‘I remember it as a very foreboding place. I was sixteen, a first offender, but I was housed along with the adults. I had an uncle doing life — Les Shirtcliff. He looked after me. Made sure no one gave me a hard time.’1 Jim Shepherd, not yet the Diamond Jim of his glory years with the Mr Asia drug syndicate in the 1980s, entered Mount Eden for the first time in early 1958. The precocious career criminal had convictions for aggravated robbery and burglary, and he spent two months in the remand unit of the country’s toughest prison before serving the rest of his three-year sentence in Invercargill Borstal.
Jim was stocky, strong and quick to take offence. ‘If you spoke to a prison officer, you were liable to get battered. There were a few decent ones, but it was a very primitive environment,’ he recalled. He soon found himself in a fight with several officers in the exercise yard, and was sent to the solitary cells on a punishment diet. ‘You got eight slices of bread and a pint of water a day. Every fourth day you got a plate of porridge in the morning and a hot meal at night. Then back to bread and water … They were still cracking rocks in the quarry in those days. They did the blasting at night time, and in the morning the guys would find these rocks with round holes through them where the explosive had gone in. They put iron bars through these rocks and used them for weights. Those guys were huge — muscles on their muscles.’
By his own account, over the next twenty years Jim Shepherd was in and out of prison ‘like a yo-yo. What a fuckin’ waste. There was no rehabilitation. They locked you in your cell about 3 or 4 p.m. and let you out again at eight the next morning. Nothing to read. It was very cold and miserable, but you adapt to it.’2
The son of a Pākehā father and a Northland Māori mother, raised in inner Auckland’s Freemans Bay and with little evidence of any education, the teenage Jim Shepherd typified the inmate population of the day.3 Sam Barnett’s optimistic predictions of a prison workforce versed in Māori culture had yet to eventuate, and some of Mount Eden’s officers deliberately provoked Māori inmates by calling them ‘black bastards’. Fights in the exercise yards were frequent in the early 1960s. When one broke out, other inmates formed a ring several men deep around the brawlers, making it difficult and even dangerous for officers to intervene. However, a few officers were accomplished combatants themselves. One was a national judo champion, and Samoan-born Tuna Scanlan held New Zealand and Commonwealth boxing titles.4 Prison etiquette forbade any complaints to authorities after these encounters, and injuries that could not be concealed were reported as resulting from accidents such as ‘falling down the stairs’.
Officers carried batons on patrol, but after a group of inmates beat an officer with his own weapon the practice was ended. From 1961, the only armed officers were tower sentries issued with Greener riot guns (single-shot weapons that fired a cartridge loaded with light shot), and those on night watch and escort duties who carried .38 revolvers. In no other prison in the country were staff routinely armed.5
Imaginative and well-organised inmates upheld Mount Eden’s tradition of escapes, notably in February 1961 when Trevor Nash, halfway through a seven-year sentence for a huge payroll robbery, simply strolled out of the engineering workshop where he was working. The workshop stood outside the perimeter wall but was surrounded by a three-metre barbed-wire fence — in which a hole had been conveniently cut. That night Nash became the first prison escaper to have his likeness shown to the nation on their black-and-white TV screens; previous escapers had been seen by the public only through the meatsafe grille of fuzzy newspaper photographs. Despite this unprecedented level of exposure, the nerveless safe-cracker remained at large for a record five months, longer than any other maximum-security fugitive before him. He was recaptured in Melbourne in July, smartly dressed and with his hair dyed but still apparently recognisable to a passing off-duty detective.6
The following year quarrying activities ceased permanently, bringing an end to more than a century of rock-breaking at the prison. The impetus for this decision seems to have been a misjudged explosion that sent a rock through the window of an adjacent Auckland Grammar School building, but prison staff were relieved that a weak link in the institution’s security system had at last been eliminated.7 The quarry had given intending escapers a route outside the perimeter wall, as well as opportunities to acquire gelignite and detonators for more spectacular breakouts. In the final months before the quarry was shut down, Jim Shepherd was back inside Mount Eden and had gained a reputation as a skilled safe-blower. Two other inmates showed him blasting materials they had acquired, and asked for instruction in using them: ‘I primed the gelignite for the sticks, and told them how long they’d got before the explosive went off. That’ll never happen again. Things were pretty hectic back in those days.’8
Once its quarrying operations came to an end, Mount Eden changed permanently in ways both obvious and unforeseen. Fragmenting the mount’s basalt rock faces had been the defining daily activity for most inmates since the prison opened, and supplied the administration with a significant stream of income to offset running costs. The ritual of forming work gangs and marching them to and from the quarry was central to the prison’s routine.
After the quarry’s closure, some inmates were still given training in the tailoring, bootmaking, engineering, plumbing or carpentry workshops, or assigned to duties around the prison itself, but large numbers of active young men now spent hours every day milling around cramped, wire-enclosed yards whenever they were not confined to their cells. In place of the rehabilitation programmes introduced under Haywood’s superintendence and largely removed under his successor’s, a new Act extended remission of sentence from a quarter to a third for inmates whose conduct had been exemplary or who had ‘during his sentence performed some outstanding act of service’.9
In the early 1960s the overall inmate population was changing in other ways that did not bode well for the institution’s peaceful functioning. The chronic overcrowding of the previous decade was somewhat relieved when lower-security accommodation became available at the Waikune and Rangipo prison farms.10 But as the number of young and short-sentenced inmates dropped as a consequence, Mount Eden’s exercise yards were increasingly dominated by long-serving hard men. The kingpins no longer exercised the same degree of authority over other inmates, and were replaced as the most respected and feared figures in the prison hierarchy by notorious criminals and high-risk escapers who spent much of their time in the back basement, the dimly lit detention unit at the end of the east wing. A thin blue seam down the side of their trousers and a white patch on the back of their jackets distinguished the occupants of this unit from other inmates, and most of them wore it as a badge of pride.
From late 1962 the ‘back basement’ housed a national celebrity, perhaps the best known and most widely admired criminal figure in this country’s history. Then aged 25, George Wilder was a wiry whippet of a man, a skilled bushman with jug ears, a sly grin and an instinctive contempt for authority. For a felon with such a remarkable reputation, his crime sheet was distinctly modest — a few thefts, burglaries and car conversions (he favoured Jaguars), but no suggestion of violence or other very serious offences. What distinguished Wilder from other petty criminals, and earned him a cell in the back basement, was his apparently irresistible urge to make a break for the outdoors and remain there for considerable periods undetected.
