PhotoHunt: Time

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May 3, 2008 Theme: Time

The Salamanca Arts Centre in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia resides in warehouses built in the 1830s and 1840s by convict laborers. It is well known that England sent many criminals from England to Australia in the first half of the 19th Century. Tasmania was home to several prisons for these convicts, including Port Arthur, a large tourist attraction today about 50 miles outside of Hobart. Some of the male criminals worked on chain gangs to build Tasmania's roads, bridges and other projects including the warehouses on the Hobart seafront. These convicts engaged in grueling physical labor including quarrying and then cutting sandstone by hand to shape blocks and then using the blocks to construct the warehouses. Most of the sandstone was taken from local Hobart quarries; however, some of the sandstone may be recycled ballast from ships that originated in San Francisco. The warehouses successively were utilized over the years by merchants, whalers, a fruit jam factory and then finally an arts center.

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Above is one of the rear walls of the Arts Centre seen from Kelly's Lane (a narrow lane and staircase climbing from Salamanca Place to the Battery Point neighborhood). This photo evokes "time" in two ways. First, the wall was constructed over various temporal periods evidenced by brick and stone striations. The layers begin with the sandstone blocks at the bottom topped by old wooden beam remnants, to smaller non-uniform rocks marked by an old roof line, to a top layer of bricks and the current roof. Second, it evokes "time" in the manner of its construction by English convicts "doing time" in Tasmania on chain gangs.

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