The Gaol opened at Fannie Bay in September 1883 with a total of thirty one prisoners, who had previously been housed in a one room stone lock-up in Mitchell Street. Blocks A and B comprised only sixteen bare cells, twelve foot square, containing inbuilt ringbolts and restraining chains, as well as a kitchen and washhouse. In 1887, the Infirmary was added. Because there was not much room this building was sometimes used as sleeping space for 'good conduct prisoners' although it was outside the perimeter of the original fence.

John George Knight was appointed Deputy Sheriff of the original Palmerston Gaol and continued to hold that office after the transfer to Fannie Bay. Knight is credited with the design of the Infirmary building. Despite the strength of the original buildings, the fence surrounding the prison was a constant source of complaint.

Made initially of corrugated iron and bush timber, it became prey for termites and a cyclone in 1907 weakened the structure to such an extent that it was considered very little impediment to freedom. By 1920, the guards wore regulation uniforms and the prisoners were employed on civic projects.

In 1921 the construction of the East Point Road by inmates was completed. The building of a separate cell for female prisoners was finally finished in April 1928. During this year a concrete floor was laid throughout in the Infirmary. In the 1930s, external stucco rendering was applied to the exterior of Cell Block A and B.

During World War II the prison was damaged by Japanese air raids. The prisoners were all pardoned and released and the buildings taken over by the military. It was resumed as a gaol in 1946. In 1952, substantial alterations were made to the Infirmary to construct a gallows for the hanging of two men for the murder of a Darwin taxi driver and the boundary fence was extended to include this building.

This work was commenced three weeks before the executions on 7th August. Two small rooms, which had been installed by the military during World War II, were converted into the condemned cell and prison officials became very superstitious about the building, a tradition that continued until Fannie Bay Gaol was closed.

The boundaries were extended at least twice, before the 1952 hangings and then in 1957 to fill out the south-west corner of the present-day site and erect a second watch tower. In March 1956 a 'native section' was opened with eight inmates which separated Aboriginal offenders from non-Aboriginal although this does not seem to have been in use for long.

In this period also, although little detail is known, the steel and mesh buildings of the kitchen and mess, remand section and C and D medium security wings were also constructed. By the 1970s the Gaol still had the corrugated iron fence and inside was split into different yards. There were two catwalk towers where officers spent four hours on and then changed over. From the vantage point of the tower they could see all the activities in the complex as a whole.

Cyclone Tracy damaged some of the buildings in the Fannie Bay Gaol complex, although considering the devastation wrought by the Cyclone in the new northern suburbs of Darwin, the destruction at the Gaol overall was relatively light. The Cyclone destroyed the laundry, in addition to blowing away the fence. At night, the prisoners were moved into town to the underground cells of the Police Station.

During the day, they were used as work parties to clean up around the Gaol and the nearby streets. Eventually, in 1979, the Gaol was closed and thus ending nearly one hundred years of penal history in the Northern Territory.

Amongst the prisoners that spent time at the Gaol were some, like Charles Kirkland, publisher of the Northern Territory Times, or Harold Nelson, were imprisoned in Fannie Bay Gaol over issues of conscience or politics. Nelson took on the Commonwealth in what was to become a long-running battle for political representation at a Federal level for Territorians.

In 1921 Nelson, as a protest, refused to pay his taxes claiming 'No taxation without representation'. Nelson and nineteen others were imprisoned at Fannie Bay Gaol. The people of Darwin were sympathetic to the protest and visited the prisoners bringing them Sunday roast lunches and the Darwin Brass Band held concerts outside the Gaol walls. The campaign was eventually successful and in 1922 the Territory Representation Act was passed which gave the Northern Territory the right to send a representative to Canberra.

The member for the Northern Territory, however, was not entitled to vote, only to debate. In December 1922, Harold Nelson was elected to the House of Representatives as the Independent member for the Northern Territory. After this first term, Nelson held the seat for the Australian Labor Party, until 1934.

Nemarluk was an Aboriginal bushranger who, with a group of followers, ranged the area of land around the Northern Territory and Western Australia border. In August 1931, he led a group who killed three Japanese fishermen from the lugger Ouida at Treachery Bay, near the mouth of the Fitzmaurice River.

Nemarluk was captured, tried and eventually imprisoned in Fannie Bay Gaol but escaped in 1933. He joined the sanitary gang who used to march out the back gate with drums of effluent to empty into the sea. Nemarluk slipped away and hid in the nearby rainforest. He was eventually re-captured the following year and once again imprisoned at Fannie Bay Gaol.

He became ill with double pneumonia and was taken to Darwin hospital. Obviously non to impressed with the hospital, Nemarluk left and crawled or walked back all of the way to the Gaol. He knocked on the Gaoler's door in the early hours of the morning asking to be let back in. He remained there until so ill, it was thought best to return him to the hospital, where he died.

Tuckiar was an Arnhem Land Aborigine who was imprisoned in Fannie Bay Gaol in 1934 after being convicted of murdering police Constable McColl. McColl had gone to Woodah Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria to apprehend the killers of the Japanese crews of the Myrtle Olga and the Raff who had been massacred at Caledon Bay in 1932.

McColl's life ended, speared by Tuckiar who mistakenly thought McColl had come to arrest him for an earlier murder. After a long series of attempts to apprehend Tuckiar he, and his alleged fellow offenders, were brought to Darwin for trial. Tuckiar was eventually tried, convicted and sentenced to be hanged.