He was one year into a four-year stretch at New Plymouth Prison when, in May 1962, he scaled a wall and disappeared into the Central North Island back country, a region he knew well. For eight weeks he evaded all pursuers before he was spotted and tracked down west of Lake Taupō. He arrived at Mount Eden with a further three years added to his original sentence, and was housed in the back basement security unit.11 In January 1963 six of that unit’s 14 cells were occupied, all by repeat escapers. Prison officers made half-hourly checks on them and turned over every cell daily, yet somehow Wilder managed to acquire hacksaw blades and a homemade key from inmates in other wings. Overnight, working silently between the half-hourly patrols, he cut out the lock from his cell door and went around the unit offering to release his neighbours. Frank Matich, Patrick Wiwarena and Reuben Awa, all under 30, agreed to take part in the escape attempt. They crammed into his cell, Wilder relocked their doors, and they knotted sheets into ropes while waiting for a prison officer to enter the unit.
Before 6 a.m. prison officer R. Grubb, on a routine night-shift patrol, unlocked the heavy steel grille separating the detention unit from the rest of the prison. He was promptly knocked unconscious by one of the four escapers and dragged into a toilet where he was bound and gagged. Using his keys, Wilder and his mates were able to open a further grille leading to the narrow, high-walled yard where executions had once taken place, and which was now the only place where they were permitted to exercise. By standing on each other’s shoulders, the men could reach the steel mesh covering the yard and cut through it with the hacksaw blades. Clearly visible in the morning sunlight, they dodged a blast from a sentry’s shotgun as they rushed for the outer wall and lowered themselves down it with their homemade ropes.12
Wilder’s three companions were picked up within days but he, as usual, took to the bush and remained at large for an extraordinary six months. During that time his reputation for resourcefulness and non-violence, fuelled by national and even international newspaper coverage, grew to mythic dimensions. The inmates of Mount Eden cheered every new report of outwitted police search parties and jeered at their own officers, who were already humiliated by their failure to contain this homegrown Houdini. The more frustrated the police became, the more the public chose to side with this rugged and amiable outlaw.
The Australian press, true to its country’s convict origins, described Wilder as ‘something of a national hero’ and ‘a champion jailbreaker’.13 The folksong boom was at its height in this period, and Wilder was awarded the ultimate accolade of a satirical ballad, ‘The Wild(er) New Zealand Boy’. To an old tune, the Howard Morrison Quartet mockingly celebrated ‘a restless man’ who:
With Matich and two Maori blokes, went missing from the can And George who never missed a trick, used Matich as decoy. They captured everyone except the Wild New Zealand Boy.14
Finally, a tipoff sent police to a lonely deer culler’s hut on the Napier– Taupō Road, where they found Wilder comfortably installed with two rifles and plenty of fresh trout and venison. Many of the public thought he had earned the right to freedom during his six months on the run.15 Nevertheless, he was returned to prison to serve a sentence that now extended to a daunting 13 years, longer than that imposed on most murderers.
During the early months of 1963, when Wilder was still at large, Mount Eden’s superintendent, the well-intentioned but ill-fated Horace Haywood, was transferred to Paparua Prison. The move was not officially a demotion, but after eight years of presiding over executions and known to be drinking heavily, Wilder’s escape may have been the final nail in the coffin of his career.16 As his replacement, the Justice Department looked for someone capable of imposing strict discipline and rigid control over this crisis-prone institution.17 The successful candidate, Edward Buckley, had spent his entire career in the prison service and the previous 10 years as a superintendent. He had a reputation for uncompromising toughness with both staff and inmates, and a grim and humourless manner that earned him the unaffectionate nickname of ‘Black Buckley’.18
The ‘Wild(er) New Zealand Boy’ himself, George Wilder, seen here in an interlude between escapes. STUFF/AUCKLAND STAR COLLECTION
He immediately announced a more punitive and inflexible regime than his predecessor’s. Many of the remaining inmate privileges accumulated under Haywood were withdrawn, and education and training programmes were reduced and closely monitored. Within weeks of Buckley’s takeover, this sharp reversal of policy was tested by a small-scale inmate revolt. About a hundred prisoners gathered in the main yard, refused orders to form work parties, and demanded to discuss the new and harsher conditions. Buckley, whose attitude towards inmates was consistently cold and hostile, stood firm, and the protest quickly collapsed. However, few believed that this incident marked the end of inmate unrest.19
Staff were at first inclined to welcome the changes Buckley introduced. They were instructed that their principal function was now the custody rather than the rehabilitation of inmates, and security systems were upgraded by improving the floodlighting of external walls and installing rolls of razor wire along the top of the perimeter.20 In the top-security back basement, patrols were to be carried out every 15 minutes rather than half-hourly, and electronic locking and warning systems replaced the manual locks and keys.21 Staff were forced, however, to balance these advances against the deficiencies in their new superintendent’s personality and style of management. Buckley was a weak character who aimed to appear powerful by shouting, abusing and bullying his officers, often within the hearing of inmates, who relished the spectacle. It was a power structure that offered little hope of reducing the existing level of unrest.
From 1960 the innovative and occasionally incautious Sam Barnett was succeeded as Justice Secretary by a solidly scientific legal scholar, Dr John Robson.22 He found a longstanding ally in Justice Minister Ralph Hanan, one of a handful of National Party ministers who crossed the floor in 1961 to vote to abolish the death penalty. In an impressive programme of work on new and expanded prisons, his ministry’s 1961 annual report announced that a maximum-security prison would be ‘[o]ne of the most urgent of these new institutions’ and would ‘enable us to convert Mount Eden into an institution for trial, remand and short-sentence inmates … Mount Eden is not a full maximum security prison on modern standards.’23 The following year a site for this state-of-the-art prison was purchased in a placid backwater north of Auckland, surrounded by orchards and market gardens, called Paremoremo.
With Mount Eden due to be downgraded to a lower-security institution, it was left largely under Buckley’s control, with little attention from national office. The breakout by Wilder and his cronies in early 1963 forced a rapid reassessment of priorities. Paremoremo was not due to open until the end of the decade, and the country’s most refractory prisoners seemed likely to retest the limits of their century-old establishment before then. Hanan promised to speed up work on Paremoremo; in the meantime, while acknowledging that ‘the building at Mount Eden is quite unsuitable as a modern security prison’, he undertook to build a new high-security unit to replace the back basement detention unit.24 Yet even this smaller facility could not be summoned up quickly within a crowded, decaying building.
