Back in the chain gang

Fort Denison in Syndey Harbour was built by convicts who called it Pinchgut Island.

In Australia, it's not a conversation-opener tactful types use on total strangers. But when you're on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, peering down at the spot where, in 1788, a bunch of convicts and soldiers scrambled ashore to set up Australia's first penal colony, you're ready to throw caution to the wind.

"Any convicts in your family?" I casually ask our BridgeClimb guide, Bernie Wheatley, as we venture across the arc of the bridge. Kitted out in our regulation brown BridgeSuits, we advance like a chain gang on Sydney's breathtaking, 3 1/2-hour, 700-visitors-a-day BridgeClimb trek.

Yes, he does. And far from taking offence, Wheatley cheerfully tells the story of his criminal forefather, portrait artist Francis Wheatley, shipped off to penal-colony Sydney, probably for forgery.

A few years ago, it wasn't the done thing to ask the convict question. Never mind that monuments to convict labour exist all over Sydney and New South Wales - the stately buildings, harbours and roads they hewed with hand tools. Now the locals are openly in love with their convict heritage.

Why the shift in attitude? "It's all part of us growing up as a country. We're confident about who we are," explains Wheatley.

It helps that the majority of convicts transported to Australia weren't of the axe-murderer variety. Many had committed minor misdemeanours by today's standards. Mischievous wrongdoers who, if they were tough enough to survive the privations of penal colony life, often ended up getting the lucky break in Australia that they would never have got back home.

The truth was, even a long stint labouring in leg-irons under the scorching Australian sun was better than the chilling alternative - a short walk to the gallows. Wheatley's forefather was one fortunate con artist. Forgery was a hanging offence in early 19th-century Britain.

All of which explains why Sydney's convict visitor attractions aren't melancholy places but fascinating repositories of clues to the origins of the larrikin, Aussie battler spirit.

None more so than the Hyde Park Barracks Museum - the elegant 1819 Georgian sandstone building that began life as Sydney's principal male convict barracks. Step inside and it has the hushed, reverential feel of a shrine honouring the lowliest of Australia's founding fathers - 15,000 of whom passed through the barracks' iron gates between 1819 and 1848.

Here, locals lean over computers, searching for information about their convict ancestors on the museum's database. Climb the barracks' tired, bowed-in-the-middle wooden staircase - the same staircase exhausted convicts climbed after toiling from sunrise to sunset on public works or slaving for "private masters" - and discover just how minor many of their ancestors' misdeeds were.

Etched into a glass cabinet is a long list of the names and crimes of some of the mainly English and Irish working-class men herded into the Barracks each night. Like the labourer sentenced to life for stealing a sheep; the cabinet maker handed down seven years for thieving a coat; and the almost laughable story of one, presumably balding 64-year-old James Carter, banished from Britain for pinching "curled hair".

Within these convict-built, lime-washed walls, 600 men slept shoulder to shoulder in hammocks. It's a slumber scene the museum has faithfully recreated to awaken our 21st century imaginations. Rows of replica jailhouse hammocks line one of the former dormitories. Artist Heather Borough's life-size, cut-out silhouettes throw ghostly shadows about the room. And voice recordings emulate the prisoners' spoken words. Hop in a hammock and picture it all for yourself.

You learn things at the barracks museum that help explain the Australian makeup today. How the country that gave us the gay Mardi Gras and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in the late 20th century openly tolerated homosexuality in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, beginning with the arrival of the First Fleet of mainly male convicts.

And how the faint stirrings of the nation's social conscience came into being when floggings for "insubordination" and drunkenness were limited to 50 lashes in response to concerns about brutality in the new colony.

You don't have to look far anywhere in Sydney to find remnants of the city's penal-colony past. Next door to the barracks stands the majestic-looking Sydney Hospital, originally a medical tent-city for troops and convicts' basic healthcare. Today, volunteers guide historical tours through the facilities and its nursing museum.

Out in the harbour you'll see a little circular masonry fort - convict-built Fort Denison. The convicts had their own name for it: Pinchgut Island, so-called because of the notoriously meagre rations meted out to those imprisoned on the rocky islet.

