page_title: Isle of the Dead (Tasmania)
section_title: Burial designation
hierarchical_section_title: Isle of the Dead (Tasmania) / Cemetery for penal colony / Burial designation
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of gravestones on Isle of the Dead in Port Arthur's harbor in Tasmania.
context_page_description: Isle of the Dead is a small island adjacent to Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia. The island is historically significant as it retains an Aboriginal coastal shell midden, one of the first recorded sea-level benchmarks, and one of the few preserved Australian convict-period burial grounds. Isle of the Dead forms part of the Port Arthur Historic Site. This site is part of Australian Convict Sites and is listed as a World Heritage Property, as it represents convictism in the era of British colonisation.
  Prior to European settlement, the indigenous population used the Isle of the Dead for food gathering. From 1833 the island was used as a cemetery for convicts and free people of the Port Arthur penal colony. A number of journalists and authors visited the island at this time and their accounts were published.
  The Isle of the Dead was the destination for all who died inside the prison camps. Of the 1,000 estimated graves recorded to exist there, only 180, those of prison staff and military personnel, were marked. The cemetery was closed following the demise of the Port Arthur settlement in 1877 and the island was sold as private land.
context_section_description: The cemetery was divided into designated sections. Convicts were buried on the lower, southern end of the island. No headstones or markings were placed on convict graves, as they were not allowed. Alfred Mawle, a tour guide for Port Arthur from about 1899 to 1939, described that convict graves were marked with small metal numbers, which went missing in the 1920s.
  
  Free people were located on the northern western corner of the island and their graves were generally marked with footstones, headstones and tombstones cut by convict stonemasons. Approximately eighty-one headstones and five footstones, dated from 1831 to 1877, were identified and inscriptions recorded in the late 1970s. Of these, four belonged to former convicts who were free at the time of their deaths and nine were erected as memorials to convicts after the closure of the penal colony. It is estimated that less than 10% of all the burials on the Isle of Dead were formally marked.
caption: Gravestones on the Isle of the Dead
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