St Helena Island Prison

Five kilometres from the mouth of the Brisbane River lies St Helena Island. For more than 60 years from 1867, St Helena was home to many hundreds of society's outcasts, for here was located colonial Queensland's foremost prison for men.

The toughest years on St Helena were undoubtedly the early ones, and the ruins on the island testify to the hard work that the prisoners had to do. These, too, were the years of severe punishment — the lash, the dreaded dark underground cells, the gag, and energy-sapping shot drill. These were the years that gained St Helena its fearful reputation as 'the hell hole of the Pacific' and 'Queensland's Inferno'. But in these days tough measures were called for, because St Helena housed some of the country's worst criminals. In 1891, for example, there were 17 murderers, 27 men convicted of manslaughter, 26 men convicted of stabbings and shootings, and countless individuals responsible for assaults, rapes and similar violent crimes.

By the turn of the century, the St Helena establishment had grown to accommodate over 300 prisoners in a maze of buildings surrounded by a high stockade wall. It operated as a self-sufficient settlement, and even exported some of its produce to the mainland, including bricks for many of Brisbane's buildings, clothes to be sold in Brisbane, and white rope for ships, which was made from imported Sisal Hemp plants. In the island workshops the prisoners were taught such trades as carpentry, boot making, tailoring, tinsmith, saddle making, bread baking and butchery.[2] The island boasted a prize dairy herd which won many awards at the Brisbane Exhibitions. The island was extensively farmed, particularly in the later years as a prison.[2] Maize, potatoes, lucerne and other vegetables thrived in the rich volcanic soil and the sugar mill crushed over 75 tons of locally grown sugar annually by 1880. In many ways, St Helena was regarded as a model prison for the times, and held in high regard by visiting interstate and overseas penologists.

By the 1920s, the prison had begun to show its age. In its latter years, after the majority of prisoners and the workshops had been removed to the Boggo Road Gaol on the mainland, the island became a prison farm for trusties, with a few dozen resident inmates tenaciously dismantling the ageing edifice. The last prisoner left the island on 15 February 1933. The last prison superintendent was Mr Patrick Roche.