Ironically, it now houses a cafe. Enjoy a large, gut-expanding weekend brunch and a tour of the tower with a New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service guide.

Afterwards, call into the old Hero of Waterloo hotel in The Rocks area for a beer and if proprietor Ivan Nelson has a few minutes spare he'll take you downstairs to see the shanghai tunnel that runs underneath his 1845-built pub.

In the bad old days, unscrupulous publicans plied punters and malingering sailors with drink before sneakily opening a trap door in the floor of the hotel and dropping them into the tunnel. By the time the drunkards had sobered up, they'd been press-ganged on to short-handed ships and were already sailing out to sea.

Meanwhile, the publican had pocketed a nice little backhander from the shipping companies.

About 160,000 convicts were taken to Australia between 1788 and 1852 when transportation ended. Once granted their "ticket of leave", numbers of them headed up to the Hunter Valley in search of their fortunes, along the Great North Road Convict Trail carved out by convict road gangs. (Well-preserved sections of the original road remain open today and the region even has an ambitious Adopt a Convict project under way to produce a biography of every known convict who worked on it.)

Nowadays, hordes of well-heeled Sydneysiders and tourists make that same journey - just two hours' drive from the city on today's faster-paced highways. Only these latter-day wayfarers usually go in search of the Hunter Valley's glorious food and wine - always on the menu at restaurants such as the famous Roberts at Pepper Tree, set in an 1876 ivy-covered, ironbark settler's cottage.

For most Kiwis, the Hunter Valley is synonymous with wine - especially Semillon, Chardonnay and Shiraz. And at least a little of the credit for that goes to the ex-convict settlers. Just ask the Eather family, owners of award-winning, boutique winery, Meerea Park Wines.

"It's my generation's attitude towards the convict heritage that has changed," explains 37-year-old, sixth-generation Australian, Garth Eather, as he pours me a delicious glass of Meerea Park Alexander Munro Semillon, named in honour of his great-great-grandfather, Alexander Munro, a former convict boy.

Sentenced in 1831 to five years in Australia for breaking into a grocery store at age 15 to steal 16 shillings and threepence, some cheese, snuff and lollies, Munro matured into an enterprising local hero who built Australia's first gasworks, became a town mayor and was at one stage the major wine producer in New South Wales.

A few decades earlier, another Eather family convict ancestor, Thomas Eather (a rookie highway robber nabbed on his first heist) also wound up in Australia. "Fortunately, for us, because I would live in no other country on earth," grins Garth Eather. Thomas' good behaviour was rewarded with a 202ha land grant in the then wilds of the Hunter Valley.

Out of these two convicts' youthful mistakes came the foundations for future generations of Eather family good fortune. Thousands of Australians could say the same of their families, too. Australia's convict heritage has "built a very strong country, a very tough people", muses Garth Eather proudly.

So go on, ask that convict question. Australians love any opportunity to answer it.

Checklist

* Getting There

Qantas offers daily services to Sydney from Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. For further details on airfares and package holidays to Sydney phone Qantas on 0800 767 400, visit www.qantas.co.nz (link below) or contact your bonded travel agent.

 * Activities
Details of the Sydney Harbour Bridge BridgeClimb are at www.bridgeclimb.com (link below).  Tickets cost from NZ$181 for adults and $110 for children depending on when you want to go.

Hyde Park Barracks Museum, Queens Square, Macquarie St, Sydney, is open 9.30am to 5pm Entry: $11 for adults, $5.50 concession, $22 family. Guided tours of other convict-built sites are available through the Historic Houses Trust. See www.hht.net.au (link below).

Fort Denison brunch costs $52 for adults, including ferry transfers to and from and the guided tour. Bookings on (612) 9247 5033 or visit www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au (link below).

Meerea Park Wines Cellar Door: The Boutique Wine Centre, open 9am to 4.30pm seven days, Broke Rd, Pokolbin, Hunter Valley www.meereapark.com.au (link below).

* Caroline Courtney travelled courtesy of Tourism Australia, Tourism New South Wales and Qantas.