In a 1964 Justice Department report on the surging nationwide prison population, Mount Eden was described as ‘the criminal terminus … Vicious men bent on violence, men who recognise neither discipline nor self-discipline, are housed within its walls. The dangerous psychopath, the aggressive simpleton and the periodic psychotic are also there.’25 Allowing for the insensitive terminology of the time, this is a reasonable summation of the longest-serving and most dangerous section of the inmate population, but does not recognise the much larger number of first-offending, short-term and youthful prisoners such as Jim Shepherd who continued to be admitted.
Those inmates tended to spend only a few weeks inside the weeping stone walls of the old prison before a transfer south to newer and lower-security prison camps. That pattern, and increasing use of non-custodial penalties for young and petty offenders, meant that for the first time in some years Mount Eden’s inmate numbers fell during the early 1960s. Of the smaller number who remained, more than 20 were lifers and 34 were preventative detainees. This represented a higher proportion of long-serving inmates, and of inmates with proven records of violence, than at almost any time in the past.
Buckley’s term as superintendent was rocked periodically by newspaper exposés of conditions within his jail, based on information supplied by former inmates and staff. Truth ran a series of articles in 1963 alleging that prison officers performing random cell searches routinely found contraband, including weapons, escape equipment and alcoholic brews made from baker’s yeast and almost any other fermentable food scraps. At least as disturbing were the claims that some inmates ran flourishing bookmaking businesses on the results of races broadcast over the internal speaker system. As currency, fellow inmates used the one-ounce tobacco packets known as ‘figs’ that were sold for threepence each in the canteen. Truth alleged that certain prison staff were also keen customers of these gambling rings, and conveyed large wagers and real money outside the walls on behalf of inmates.26
Buckley and his superiors could not credibly reject all of these revelations but maintained that they were exaggerated. They also seized on admissions in the articles that certain aspects of prison life were better than in the past, such as the declining influence of kingpins and ‘stand-over bullies’. Even the most legendary kingpin of them all, ‘Maori Mac’ McDonald, eventually lost his former authority. In 1965 he was back inside serving 14 years, and the much younger Jim Shepherd, although half his size, took him on hand-to-hand in one of the corridors. McDonald, once he recovered from his astonishment, smacked the young upstart about at will, but Shepherd kept coming back for more until a kindly senior officer named Dan Cavanagh stepped in and stopped the fight. The novelty of seeing someone willing to stand up to the massive Maori Mac — and especially such a mismatched opponent — demolished the bigger man’s mana in the eyes of other inmates.27
A year after Truth blew the whistle on corrupt and illegal practices inside Mount Eden, its rival weekly, the Sunday News, did the same. Its informants were an articulate ex-inmate identified as Kevin and a former prison officer, Graham Reddaway. In addition to the now-familiar allegations of unchecked violence between inmates, improvised weaponry and tattooing gear, and home-brewing in the workshops, they described in detail some aspects of the formerly unmentionable sexual life of the prison community. The small women’s prison extending from the north wing was entirely sealed off to male prisoners, said Kevin, but the inmates managed to send written messages back and forth nonetheless. ‘A slit is cut in a tennis ball and a note inserted. The ball is then belted high over the women’s section where the note is read, and the reply is sent by the same method.’28 According to psychologist Donald McKenzie, the women often added a strand of pubic hair to their messages. In this way a torrid correspondence could be kept up even though neither party knew for sure which inmate they were addressing.
The shower room, ‘centre of intrigues and physical delights’. Illustration from The Rock Orchid, an unpublished homoerotic novel set in Mount Eden in the early 1960s. ‘IN THE ORIENT’ (1964–1968), C. E. R. WEBBER PAPERS, MS-3333/198/004, HOCKEN COLLECTIONS UARE TAOKA O HA-KENA, UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO
Both men confirmed that this hypothetical sex was not the only kind available in the prison. Male homosexuality was still illegal, so a number of inmates were serving time for having sex with other consenting adult males, and a large proportion of the rest were evidently prepared to adapt their behaviour to their current circumstances. ‘In any single-sex residential establishment,’ wrote McKenzie, ‘homosexuality will inevitably appear. Homosexual behaviour of this kind is not necessarily an indication of permanent homosexual tendencies, but is often an adaptation to the abnormal compression and sexual frustration of an all-male or all-female population.’29
Kevin and Reddaway both agreed that ‘[h]omosexuality is rife throughout the jail, though many men who were perverts now were normal when they were sent to prison’. Kevin revealed that ‘[m]any of the longterm inmates have their own “boys” — or as they are called in prison jargon, “Mark Foys”.’ This term appears to be antipodean rhyming slang — Mark Foys was a well-known Sydney department store. ‘Some longtermers have managed to get these boys as cellmates. Most of these “couples” are in the east wing, commonly known as the “married quarters”.’30
Reddaway, after eight years on the Mount Eden staff, felt that homosexual activity, consensual or otherwise, was encouraged by the ‘two men to a cell’ scheme, which had been introduced in 1958–59 in response to overcrowding. He added that ‘[p]risoners locked up for crimes of sexual violence or who have been convicted of homosexuality are the easiest to handle in prison. They are inveterate churchgoers. The most difficult to handle are young men convicted of crimes of violence. Life prisoners and those serving preventive detention are easier to manage.’31 The Sunday News editor weighed in by describing Mount Eden as a ‘festering eyesore’ and ‘Auckland’s darkest disgrace’, and reiterated the tired refrain that the ‘Government must put the building of the new maximum security prison at the top of its list of urgent works’.32
These articles provoked a much wider public reaction than Truth’s revelations of the previous year. One MP brandished a copy of the Sunday News in the House, and Justice Minister Hanan blustered that the allegations were ‘highly exaggerated and in some aspects highly defamatory to certain people’, but he ordered a full inquiry into them, the first Buckley had faced as superintendent. Former prison officer Reddaway told this inquiry that during his initial training course in Wellington ‘we were informed … that homosexuality was a disease and there was no cure for it; it is something that is rife’.
