged poll has proved to be very, very elusive - even National Geographic deny it exists - and eight months later Ghost Tours' owner Jack Sim has still failed to provide evidence to back up his claim, instead finding it easier to delete simple questions about it from his Facebook page and insult commenters. With the matter now referred to the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission and other people demanding answers, expect interest in this matter to be maintained until questions about the poll are answered one way or another.

It's what we do

Further questions about the credibility of Ghost Tours emerged later in the year when a doctored photo and email appeared on their Facebook page. The pic was allegedly of a ghost from a cemetery night tour the previous weekend, but it turned out to have been taken in broad daylight in Tasmania back in 2006! Whoops. My article exposing this 'mistake' drew fire from Ghost Tours, as shown in the 'Sticks and Stones' article. As it was, the most-commented-upon article of 2011 was about the strange little threats and insults we as a historical society have to put up with. Controversy sells! 

The trifecta of dodginess was completed when the dubious evolution of a cemetery ghost story was explained in another article. Similar articles on the excellent 'Haunts of Brisbane' blog, such as one about an imaginary morgue at the cemetery, highlighted the need for a thorough stocktake and correcting of the historical misinformation floating around about South Brisbane Cemetery, which will take the form of this 2012 project. After all, if a tour operator was telling tourists that Brisbane was established in 1987 by Walt Disney you'd expect them to be pulled up on it. Same goes for all blatantly wrong history - people need to be held to account. Customers paying good money for a history tour need to know that they are getting the facts and not fiction.

In fact, cemeteries continued to be a pretty regular source of material here, with other articles this year covering a victory on cemetery laws, Brisbane's lost plague cemetery, plans to reuse city council graves, an Ipswich Cemetery history project, a Boggo Road burial mystery, and Brisbane's oldest municipal cemetery.

Throw in a bunch of other articles on tattoo machines, execution machines, the Houdini of Boggo Road, the late Bill Kearney,  (yet more) ghosts and ghost hunters, the meaning of the name 'Boggo', the relationship between officers and inmates, a new play about the only woman hanged at Boggo Road, heritage gaol prices, and weird Spiritualist arguments against the death penalty, and you have quite a varied menu right there.

With a monthly readership now well into four figures, the 'Boggo Blog' ends the year with plenty of reason to celebrate. A big, big thanks to all of you who have visited this blog, and especially those who left comments. All feedback is welcome (yes, even you 'silver strychnine'). 

Resolutions for 2012? To keep the mixed bunch of articles coming, to keep everyone updated on the redevelopment plans, to celebrate Good History and to hold Bad History to account, and to hopefully hear more from the readers of this here Boggo Blog. 

Here's to a great 2012 for us all...

The Myth of ‘Halliday’s Leap’

Arthur Ernest 'Slim' Halliday, convicted murderer and infamous Boggo Road escapologist during the 1930s-1960s, is the subject of some incredible tales, some tall, some true. Like the time he bent a solid metal cell door back with a winch made from bits of wood and bed sheet. Or the time he burned a hole in roof of the mattress workshop in a bid to escape. Or when he made a replica gun from bits of leather. These are some of the true tales. 

Arthur 'Slim' Halliday, 1937 (BRGHS)

There is, however, one particular story that is as tall as it gets. During one of my first visits to Boggo Road I took a tour with a highly-respected former prison officer who told our group all about 'Halliday's Leap', the place where Slim Halliday jumped off the roof of E Wing cellblock in 1940 and landed on the top of the perimeter wall before making good his escape. At the time I totally believed it - such is the authoritative power of the tour guide - but after I worked at the museum and spent more time in the area, I realised that the story and the numbers just didn't add up. 

The legendary leap would have involved jumping from a three-storey cellblock roof onto the top of the red-bricked outer prison wall, a near-impossible feat involving a drop of eight metres over a width of four metres. The curved top of the wall itself is no more than 30cm wide and is over seven metres high – not the safest landing spot for someone jumping from a great height. Imagine jumping off the roof of a two-storey house, aiming to land perfectly on a 30cm-wide ledge, without breaking your legs or spine or falling over when you do land, because that ledge is seven metres off the ground - and someone with a rifle on the neighbour's roof will shoot you if they see you. It is, basically, a feat requiring all the abilities of Spiderman, and Slim may have been a lot of things but he was no superhero.

Track, outer wall, and cellblock at Boggo Road.

I delved into the official records at Queensland State Archives and a very different story emerged, but one that was no less impressive. To run through it briefly; Halliday had planned this escape for months, secretly making and hiding escape ropes, grappling hooks and wire cutters in the prison workshops. One day he slipped unnoticed from a line of prisoners and scaled the 10-foot high fence of the exercise yard to gain acces to the Track that ran around the inside of the perimeter walls. He climbed onto the workshop roof and dropped down through a skylight that gave him access to the inside of the workshop, where he cut through wire mesh walls with the hidden wire cutters to get to his escape ropes. He climbed up onto the roof again and hooked the longest rope over the outer wall, at a place he had worked out to be a blind-spot from the towers. He dropped the shorter rope down the side of the workshop and climbed down onto the Track, then climbed up over the prison wall using the first rope before changing his clothes and making his escape.

 

     A – Location of ‘Halliday’s Leap’

B – Workshops

T – Towers

No.2 Division, Boggo Road, in the 1940s. (BRGHS)

 

Halliday's escape route 1940 (BRGHS)

There is no room in this article for the tale of the massive manhunt, shoot-outs and high-speed car chases that led to Halliday’s recapture, which is all covered in detail in my book The Houdini of Boggo Road. Of more relevance here is how the myth of 'Halliday's Leap' grew. One clue comes from discussions with local residents who were children when the escape happened. When news of the breakout got out, local parents ordered their children to stay home, but the kids had other ideas and formed themselves into 'posses', excitedly roaming the local streets in nervous pursuit of the escaped prisoner. They circulated a story that Halliday had jumped from a roof during his escape, and in the process of ‘Chinese Whispers’ this became a cellblock roof. This story took hold, and 50 years later it had become accepted even within modern prison officer circles.

Halliday escaped over the blind spot at this section of the wall again in 1946, and it gained the name of of 'Halliday’s Leap’ quite early on. Following yet another escape attempt by Slim, this time in 1953, a newspaper ran an article with the headline 'HALLIDAY’S LEAP HEADACHE FOR BOGGO ROAD STAFF: WEAK SPOT IN THE PRISON WALLS'. However, the blindspot had in fact been fixed in 1947 with the erection of a new stand-alone guard tower (called E tower) in the prison grounds to the southeast of the workshops. The workshops and Halliday’s Leap were later demolished as part of the prison modernisation of the early 1970s. The myth of Halliday's Leap has only been demolished in more recent years.