Fremantle Prison Tour, Jun 2019

👩‍🦰 It only took 7 years of living in WA to finally visit Fremantle Prison! Every time I drove past the high brick walls, I wondered what the inside might look like. Well we didn’t just go inside, we went waaay below ground, rowing and crouching through the tunnels 20m underground.

The highlight for me was when we stopped in a section of the tunnels in the boats and the guide told us to turn off our lights and just sit there silently. It was pitch black with not a whisper of sound from the outside world. Incredibly eerie and super peaceful all at once.

Once we ascended from darkness back into the light of day, we took the Fremantle Prison True Crime tour where our guide told us stories of the most evil criminals and daring escape attempts. We walked through the yards before stepping inside the cells of infamous criminals such as Western Australia's most prolific serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, 'the night caller' who confessed to 10 murders and was hanged. I had Aaron stand in his cell but I was a bit too creeped out to go in there myself haha!

We heard the chilling details of the crimes committed by cold-blooded killers like serial killer David Birnie. Initially Birnie was held at the maximum security Fremantle Prison, but he was soon moved to solitary confinement and he exercised alone under guard in the lane pictured below. It was the only time he was allowed out of his purpose-built cell because they feared other prisoners would kill him. The original death row cells were converted for him and he stayed there until the prison closed in 1990.

Fremantle Prison hosts a range of events, not just tours of the grounds but everything from hiring out the cell blocks for private functions to movie screenings during their Prison Cinema events. I would definitely recommend both the tunnels and true crime tours, and doing them back to back is fine as they aren’t very long either.