Because of certain irregularities in the trial, the case was appealed and the verdict quashed. This did not benefit Tuckiar, however, who disappeared mysteriously. Rumour has it, that police loyal to the memory of McColl, had taken events into their own hands, murdered Tuckiar and disposed of his body in Darwin Harbour.

As you enter the grounds of the Gaol notice the fence. The original fence of 1883 was described by an early commentator as a 'nine feet iron fence, over which prisoners can get as easily as an astute lawyer can go through an Act of Parliament'. The fence you can see today is colourbond steel sheet built in 1976. Cyclone Tracy blew down the old fence in 1974.

The newest part of the Gaol grounds is the medium security wings C and D which were added some time about 1960. These buildings are light weight iron and weldmesh structures which are suitable for the climate and they survived Cyclone Tracy very well. The small guardhouses in the south-west and north-east corners were constructed as temporary measures after Cyclone Tracy blew down the watch-towers in those corners.

The Infirmary dates back to 1887. It is a good example of Darwin tuck-pointed porcellanite rubble construction. Although some of the windows and doors are not original, much of the original joinery is intact including a complete range of architraves and box frames, with beading, sashes, runners and even weights.

The roof blew off during Cyclone Tracy and the building was covered by a temporary parasol roof, supported and tied down by anchored steel posts internally and scaffolding externally. This building, which was the site of the 1952 hangings, is reputed to be haunted and interviews with Prison staff suggest that it was avoided by both staff and prisoners during the operation of the Gaol. This building was used in the period of racial segregation. The segregation appears to have been discontinued after about 1963.

The concrete slab west of the Infirmary is the remains of the laundry. Fannie Bay Gaol operated as a labour prison. There were old coppers set up on the slab for the laundry work. In the 1960s a laundry was built and the prison had the contract to launder the sheets of the Government hostels and other organisations in the town. This entire building blew away during Cyclone Tracy.

Past the guard house and ablutions block, there are the separate confinement cells and yard which were built at some time in the 1950s. The padded cell was constructed in about May 1955. The design was severely criticised by the Department of Works for being substandard: ceiling too low, light fixtures not flush with the ceiling, door aperture too small, grills unsuitable and rounded padding omitted.

Due to the lack of facilities in the Northern Territory for mentally disturbed people, they were often imprisoned at Fannie Bay. Unless their behaviour was peaceful, people with mental disturbances were confined within this section.

The oldest part of the Gaol complex is the muster yard. This suggests that this area may have always been used for this purpose. The steel-framed building with post-Cyclone roof next to open muster area was used during inclement weather.

The separate women's' area appeared at the Gaol in 1928 in the form of one cell. Adjoining the cell was a shower and potato store. These facilities were shared by the male officers. This proximity contributed to some of the areas of concern which were aired in a 1956 Inquiry and the structure was demolished. The current women's' section is a concrete block building with corrugated galvanised iron roof which was constructed some time after 1956.

The children's' section was originally constructed as a contagious disease isolation cell, possible as a result of the public outcry concerning the Gaol accepting prisoners from East Arm Leprosarium. The boundary at the north-west corner of the Gaol site was extended, with a former Gaoler's residence demolished. Plans were requested for a three cell isolation block.

The plans were submitted to the Commonwealth Department of Works, Northern Territory in January 1963 and the building constructed some time after that. The building was used most recently in Gaol history as accommodation for refugee Vietnamese boat people.

The oldest building in the complex takes in cells A and B. The masonry walls are of course porcellanite rubble, like the Infirmary, but are now covered with a cement render. The former wooden truss roof has been replaced by a modern gable roof of low pitch.

Except for a band of rubble visible at the west end and the iron grill doors and windows, no part of the original building is visible externally. The interior however, is intact and little has changed since 1883. WC's have been introduced into each cell and many of the securing eye bolts for shackling prisoners to the wall have been removed.

Although most of the plastering on the lower parts of the walls was redone after Tracy, the upper sections retain the original parts. All corridor ceilings are new but the iron work on the doors and windows is largely original or early. At the west end, the concrete floor and wall bases indicate where the gaoler's office and early reception area were before they were demolished.

The timber and iron framed building, the Mess hut, is in fair condition. The building contains a number of fittings and services dating back to its period of use. Security precautions, such as increasing the height of some of the internal division walls and installing barbed wire baffles were instituted in the 1950s after the cook escaped out of the kitchen and up and over the roof of the Infirmary. Close proximity to female cells also appeared to cause problems. The building there now was described as 'new' in 1960. It was damaged, in part, by the Cyclone of 1974.

Inside the walls of the prison it is hot and still. Go back to the oldest sections of the Gaol and look about you and try to imagine what it was like to be a prisoner in Fannie Bay over one hundred years ago. Daily, you would be taken down to the beach for a wash and to empty the night soil.

Around the Gaol are the experimental agricultural gardens where you might have been taken to work. By 1920 you could look out and see the well established airstrip on the site of the present Ross Smith Avenue, although the treeless dusty paddocks and fences might seem bleak. Your fellow prisoners, many of whom, like the population of Darwin, are Malay or Chinese. Other prisoners are Aboriginal, scarred with cicatrixes of tribal honours, from remote areas not even marked on the map.

At night it is still in Cell Blocks A and B, with only the creaking of the corrugated iron cooling down at night, and the faint sound of someone calling out in their sleep. It is so hot you cannot sleep and the passing light from the gaoler's round reminds you that you are a long way from home.

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