Other informants were less dependable. Noel Tuohy, an influential and long-serving inmate, earnestly told the inquiry that he had heard of homosexual activity within the prison but never witnessed it himself.33 In private he told Donald McKenzie that he was one of those fortunate inmates who had arranged to share a cell in the ‘married quarters’ with ‘a very nice young Maori boy’.34 Under Horace Haywood’s leadership, consensual homosexual relationships had in fact been tolerated as conducive to overall harmony. One enthusiastic member of the inmates’ writing class had produced a full-length (and to date unpublished) erotic novel, The Rock Orchid, celebrating the joys of inter-racial gay sex in the cells and during the kitchen night shift.35
Buckley disputed the most salacious of the Sunday News claims and insisted that ‘I do everything in my power to transfer young offenders from Auckland Prison but there are cases when I am unsuccessful’, as ‘the facilities at Auckland Prison are totally inadequate for modern penal practice’. Inmates convicted for homosexual offences were kept apart from others, he said, but still managed to assert their identity by plucking their eyebrows and using black boot polish as eye shadow. Buckley said he was determined to stamp out all homosexual activity in future. The inquiry concluded that he ran the prison under a regime that was ‘strict but fair’, and it largely absolved him of the regulatory failings revealed by the Sunday News.36
His own staff were not so forgiving. They disliked their superintendent’s high-handed and abusive manner, and after the initial lift in morale following his appointment, the old problem of rapid staff turnover reappeared. Those who remained were inclined to vent their frustrations on the inmates, who in turn seized on any opportunity to resist or retaliate. Within a year of taking over the prison with a brief to restore order and prevent further escapes, Black Buckley had isolated himself in his office in the Dome, while tension in the exercise yards ran higher than before his arrival.37
Down in the east wing basement, Wilder and his fellow escapers had new neighbours. Ron Jorgensen and John Gillies, both facing life for a Mafia-style sub-machinegun murder of two sly-groggers in the Auckland suburb of Remuera, had arrived in the detention unit in early 1964. The two men were celebrated underworld figures with associates at the upper levels of organised crime. In February 1965, Gillies, after a year in prison, was ready to attempt a breakout along with Wilder and another basement-dweller, Lennie Evans, serving 16 years. The key component of their plan was a sawn-off shotgun, probably smuggled into the prison in several parts.38
Dan Cavanagh, the grizzled veteran officer who had stepped in to break up the fight between Shepherd and Maori Mac, had just returned Evans to the security unit with two colleagues one morning when Gillies emerged from the toilet pointing the shotgun at them. He took the officers’ keys and used them to release Wilder from his cell, and the three escapers ordered the officers at gunpoint to head for the stoneyard behind the prison, which had its own gate through the perimeter wall. The officer at the gate was ordered to open it, and he obeyed for fear of harming the hostages. The escapers then commandeered the only available prison vehicle, an elderly flatbed truck, and climbed aboard along with Cavanagh, the single hostage they selected to accompany them. Why they made this choice is not known, but Cavanagh had spent four years as a POW in wartime Germany and during that time had escaped himself. Few other officers are likely to have remained as calm while menaced with a firearm by desperate men.
The truck smashed through a crash barrier and out of the prison grounds, peppered by a blast of buckshot from a sentry. Until this point the escape had gone according to plan, but now it began to falter. The old truck proved an unsuitable getaway vehicle as it trundled at its stately top speed of about 40 kilometres an hour through the quiet and leafy streets surrounding the prison. With pursuit vehicles gaining, the three desperadoes pulled into the driveway of a house in Mount Eden’s Horoeka Avenue, ran inside, and added its occupants, an elderly woman and her adult son, to their hostage tally.
The house was quickly surrounded by police, including members of the recently formed Armed Offenders Squad taking part in their first major operation. The escapers recognised the futility of their position and released the woman after some hours. ‘I wasn’t really frightened,’ she told reporters later. ‘They seemed quite all right. We weren’t harmed.’ Crawling on hands and knees to remain below the window ledges, Gillies and his two companions still hoped to win some small concessions in return for their surrender. As night approached and armed police prepared to assault using teargas, the escapers settled for cigarettes and bottles of whisky and gin provided by a considerate neighbour, then threw out the shotgun and submitted to arrest. Like his fellow hostage, Officer Cavanagh reported that apart from spending anxious hours under the twin barrels of their gun, he had suffered no ill-treatment at the hands of the three escapers: ‘In fact, we were on good terms.’39 The escapers’ civil treatment of their hostages did not count for much in court, where each of them was given an extra five years. This brought Wilder’s term to a total of 18 years, the longest determinate sentence imposed in New Zealand to that date.40
In response to this short-lived but sensational escape bid, detention unit inmates were kept in their cells for 22 hours a day, with an hour’s exercise morning and night in the adjacent high-walled yard where the scaffold had stood three years earlier. Buckley also ordered one-way locks installed on the grille doors that barred access between sections of the prison — a decision that would have profound consequences for a later escape attempt. National prison authorities were also prompted to accelerate progress on both the new maximum-security prison north of the city and the stopgap high-security unit within Mount Eden itself. The site chosen for this purpose-built unit was occupied by the wooden north-wing extension built in the 1890s that housed the few women inmates who remained after most were moved to the temporarily re-opened Dunedin Prison in 1958.
In a few urgent months after the early-1965 breakout, a two-storey, free-standing building, built in the 1890s as the superintendent’s house, was reconfigured into dormitory cells, and these remaining women inmates were transferred to it. The vacant women’s wing, once the destination for many steamy-message-bearing tennis balls, was then demolished, and a new structure to house the high-security male inmates began to take shape in its place.41 The construction work took nine months and the building was ready for use in March 1966.42 This was lightning progress by past standards, yet not swift enough to contain the simmering discontent of the male inmate population and the extreme measures that some were prepared to employ.
Mount Eden’s remand unit was the only area of the prison where inmates could wear their own clothes. In mid-July 1965 the unit held a new inmate who strained this degree of individuality to its limits. Daniel MacMillan, also known as Phillip Weston and by various other aliases, was a tall young man with the long beard and wild hair of a would-be magus. He wore a blanket as a poncho and was a devotee of heretical spiritual philosophies, especially Nietzsche’s concept of the superman, freed of normal social constraints. MacMillan, aged 28, was held awaiting trial along with his brother David, who was seven years younger and formerly a law student at the University of Auckland. Using an Italian-made .22 revolver, these two had robbed an enormous sum from the Avondale branch of the BNZ bank, but were apprehended soon after.43 Their father had himself been a bank manager on the North Shore, and he and his wife considered their elder son to be mentally unbalanced. Health professionals later supported this view, but his case was allowed to proceed.
