ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the kinds of connection that are possible between the pain or joy of generational experience and the forms of identification invoked by that larger periodicity of the nation. It presents argument around a place, Port Arthur in Tasmania, and around a set of stories associated with it. An explorer is made the reluctant witness of an execution carried out in the penal colony. If the apparatus that the explorer witnesses in the penal colony belongs to the old regime of spectacular punishment written on the body, it also, paradoxically, partakes of the spirituality of the new, 'humane' regimes of moral inculcation which operate on the prisoner's soul. Although Port Arthur was retained as a penal settlement well after the other stations were closed, the proportion of its inhabitants classified as paupers, invalids and lunatics – men who had known nothing but prison for most of their lives and were incapable of surviving outside it – grew steadily.
