Bricks and the Body, Timber and the Tide: Architectural Traces at the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station
At the summit of Grummet Island, a sandstone outcrop in the dark tannined waters of Macquarie Harbour, lutruwita/Tasmania, is a brick with an idiosyncratic thumbprint pressed deeply into the red clay (Figure 1). The brick is part of the remains of two fireplaces whose materials tumble outward through the underbrush and tea tree scrub (Figure 2). Originally the product of convict labor at Brickmaker’s Bay on the mainland of the harbor, the bricks that remain where they were placed are supported by footings of red-banded Cambrian sandstone. The foundation stones were likewise hewn by convicts, most likely from the side of the outcrop itself.
These bricks and stones are the most enduring traces of a timber building that once occupied the small buildable space atop this tiny island that, at high tide, measures only around 5m across and 100m long. The bricks roll downward in the slowest of cascades, like hard red droplets responding to the gravity of history, and I’m reminded that even seemingly solid matter is in flow against the long horizon of geological time.
Figure 1. Brick with thumbprint, held by my guide and skipper Trevor Norton. Tumbled bricks of the fireplace are visible in the background. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
Figure 2. Remains of a brick fireplace sprawling amongst the trunks of tea trees on the summit of the island. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
Figure 3. Sandstone and brick remains of a second fireplace on the island. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
The ruins at Grummet Island signal the island’s history as a part of the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station, the main settlement having been around 800m to the southeast at Langerrareroune/Sarah Island. The settlement operated from 1822 to 1833, and again very briefly in 1846-7, comprising a network of island, harbor and riverine shoreline sites (Figure 5).[1] It was the first penal station of its type in lutruwita/Van Diemen’s Land and was established as a secondary punishment site for people sentenced to transportation by Britain, predominantly men, who acquired secondary convictions while serving their original sentences.[2]
The station was designed for both punishment and resource extraction to support colony-building beyond the ambit of the penal stations. While extractive processes connected with brick and lime production were focused on the building and subsistence of the settlement itself, cutting the fragrant huon pine (lagarostrobus franklinii) was the activity underpinning all others (Figure 6). Its buoyant, insect-resistant timber was of great interest to the colonial government for shipbuilding, the major industry in Langerrareroune/Sarah Island. Thus, while the harder-wearing brick and stone constitute the most prominent ruinous traces of the site, timber was the main building material for the structure on Grummet Island. It was also the structuring material for the entire settlement: its extraction was both the rationale for the settlement’s existence and the process that determined its major sites and networks.
Figure 4. Grummet Island, Macquarie Harbour. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
Figure 5a. Map showing relationship between Grummet Island and Langerrareroune/Sarah Island and location within the harbor. The lower reaches of the Gordon River are visible at bottom right. Maps compiled using LISTmap. Department of Natural Resources and Environment, Tasmanian Government, 2025.
Figure 5b. Map showing relationship between Grummet Island and Langerrareroune/Sarah Island and location within the harbor. The lower reaches of the Gordon River are visible at bottom right. Maps compiled using LISTmap. Department of Natural Resources and Environment, Tasmanian Government, 2025.
Figure 6. Huon pine growing in the banks of the Gordon River. Note the “lime green” coloring and weeping form in comparison to surrounding species. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
The eventual destinations of timber used as building material within the environment of Macquarie Harbour are hard to track. While huon pine was the main game at Macquarie Harbour, its precious quality meant that other tree species, particularly a eucalyptus known locally as stringybark, was more commonly used for settlement buildings. While the felling of stringybark would have affected the surrounding ecology of the harbor, the timber’s final whereabouts is largely unknowable: gradually yielding to moisture and rot, perhaps being incorporated into the topsoil of the island as break-away fragments of timber boards and posts moistened, were chewed upon by small creatures, mingled with the humus of tea tree leaves, sheoak needles, paperbark. Some of that timber would have ended up in the water, perhaps becoming waterlogged and sinking, degrading imperceptibly in anoxic brackish water or more rapidly in air-exposed places along the shoreline, contributing to minute changes in nutrient content in the harbor, maybe creating hiding places for little water-dwellers in a microcosmic contradiction to the habitat destruction its felling wreaked elsewhere.