Fellow inmates of the remand yard knew MacMillan as Cosmo, and he won their bemused admiration for treating the prison officers with open contempt. As his trial date approached he also spent hours noting the pattern of the officers’ movements, calculating the sentries’ field of view and evidently plotting an escape. His brother wanted nothing to do with it, but Daniel MacMillan formed an unlikely partnership with a solidly built career criminal named Jon Sadaraka, aged 22 and remanded for bombing a car at Western Springs. Jim Shepherd, who was then serving time in the main prison, had known Sadaraka since childhood and could recognise the bond between these two apparently dissimilar types: ‘They were desperate men. MacMillan was looking at 10 years, so he was desperate to get out. Jon was sort of under his spell.’44
Their escape plan seems to have been modelled on the recent attempt by Wilder, Gillies and Evans, which had acquired legendary status within the prison. They therefore knew they would need cell keys and a weapon of some kind. MacMillan, for all his bizarre mannerisms, was a dedicated bank robber with access to firearms. He had travelled to Italy, where he may have obtained the revolver used for the BNZ robbery, which was not recovered when he and his brother were arrested. Sadaraka, for his part, had useful contacts on the outside, and Shepherd is confident that ‘Jon got his family to smuggle the gun in for him’.45 Both Sadaraka and MacMillan had visitors on the Saturday before their escape attempt.46 All visits took place in the chapel, in circumstances that made it laughably easy to transfer contraband. As many as 12 inmates at once, and about 150 in the course of an afternoon, were seated along one side of a narrow trestle table, with their visitors on the other.47 There was no barrier between them and only one officer supervising the entire room. As each visit ended, this officer was required to phone a colleague to escort the inmate out of the room, making it still more difficult for him to supervise interactions down the length of the table. Inmates were searched after each visit, but only by a ‘cursory rub-down’. Presumably in this manner, Sadaraka became the possessor of a chrome-silver .22 handgun and 50 rounds of ammunition.
Remanded and sentenced prisoners were supposedly segregated in separate wings, but in practice it was not difficult for them to communicate by various illicit means. Remand inmates were not able to work in the prison training workshops, so Sadaraka is likely to have used his contacts in the sentenced section to have a cell key made in the tinsmith’s workshop. Homemade keys were commonplace, and Shepherd owned a whole set: ‘We used clay to copy keys that were lying around and made them up from the impressions in the workshops.’48
On Monday 19 July 1965, the final night before MacMillan was due to appear at his depositions hearing, the two men put their plan into effect. They were given their evening meal as usual at about 5 p.m. and locked up for the night. Both Sadaraka and MacMillan were held in cells with solid wooden doors that could not be unlocked with their homemade key, but before the lockup they gave their key to an obliging nearby inmate whose cell had a grille door. By holding a mirror through the grille, he could see when there were no guards on the catwalks. He quickly unlocked himself, and ran to Cell 16 to release Sadaraka, gave him the key and returned to his own cell.49 Sadaraka released MacMillan from Cell 27, and because their homemade key did not fit the large grille that sealed the corridor to the main prison, they spent some tense hours waiting in a toilet for an officer to unlock it.
Just after 2 a.m. officer Ed Marchant patrolled alone towards the remand wing. He carried no weapon, as the practice of issuing revolvers to night patrols had been stopped after Wilder’s escape in 1963.50 As he unlocked the grille, he was confronted by a prison officer’s worst nightmare. MacMillan emerged from the toilet wearing a balaclava and wielding an iron bar. Sadaraka, with his lower face covered by a scarf, trained the pistol on Marchant and ordered, ‘Go into the toilets or we’ll blow your head off.’ Marchant, a robust type, refused to obey and was beaten around the head and face with the bar, yet he still managed to scream for help and blow his whistle before he was left bleeding in the corridor.
‘That’s when the prison came to life,’ he said later. ‘There were cell doors slamming and men racing all over the place.’51 One of them was fellow officer Jock Weir, who rushed to investigate the noise. As he reached the remand wing, he was taken hostage and led at gunpoint by the two escapers towards the Dome, the prison’s nerve centre, which led out to the front courtyard. Like the remand wing, the corridor to this area was closed off by locked grilles. This was the point when the prison’s revamped security system began to foil the two men’s plans.
Sadaraka ordered Weir to unlock the grille doors, and reinforced the command by firing a shot through a window. Even that threat could not force Weir to do as he said, because after the escape a few months earlier by Wilder and others the grilles had been fitted with locks that could only be opened from the outside. When a guard appeared on that side, Sadaraka pointed the gun through the grille and barked, ‘Open up or the screw gets it.’ The guard leaped sideways through an open door as Sadaraka fired twice, narrowly missing Weir. In his cell on the upper tier of the north wing, Shepherd, ‘could hear the shots going off all down the wing … After that it was chaos.’52
Sadaraka and MacMillan were losing control of their strategy, and feeling confused and desperate.53 They took a second hostage, Officer Haines, who repeatedly urged Sadaraka to abandon the escape attempt and give up the gun. But ‘desperate men do desperate things’, says Shepherd, and the two still held out hope of forcing their way to the outside. With their two hostages they withdrew to the high-security unit in the east-wing basement, hoping that its veteran escapers might draw on their combined experience of earlier escapes and find a way to lead them to freedom. The unit’s cells were forced open, and the country’s most feared prisoners emerged sleepily to find themselves at large in a prison on the brink of bedlam. Over the intercom system a police inspector appealed for the two armed men to surrender. This entreaty was broadcast to the entire inmate population, who responded by creating pandemonium.
To remove the hostages from the developing melee, the prisoners locked them in one of the basement cells with their own keys. Wilder, who carried more mana than anyone else in the prison, was placed in charge of them, and later recalled that he had ‘never seen such a shaken bunch of men’.54 His accomplices returned to the Dome and one of them used MacMillan’s iron bar to smash the main switchboard, generating a volley of sparks before the whole prison was plunged into darkness. In a fateful and irreversible step, Frank Matich poured kerosene and polish on the wooden floor of the Dome, and set it alight.
