Going steady in the windy city: Old Geraldton Gaol

With period-piece romance dramas all the rage at the moment, why not suspend reality and imagine your date is a prisoner in a minimum-security gaol? You’re a bored warden’s wife who is too well-read to be exhausted by cooking creamed chicken. After a long day playing thong darts and rationing his bread and tea, your date climbs out — over the shattered glass wall designed to keep prisoners in — to sneak into your quarters. He tells you stories of his crimes, which are petty but provide tantalising content for the letters you send back home to your jealous sisters. Fictional dramatisation aside, a tour of Geraldton’s Old Gaol will enrich your understanding of local history, leaving just enough gaps in between the facts for a creative couple to embellish with fantasy. Geraldton Voluntary Tour Guides run tours on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1.45 pm, starting from the old hospital at the Bill Sewell Complex/Ngurra Barlunggu. My date and I were lucky enough to have Melody Cartwright as our guide. She spoke with passion and knowledge about the former convicts. I wouldn’t be surprised if she is a medium with personal relationships, of varied nature, with the convicts whose stories hung on the walls. I’d hate to spoil Ms Cartwright’s best titbits and historic gems by publishing them in the paper, but make sure you ask your guide about the matron who was “loved, admired and feared by all”, and the man who questioned the weight of his bread. Be sure to get to the old hospital a little early to gawk at the colonial-era travelling doctor’s urethral catheter. It is a nifty two-in-one instrument with a side for both male and female urinary systems. For the sake of Mid Westerners past, I hope it was more effective than other two-in-one products such as combination shampoo and conditioner. Don’t forget to pose with the novelty pillory — which is great fun and completely historically inaccurate — and, test your throwing prowess by playing a popular prison game of thong darts. Be careful — Ms Cartwright says thongs “behave really differently depending on the weather”. There are people in town who drive past these buildings every day but who will never know the stories embedded in its crumbling sandstone. My favourite thing about doing a guided tour at home is amassing hundreds of semi-useless but saucy facts you can impart on friends and family. “Wow, you’re so knowledgable,” they will say. To which, you’ll nod your head smugly in agreement.