Boggo RoadGaol

Jack Sim has run tours through Boggo Road Gaol in Dutton Park, Brisbane, since 1998, and in December 2012 the Queensland Government formally awarded his company, Boggo Road Gaol Pty Ltd, the right to operate historical tours at the site. Known as Brisbane's "Man in Black," Sim guides the Ghosts & Gallows Tour and the family-friendly History Tour himself, drawing on former prisoners' and officers' own accounts rather than invented lore. In 1999 he founded the Prison Players, a troupe that re-enacts scenes from the gaol's history on site. Over more than two decades he has built out a wider program under the Historic Australia banner, including Ghost Tours Australia and Crime Tours Australia, and taken on a second heritage site, the Venus Gold Battery in Charters Towers. Boggo Road remains the flagship: one former Brisbane prison, its record of executions, escapes and incarcerations told by the person who has been walking its cell blocks and gallows yard longer than anyone else still doing it. The History Tour and the after-dark Ghosts & Gallows Tour both depart from the gaol itself, not a satellite office, and both are pitched around Sim's own accumulated knowledge of the site.