The prison in flames. An armed officer watches over the main exercise yard during the July 1965 riot. STUFF/AUCKLAND STAR COLLECTION
The disaster dreaded since the prison’s earliest days — of fire sweeping through the cellblocks — was about to begin. With the administration offices ablaze, men went to the chapel and set fire to its curtains. The tinder-dry wooden pews also burned readily, and the chapel ‘went up like a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night’. Ex-inmate and academic Greg Newbold has pointed out that it was the high-security inmates, and not the two remanded escapers, who converted an escape attempt into a devastating riot. ‘Locked in their basement cells for twenty-two hours of every day, without work or recreation, their terms of solitude were indefinite … Their explosive behaviour when suddenly liberated requires no other explanation.’55 Some of these men, such as Gillies and Evans, were carrying extraordinarily heavy sentences.
As the fires took hold, clouds of acrid smoke filled the corridors. Other prisoners, especially on the upper levels, feared being burned alive or suffocated, and screamed to be released. Wilder and a few other level-headed inmates immediately began to unlock as many cells doors as possible. Their improvised key was crude and difficult to use, but they persisted until their hands bled.56 ‘If it wasn’t for their efforts,’ Sadaraka claimed years later, ‘the death toll would have been huge.’57 Not every inmate was released unhesitatingly. According to Donald McKenzie, ‘When they came to the cell of a notorious and repeated sexual offender against young girls, the men with the cell key deliberated for some time before deciding to rescue him from a grim death.’58
More prisoners were now able to join in the destruction, and they piled up mattresses and soaked them with anything that would burn. The solid stone walls were fire-resistant but were coated inside with layers of lead-based paint that burned freely. When the flames reached the ceilings they ignited the equally flammable kauri rafters, and fires then roared through the roofs of each of the wings. All thoughts of escape had been abandoned in favour of wanton mayhem. The knowledge that greatly respected figures such as Wilder, Gillies and Evans had begun ransacking the old building encouraged younger inmates to carry on destroying the institution that confined them.59
These keen arsonists were, however, only a proportion of the hundreds of inmates who now barged through the darkened wings. Many, perhaps most, of the inmates wanted nothing to do with this manic fire-raising, and a few attempted to extinguish the flames until MacMillan threatened to shoot them.
From his cell window on the north wing’s upper tier, Jim Shepherd could see a stream of headlights heading towards the prison as police vehicles and fire engines arrived to surround it. It was clear to him that any prospect of escape was now out of the question, but he made sure his old mate Sadaraka released him from his cell anyway. For protection, and with the prospect of settling a few scores, Shepherd armed himself with ‘a six-inch razor-sharp shiv in my right hand and a long iron bar in my left’ and set out to explore the hellish interior. ‘Below my cell on the first level a group of rabid prisoners surrounding the hostage prison officers were shouting “Burn, burn, burn” … In the eerie half-light it looked like something out of a Fellini movie … In all the confusion and pandemonium, the captive prison officers managed to slip away in the dark and make good their escape’ — the only occupants of the prison to do so that night.60
A courageous group of firemen dragged their hoses through the front gate and into the Dome, but were driven back by a bombardment of crates, books, wood and cutlery from inmates on the upper landings. In one of the riot’s cruel ironies, a senior fireman was knocked unconscious by a flying fire extinguisher. His colleagues withdrew to safety between the railway line and the perimeter wall, and played their hoses on the outside of the building, but to little effect.61 The city’s chief fire officer found it ‘the most impossible situation he had ever been in’: the old structure’s design, coupled with the inmates’ resistance, made effective firefighting impossible. Its barred windows broke the jets from the hoses into feeble streams, and when the most determined firemen ascended onto the roof, they found its iron sheeting screwed down so firmly that removing it was a slow and arduous task.62 Inside the wings the heat grew so intense that toughened glass burst out of windows and inch-thick iron bars were twisted out of shape.
Less than an hour after the assault on Marchant, about a hundred police, including the Armed Offenders Squad, ringed the prison to repulse any attempt at a mass breakout. Later in the night they were joined by army personnel from Papakura military camp — more than 100 members of an artillery squadron fresh from a tour of duty in Vietnam, and an SAS ranger squadron with automatic weapons and fixed bayonets. This highly trained and galvanised force was ready to storm the prison, but level-headed senior police officers instructed them to maintain guard outside the walls.
The inmate muster that night numbered 293, and police were aware that at least two of the men at loose inside were armed and dangerous. The prison’s narrow doorways meant an assault party would have to enter its darkened corridors practically in single file, and if any were captured the inmates might gain an extra hostage and his firearm.63 This strategy of passive containment is likely to have saved lives on both sides, but later some aggrieved newspaper correspondents, such as G. Reeman of Rotorua, fiercely disagreed with it. ‘Surely if the sufficient and competent security forces … had stormed the place at the outset, many thousands of taxpayers’ money would have been saved. Perhaps a few heads would have been broken but the mutineers needed a lesson.’64
Within the prison the choking haze of smoke became unbearable and a group of inmates made frantic attempts to break through locked steel grilles to reach the main exercise yard. They finally succeeded by using a heavy lawn roller. Shepherd remembers ‘this guy Charlie — Māori, bald-headed, he was the first guy out through the gate to the exercise yard. Burning roofing iron dropped on him from the upper levels and he was jumping around, ablaze. But it was the lesser of two evils — everyone was pouring out into the big yard.’65
Those inmates still confined in their cells were systematically unlocked by a group of prison officers. During the night the officers separately encountered the two MacMillan brothers, each anxious to ensure the other’s safety, and removed them to cells in Auckland Central police station. It is a curious reflection on the relations between staff and inmates that throughout the riot these uniformed staff members, who included Superintendent Buckley, traversed the prison complex repeatedly without any harm or hindrance.66 The inmates were less respectful of one another. Shepherd witnessed enthusiastic group sex in the eight-man association cells ‘as fire consumed the ceilings above them and smoke billowing everywhere’, but also brutal gang rapes of young men in the remand section. It was ‘utter chaos, depravity and madness’.67
Fire hoses snake across the ground beneath the prison walls as firemen struggle to control the inferno inside. STUFF/AUCKLAND STAR COLLECTION
The prison chapel stands roofless and ruined after the riot. NEW ZEALAND HERALD
Daybreak revealed groups of inmates huddled in corners of the exercise yard and draped in blankets against the chilly drizzle. The local and overseas press gave front-page treatment to aerial images of a structure that resembled ‘a besieged medieval castle with police, firemen and onlookers grouped around the walls and in the courtyards’.68 Firemen had the blaze under control by mid-morning, but a heavy pall of smoke lay over the city from Mount Eden to the waterfront, clearly visible to aircraft flying overhead.69
The inmates, damp and cold from their night in the open, were given the opportunity to surrender, and at least 70 were eager to do so, especially the younger and short-sentenced men. They also included the once mighty Maori Mac, who may have feared retribution from his many enemies. Remaining diehards continued to roam the drenched and blackened interior of the prison, feeding fires with cooking fat and fuel oil, and setting new ones. One prisoner, as he kicked through a glass window in the north wing, was heard to call out to the crowds of press and onlookers, ‘What do you think of your great Government prison now?’
