January 14

Yesterday I tried to blog at the Marrickville library and a warning came up on the screen : You Have Tried To Access a Site Which May Contain Dangerous or Damaging Material. Maybe the blocking software has understood the perversion of people who hang around in dark gardens etc?

We went to the museum in the Hyde Park barracks yesterday, as an expression of new found interest in my convict heritage. Shoes half eaten by rats preserved behind glass under low lights to prevent their further decay, a row of hygienic and lice-deprived hammocks swaying gently in a sanitary breeze. Little plaques and locked display boxes everywhere- as usual the tourist rendering of the Olden Days is so far removed from the reality that the effort of imagination required to feel any empathy is exhausting. In Tuol Sleng, the prison and extermination centre in Phnomh Penh, they had gone to the other extreme and left everything exactly as it had been at the departure of the Khmer Rouge- bare iron bedsteads strewn with pieces of rotting rope and rusting boxes for administering electric shocks – and the only thing under glass was the photographs of the doomed, staring into the camera with the whites of their eyes showing like a herd of panicked horses. The moral of the story? There’s more than one way to skin a cat (arrange a museum).

Will close with selected highlights of the alphabetical listing of things you could be transported for.

illegal pledging
illegal selling
incest
insubordination
insurrection
intoxication
killing
larceny
machine breaking
maiming
manslaughter
miscellaneous