Figure 7. Animal habitats: gull eggs in a nest (foreground) sheltered by rocks on the lower level of Grummet Island; mud “chimneys” built by freshwater burrowing crayfish along the Gordon River where huon was logged. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
Figure 8. A curious pademelon (a small type of wallaby) in the undergrowth near the banks of the Gordon River. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
In contrast to this disintegration, huon pine leaves more of a trail. Its sought-after status led it to be incorporated into ships, fine furniture, picture frames: treasured and cared for, or traded, written up as an item in shipping records. Importantly, however, this harvested timber largely ended up elsewhere: along the river edges where it was harvested, its consumption registers as a different kind of absence in the presence of many small trees and very few sizable ones. This composition reflects the exceptionally slow growth rate of huon pine, which may add 1-3mm to its girth in a year, as well as its extreme susceptibility to fire. While the convict logging operation had wrapped up by the middle of the nineteenth century, free settlers continued pining into the late twentieth.
Due to the long timespan of these logging operations, the timber is everywhere along the shoreline of the harbor and river edges and survives in elements such as the old boat slips at Langerrareroune, partially submerged and resisting decay due to the timber’s high oil content. At Macquarie Harbour, then, we can observe a rare occurrence of the survival of colonial-era timber ruins not in a heavily maintained built form. This occurs due to the combination of a long-running logging industry, huon pine’s specific material properties, and tidal movements; it is also supported by the small size of the local population and the more recent incorporation of the southeastern portion of the harbor into a UNESCO World Wilderness Heritage Area, meaning all that driftwood pretty much stays where it lands. To a nature tourist, of which there are many, this driftwood is easy to overlook as part of a “natural” environment. Here and there, though, saw marks or the specific stamp of a late-era logging operation mark out a very “loggy” log, its cylindrical geometry not yet broken apart and smoothed beyond recognition by the coursing, cresting, and lapping of water.
Figure 9. A remnant huon pine growing on the shoreline of the Gordon River, one of very few large trees remaining; at right, huon pine driftwood washed up in one of the many bays of Macquarie Harbour. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
The decomposition of timber and more “solid” architectural materials such as brick or stone correspond to different time scales, though not in a simple manner: huon pine is an outlier, unusually stubborn in comparison to the relatively shorter life spans of eucalypts like stringybark and, indeed, of much nineteenth-century timber used as building material around the world. Attending to these different time horizons reintegrates architecture into so-called natural spaces and elemental forces, forces that at Macquarie Harbour include the highly effectual activity of water. High winds and rainstorms are frequent here, and in the nineteenth century, water also came from below: Thomas Lempriere, Commissariat Officer at Macquarie Harbour, wrote that waves would sometimes break right over the top of the building during bad weather, a circumstance that likely persisted until the upriver damming of the Gordon River in the 1970s radically decreased fluctuation of harbor water levels in times of heavy rainfall.[3]
Considering these forces changes the way we think about colonial ruins. We don’t need to pan all the way out to geological history to see how water, gravity, and the interventions of humans and animals reclaim architectural materials into the spaces from which they came: it’s visible here in a landscape across a 200-year process in which no massive urban expansion has subsequently occurred.
The variable reabsorption of materials is also affected by building practices and vegetation growth. The sandstone foundations of the fireplaces atop Grummet Island have not necessarily remained more intact than many of the bricks because of their composition as matter, as demonstrated by severe weathering along the contours of the stone’s distinctive banding at other nineteenth-century sites. They are simply at the bottom of the fireplace, and in the case of the retaining wall structure of the convict road, dug into the side of the hill. The water must first take all the lime mortar from the fireplace and all the bricks shielding the stone below. In the meantime, cleared vegetation has regrown or been seeded, providing shelter and slowing the process down. Sometimes, too, a local or a tourist might go there in a motorboat and make their own unpredictable intervention, as evident from an inverted beer bottle we found on a snapped tea tree branch at the summit; or an archaeological dig, like the one conducted there in 2010, disturb the soil in ways that lead to new growth, or make areas more—or perhaps less—susceptible to future erosions as they carefully replace the soil.
If the paths of wood from forest trees to timber building via convict gang logging and sawpits are roughly clear, their entropic devolutions from post, beam, rafter and weatherboard back into the living, relational landscapes known to Australian Indigenous people as Country are not.[4] The resistance of stone and brick to environmental reabsorption presents still another set of possibilities for interpreting architectural materials at penal settlements: interpreting, since they are still extant at the building site to be examined, rather than only imagined.
Unlike stone, where labor is applied exclusively to the exterior and whose internal composition is unchanged, bricks are products of both extractive and explicitly fabrication-based labor, requiring multiple inputs: clay, water, and significant quantities of timber to burn in the firing process.[5] Because of their small size and relative mobility once leeching destroys their binding mortar, bricks get distributed in ways that suggest different time scales within the same space, depending on the extent to which they are removed from their places in a built structure and exposed to the elements.
“We don’t need to pan all the way out to geological history to see how water, gravity, and the interventions of humans and animals reclaim architectural materials into the spaces from which they came.”