Meantime, the inmates holding out in the yard ripped steel mesh off the kitchen windows, broke inside, and handed out packages of sausages and steak. The mesh was propped on chairs over a bonfire of wooden furniture and several inmates cooked a communal barbecue. ‘There was no mad scramble for food,’ says Jim Shepherd. ‘All the men lined up and waited patiently.’70 The midwinter weather made the prospect of a second bleak night in the yard uninviting, even for the most defiant. Nevertheless, they dragged mattresses into sheltered doorways or bedded down in corridors and the least damaged cells in the east and northern wings. One elderly Aucklander is reported to have rung police to say she was concerned about the prisoners’ welfare, and offered accommodation for three of them at her home for the night.71
After darkness fell, the bonfires in the yard were kept alight with broken furniture, and the shrouded figures around them spent some of the night singing to the accompaniment of three guitars and a mouth organ. A few of the most persistent used a grappling hook to claw rolls of barbed wire from the top of the perimeter wall and attempted to climb it on a precarious tower of broken furniture. By then the Auckland Electric Power Board had installed powerful floodlights that bathed the exercise yard in harsh white light, and the climbers were easily repelled by warning shots and jets from a fire hose.72
The atrium of a cellblock in the aftermath of the riot. NEW ZEALAND HERALD
The following morning the two hundred-odd men who remained in the yard were hungry, chilled, short of sleep and ready to surrender. ‘Prisoners are very regimented,’ says Shepherd. ‘You get used to a routine. It’s when you break it that the trouble starts.’73 Lifer Ron Jorgensen approached the police stationed in the Dome and asked if he and the other inmates could keep their personal property if they gave themselves up. This was agreed to, but the terms of surrender were otherwise unconditional.
By 11 a.m. the last of the inmates had been accounted for. ‘One by one, with our hands above our heads’, Shepherd and his fellow inmates filed out of the main exercise yard and through a cordon of armed police lining both sides of the corridor linking the Dome with the front entrance. As they emerged they were closely searched by prison staff and taken to unroofed yards at the back of the prison. There they spent two more cold and miserable nights with no shelter and little food as authorities desperately juggled national prison musters to create space for them all.
During those days prison staff, Justice Department officials and police made a solemn inspection of the smoking shell that was the country’s only maximum-security prison, and in the process discovered Sadaraka’s loaded revolver and various improvised weapons. The rugged stone walls had suffered little damage but almost nothing else remained intact. In some places the ceiling and roofing iron had crashed into the passageway between tiers of cells in a mound of charred beams and twisted ironwork.74 More than 60 cells had been set alight, and the kitchen, chapel, bakehouse, storerooms and watch-house destroyed.75 The administration offices in the Dome were gutted and their contents, including many inmate files, burned or ruined by water damage.76
Water continued to pour into the lower floors and basement, and the stench of smoke was overpowering. The main exercise yard was a scene of squalid intemperance, with uncooked sausages and bacon strewn among damp bedding and sodden clothing; lying in the middle of the yard was a huge double bass from the prison band. One journalist, a veteran of foreign assignments, had ‘never seen anything like this since Korea’.77
The carnival is over. One of the prison band’s instruments lies in the middle of the main yard. NEW ZEALAND HERALD
Among the men squatting miserably in the rear yards were 22 lifers and 34 preventive detainees. Paremoremo was specially designed to receive such inmates but was still several years away from completion. In desperation, the men were categorised according to their perceived security risk and dispersed accordingly. About 40 short-termers were kept behind to help with the clean-up, and were accommodated in the least damaged sections of the prison. Another 30 were sent to minimum-security prison farms, and others to Mount Crawford in Wellington and Paparua in Christchurch. There they proved disruptive, especially at Paparua where a minor riot soon took place, and teargas was needed to subdue them. The newly built psychiatric hospital at Lake Alice was temporarily designated a prison to receive those considered more dangerous.
To make room for the remaining long-sentenced, escape-prone and violent men, including Shepherd, 60 borstal boys were transferred from Waikeria to Invercargill. The 10 regarded as the most dangerous of all, including MacMillan, Sadaraka and Wilder, were held in a new high-security unit at Waikeria which, by chance, had just been completed. Many found their time there very uncomfortable: conditions and routines were unfamiliar, and staff treated them with great suspicion. One later recalled: ‘We were let out for maybe ten minutes each day. In those few minutes we had to have a shower and clean our cell out … We were more or less living like animals. About eleven chaps were sent to mental hospital from there. Several fellows cut their wrists.’78
In the heat of the riot, Maori Mac had been among the first to hand himself in to police. He then volunteered information to them about conditions inside, and later cooperated with a commission of inquiry by providing evidence against riot leaders. Those actions made him an outcast at Waikeria, and he was transferred to Mount Crawford for his own safety.79 The other high-risk inmates spent nine months in Waikeria’s high-security unit while the work of building a similar stand-alone prison-within-a-prison at Mount Eden itself was accelerated. Just a week after the riot concrete was poured for the floor.
