Matt & I had a day to ourselves today with Grandma looking after the boys. We went to Perth Mint where no photography is allowed inside hence there are not many photos of the experience. It was very good though, taking the guided tour and watching a 6kg bar being formed. The pots they use to melt the gold have to be replaced every 2 weeks and cost $120 each. They melt these pots down after the 2 weeks so that they can retrieve the gold which has been embedded inside and is worth around $300.


We then had a nice lunch at the Hydrant Bar in the city before driving down to Fremantle Prison. We did 2 guided tours - "doing time" & "great escapes". The guides did a great job and I think this was helped by them having first hand experience. (Jim worked as a prison guard here for the last 5 years it was open). Our second guide was quite intimidating and seemed quite rude a lot of the time but this was all to try to give us authentic feel for what goes on inside. Although I'm sure a few of the young girls on an excursion from Singapore will have nightmares.
Matt was chosen to 'volunteer' for Jim the guard liked to demonstrate the process of checking in a new prisoner. A lady in the group was no so impressed with being chosen to wear the rubber glove to finish the 'pat down'.


The Fremantle Prison was built by convicts using the stone they dug out of the ground at the site of the prison and the wood and locks for the doors all came from the ship they were transported here on. It was a maximum security prison until 1991 and had 230 escapees during its time and only 7 were never recaptured. The condemned cells are now leased out to small businesses for a fairly cheap price.

We heard of quite a few escape stories, some of the more interesting ones involved slipping the guard sleeping pills in his soup so the prisoner could climb the wall and another sewing special forces uniforms for a few prisoners and when they were seen on the roof by the guard in the gun tower they pretended to be measuring and checking the roof and got away with it.

In the late 1900's an investigation concluded that the cells were too small so the prison knocked out the dividing wall to join 2 cells together but once they did this, they now would put up to 4 prisoners in the same space it previously had 2. The prisoners were treated to movies twice a week and a live show such as musician or comedian once a fortnight.




Jim took us through the hanging process and said only one ever didn't go to plan. They place the metal ring on a particular spot on the prisoner's neck so that the drop breaks their 2nd & 3rd vertebrae. The one that went wrong was when a man was decapitated. This was because he previously placed a detonator in his mouth that didn't kill him but needed extreme reconstruction surgery. They waited until he was well again before hanging him but due to his injuries and surgery his neck muscles were extremely weak.