It is less a question of the comparative ages of the bricks themselves than the perceptions of space and time often experienced through contact with them. At the summit of the island, standing before the tumbling remains of the fireplace whose structure and footings remain perceptible despite the disappearance of the building and the tea trees asserting themselves within and beside it (see Figure 2), the time of the building’s intact form around 200 years ago seems closer. There’s the physical presence of a built form, if only loosely identifiable, through the completeness of many of the bricks and their crisp, still-sharp corners, the darker rust-reddish ones especially providing a bridge to the color of contemporary bricks and making the paler pink hues seem less unfamiliar; there’s the staggered stacking that’s recognizable even with most of the mortar gone, since bricklaying technique has remained essentially unchanged.
Below the outcrop, where bricks and their fragments have shifted via the elements and people, they look different: within reach of the tide, edges lose sharpness, baked clay breaks down. While the same approximate age as the bricks at the crest, these fragments seem to suggest a different time, no longer the ruin of a building prompting reflection on its former state and the people who occupied it, but something else: a dissolution of building materials into the surrounding land- and waterscapes. This dissolution, too, appears on a gradient: in one place as a round-edged but still recognizable brick among the stones of a cave floor, perhaps relatively recently brought here, or just a little too high on the tideline to yet feel its full effects (Figures 10 and 11). Elsewhere, brick pebbles have integrated fully into the pebbly shore, distinguishable only from the diverse mineral composition of the island’s “cobble beach” by their color, texture, and charcoaly patches where burnt organic matter has darkened air pockets in the brick mixture (Figures 12 and 13). As with the drifted huon pine, you have to look closely to notice what you’re seeing.
Figure 10. Entry to a cave at the lower level of the island with stones and brick fragments. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
Figure 11. Looking outward from the cave entry: note the piece of brick just left of centre. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
Figure 12. Holding a brick “pebble,” with pebbly shore and water of Macquarie Harbour in the background. Dark areas of brick appear to be the effects of burning, possibly from firing process or location within the fireplace. The shape of the material and its location on the waterline suggests the burning may have gone right through it prior to erosion to its current form. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
Figure 13. Image of pebbly shore, showing distribution of differently colored stones, and brick “pebbles” at middle right and bottom (cut off in image). The large dark red stone just above it is a rock. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
But this way of experiencing time has a structure that is shaped by the modes of thinking we bring to bear on this tiny island that my guide and I reach in stages: first by motorized racing yacht and then by inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor that tears up the distances. The cabin of the yacht is filled with books on the colonial history of the harbor that follow the methods and narrative arcs left by the colonizers, and when we drop anchor and leave them behind, my body flying light across the water bears that history just as potently: as a settler-descended scholar with a specific interest in the history shaped by the colonial power, I’m trained culturally and academically to recuperate a particular version of that past.
On the yacht, Trev and I chat about nautical history, and as he drags me clear of the waterline in the dinghy, we joke that I am like the colonial Lady Jane Franklin being carried through the so-called western wilderness in her makeshift palanquin. It’s hard to resist casual identifications like these with stories that are so present in the cultural milieu: even if I reject them, they work on me. The violence of conquest is a dark strong current running through the wonder of the age of sail; likewise, a colonial fireplace can come to represent the wounding of living Country, forced labor and imprisonment, part of a broader process of genocide and expulsion.
Attending to these material traces provides glimpses of other temporalities, other structures of experience: the patina of colonial nostalgia rubbed back momentarily to see the tortured bodies that might leave a thumbprint in a brick they have been forced to fashion to imprison themselves with, people who must have experienced time and space differently as they served out long sentences and moved across the water in rowboats under the power of their own wasting muscles. Fingerprints in convict-made bricks, sometimes romanticized as “signatures,” are not uncommon in lutruwita/Tasmania, and are often pointed out by tour guides at convict sites.[6] The length, depth, and distinctive profile of a long nail in this brick atop a tiny windswept island, however, cut through my habitual familiarities, momentarily collapsing time as it confronted me with the trace of a particular human body.
To put these bricks in relation to the body is also to recall the imprisonment of the Toogee, or west coast Aboriginal people here in 1833, as well as the intimate connections between land and the body that constitute Country as place and a set of constantly renewed relationships.[7] In the midst of a violent frontier war between colonists and the Aboriginal clans of lutruwita, George Augustus Robinson’s “Friendly Mission” captured and imprisoned Toogee people at Macquarie Harbour as a holding place during their deportation to Flinders Island in the northeast. Their first place of incarceration was in this same building at Grummet Island. Later, they were removed to the penitentiary of the main settlement, where prisoners on the upper floor subjected them to forms of abuse facilitated by the materiality of the architecture the convicted men had themselves labored to build: the convicts hammered on the floorboards to disturb the Toogee, and urinated and poured water through the cracks.[8] When many Toogee later died from respiratory disease because of the poor conditions and impact of their removal from Country, they were buried near the hospital at the main settlement, becoming a permanent part of the landscape’s very matter.
