Isle of the Dead – Swamp Thing

Port Arthur is the site of a notorious prison farm and village, south of Hobart on the Tasman Peninsula, established during the British colonial administration of Tasmania in the 19th century. Ironically, it was founded as a model prison derived from reformist penal strategies (stressing psychological subjugation as much as physical punishment) manifest in the famous panopticon structure devised by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The prison had closed by 1877 but the ruins of Port Arthur soon became an open-air curiosity, and by the early 20th century a focus of ‘dark tourism’, one morbid attractor of which was the small island just off shore from the prison complex that had become, between 1833 and 1877, the burial site of the convicts, who increasingly had been dying of old age as well as the hard labour they endured. Corpses would be ferried out in rowing boats that would return empty. It became known appropriately as the Isle the Dead, and looking across the channel of water towards it one can’t help but think of the enigmatically portentous Arnold B.cklin painting of the same name from 1880.

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Can we call it anachronic coincidence or an atavistic symptom? B.cklin’s Isle of the Dead, painted a few years after its Tasmanian namesake (about which he would have known nothing) took its last occupant, was the first of five versions of this subject that he produced during the 1880s. Each was barely different to its predecessor, as if he was not so much refining or repurposing but meticulously repeating the image, returning to the scenario in order to methodically duplicate it. That exacting duplication might have been due to the image’s remarkable popularity. B.cklin did these versions to satisfy a market as much as his own pathology. The first of these works had held Strindberg spellbound (he wrote the third act of his play Ghost Sonata upon it).