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One of the first things you learn as a foreign correspondent is that history matters. Everywhere. So as I toured Port Arthur this week on a brisk Tasmanian morning, I wondered what the restored convict camp might have to teach.

Our guides gave us clues more than conclusions. They pointed to the garden for guards’ families, set up to resemble an English country estate. They told us about punishment. They shared tales of individual prisoners and the British commandants who ran the place.

But it was the cemetery just off the coast that lingered in my mind.

Port Arthur’s upper-class overseers called it Isle of the Dead or Isle de Mort, and they were buried with headstones on the island’s highest point.