Despite Country’s substance turned against the Toogee by the colonizer in imprisoning brick and timber, reappropriations of such “deadened” Country are on record, with members of the North Midlands Tribe at Campbell Town grinding soft brick into pigment to use in place of ochre for the body paint that is part of cultural identity and ceremony.[9] Such a reclamation literally reinstates brick, as both carceral product and incarcerating agent, upon the body, in a cultural form that affirms the relatedness between place and the body. This reclamation takes place during the period of active convict brickmaking and building, continuing an unbroken 40,000 year history of cultural practice in lutruwita/Tasmania during the height of colonial violence. Between the far horizon of geological time and the 200-year timeline of change I observe in bricks rounded by the ebbing tide, the temporality of Country as past, present and future intervenes.
Against such a horizon, these fireplace bricks as bricks seem suddenly inconsequential: standing at the top of Grummet Island, it’s hard not to be distracted from my ostensible subject matter by the carpet of sheoak needles, wheeling gulls, bright sun on squiggly-veined rocks, crunching pebbles, yellow sandstone yawning with small caves, wind whipping the tannin-dark waters of the harbor into little caps. The living forces of Country in the tea trees whose roots are exploding the fireplaces in slow motion seem suddenly more consequential than the ruins: we might glance back and see spears in their straight-grained trunks.
For a settler-descendent like me, it’s perhaps easier to perceive these forces standing on the pebbly shore, where bricks are most obviously in a state of reclamation, merely transitory conglomerations of earth demoted, or maybe promoted, to the status of shoreline pebbles. We might forget for a moment about the apparently short straight line of building history and look out across the water to imagine still other boats made of bundled paperbark, in a linked and living landscape whose temporality always was, always will be, as Australian Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander people across the continent have been saying for some time. Like the brick itself, that reddens my skin as I turn it over in my hand, the use of convict sites in nationalist mythmaking begins to break down.
Figure 14. View looking northeast into the harbor along the face of Grummet Island sandstone. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
Figure 15. Mixed forest along the banks of the Gordon River, with a grand blackwood (acacia melanoxylon) at center. Photograph by Megan J. Sheard.
Acknowledgements
I thank my generous guide Trevor Norton, whose maps of the harbor are rivalled by none. Trev spotted the brick and exclaimed “Look at that thumb!” This writing is greatly shaped by his intelligent attention. Thanks also to Greg Lehman for his helpful comments on the article draft.
I also acknowledge my own debt to Country and emphasize ongoing Palawa continuity, expressed through projects such as Palawa Kipli, whose knowledge and hospitality I benefited from in lutruwita.
Citation
Megan J. Sheard, “Bricks and the Body, Timber and the Tide: Architectural Traces at the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station,” PLATFORM, October 20, 2025.
Notes
[1] Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Closing Hell’s Gates: The Death of a Convict Station (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009).
[2] Van Diemen’s Land was the name of the British colony until 1856.
[3] Thomas James Lempriere, The Penal Settlements of Early Van Diemen’s Land (Launceston: Royal Society of Tasmania, Northern Branch, 1954). Thanks to Trevor Norton for explaining this environmental change. Today, it’s hard to imagine waves breaking over the top of the rock, since high rainfall does not result in such a substantial change to harbor water levels. Lempriere’s journal also records evidence of very high river flooding not directly observed by his party: recording an expedition up the Gordon River, he notes dislodged branches caught high in treetops by the river’s edge, suggesting the water level had been there not long before.
[4] For Country, see also Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.
[5] Julie Sebanc-Butler, Martin Gibbs, and Richard Tuffin, “Convict Brickmaking at Port Arthur: 1830-1877,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 22 (2020): 119–52.
[6] These marks may not be intentional. See Sebanc-Butler et al., “Convict Brickmaking,” 141. Fingerprints sometimes coexist with the explicitly intentional post-construction marks such as graffiti.
[7] Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803 (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012).
[8] George Augustus Robinson, Friendly Mission; the Tasmanian Journals and Papers, 1829-1834, edited by N. J. B. Plomley (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966), 806.
[9] Thanks to Jenny Smith for directing me to this reference. George Augustus Robinson, Friendly Mission, 535; Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonial Sea Frontier (Hobart: Fullers Bookshop, 2011).