Similar urgency was accorded to the long-promised maximum-security prison north of the city. The Christchurch Star pointed out that there was currently ‘no maximum security prison anywhere in New Zealand’, and demanded ‘the utmost urgency to build a new prison which would remedy this fundamental defect’.80 Some suggested that by forcing the fast-tracking of this project, the rioters had inadvertently performed a service to the country.81
An inquiry into the largest and most destructive prison riot in the country’s history delivered its report at the end of 1965, and again Superintendent Buckley was absolved of direct responsibility for the carnage.82 The locks on the corridor grilles, installed after Wilder’s escape attempt in February, were found to have been the crucial factor in containing Sadaraka and MacMillan. ‘Without security locks on all outside doors I am sure there would have been a mass breakout,’ said Officer Haines, one of the hostages, in a radio interview.83 Both inmates and prison staff were commended by the inquiry for their courage in releasing inmates from their cells and helping to ensure that no deaths and few injuries resulted.
Yet the inquiry also found serious lapses in prison procedures that enabled the ringleaders to obtain the revolver and cell key, and later allowed remand inmates to link up with sentenced prisoners, to devastating effect. The riot might have been entirely prevented, thought the inquiry, if stringent searches had located either the revolver or the key.84 It found that failure to adequately supervise visits, or search inmates afterwards, was due primarily to an acute staff shortage, with some officers required to work for 13 successive days without a break.85
Twenty-four inmates were charged with offences arising from the riot, including assault, attempting to escape and setting fire to prison property. They were dealt with leniently by the court, and even Sadaraka and MacMillan, who received the heaviest sentences, successfully appealed them. The press was inclined to agree that pursuing severe legal remedies against the rioters could ‘foster wide resentment and so spark further trouble’.86 However, the subsequent careers of the two ringleaders suggest that they themselves failed to appreciate this example of official pragmatism.
MacMillan was returned to maximum security after his escape attempt, and a few weeks later was declared insane and transferred to a mental hospital. He spent seven years there until considered eligible for parole. He then left the country for Australia and resumed his interrupted career as a bank robber, pulling off several armed robberies before his spectacularly violent death in 1979, in a machine-gun battle with New South Wales police. Sadaraka completed his original sentence for the car-bombing, but in 1975 was given 10 years in Paremoremo for assault and robbery. He was paroled in 1980 and also headed to Australia, where he murdered his brother-in-law during a furious argument. He served 14 years in maximum security and was then deported back to New Zealand. Just six months later, and aged in his 50s, he was back in Paremoremo for the murder of a Hokianga drug dealer.87
In late July 1965, Mount Eden’s inmate muster stood at just 13, the lowest in its long history. The long-debated issue of demolishing the charred, derelict and barely habitable prison seemed finally capable of resolution. For years before the riot, Justice Minister Hanan had favoured tearing down this looming physical rebuke to liberal penal practice, and Auckland’s local politicians and residents, especially those who lived nearby, avidly supported its demolition. Yet there remained the question of the prison’s new maximum-security unit, already under construction and intended to house the country’s worst offenders until Paremoremo was completed a few years hence.
Hanan was also acutely conscious that the country’s other prisons could not long absorb the several hundred displaced inmates. A few weeks after the riot he announced that the burnt-out building would be partially rebuilt to house 150 remand, short-term and medium-security inmates on a strictly temporary basis.88 Later, as those renovations were underway, he emphasised that ‘Mount Eden will be completely demolished, and not a vestige of the existing institution will remain, except for the new security unit being built now, for fourteen men’.89
Like a continually reprieved inmate of its own condemned cells, the indomitable old building won yet another stay of execution. By mid-August, with the worst of the debris cleaned out of the wings, the inmate muster had already risen to one hundred, with some of the men housed in cells whose ceilings leaked badly. Buckley acknowledged, ‘It will be a bit unfortunate for some of them if it rains … they will just have to put up with it.’90 As with the original stone structure, much of the rebuilding work was carried out by inmates themselves. Burnt-out timber roof trusses were replaced with steel beams, new roofing iron was laid down, and the kitchen and west and south wings were rebuilt. The other two wings were left largely untouched and marked for demolition.91 The renovations went far beyond restoration to produce substantial alterations throughout the prison — more extensive than any since it was built, or subsequently.92
A burned-out workshop destroyed in the 1965 riot. NEW ZEALAND HERALD GLASS PLATE COLLECTION, AUCKLAND LIBRARIES, 1370-39-4-2; PHOTOGRAPHER BILL ROWNTREE
By Christmas most former inmates, such as those sent to Lake Alice, were returned to the renovated cells. The partially rebuilt and barely functional prison already housed more inmates than the 150 it was designed to hold.93 They found their conditions significantly worse than before the riot. Inmates were now confined to cells for up to 17 hours a day except on weekends, when it was compulsory to go out into the yard even on wet days. They were no longer allowed newspapers, hobbies or recreation materials, apart from library books. Weekly visits were tightly monitored, with no physical contact allowed of any kind, let alone ‘Hollywood clinches’. According to one officer, Buckley had ‘all the inmates running at double time and snapping to attention like bloody soldiers’.94
Demolition of the sealed-off and unrestored east and north wings began in early 1966, when inmates removed the first sections of ornamental stonework from the crenellated towers. Whether by accident or otherwise, these heavy pieces of carved stone damaged the paving and drains as they were lowered to the ground, and Justice Minister Hanan halted the project until it could be carried out ‘by people experienced in demolition work’. The perimeter wall of the prison also had to remain in place ‘since the building had to be kept secure to hold remand prisoners until a new remand centre could be built’.95
Nine months after the riot, in March 1966, the brand-new Mount Eden high-security unit was ready to receive the hardest cases sent to Waikeria. Jim Shepherd was among the 12 who were driven back to Auckland in a specially reinforced bus, with a group of armed officers behind barriers at its front and rear, and an escort of four carloads of armed police.96 The new unit was a miniature version of the state-of-the-art facility under construction at Paremoremo. Each of its 14 cells was a six-by-three-metre steel box that proved uncomfortably hot and stuffy in summer. All strategic points were controlled by electronic switches, and visits were made in locked booths behind shatterproof glass. The unit’s occupants were confined to their cells for more than 18 hours a day, including all meal times. Twice a day they were escorted into a dayroom in groups of three to carry out simple work projects. Exercise was allowed for two hours in the afternoon in a small cage-like enclosure, again in groups of three. No other association privileges were allowed.97
Shepherd remembers the unit as ‘virtually an underground concrete and steel bunker. The doors were solid steel with mesh panels top and bottom so officers could see inside at all times. Our food was passed through a small opening.’ During his three years there, he says, ‘we were subject to torture — lights on all night, gates going every 20 minutes. You couldn’t sleep. The screws would bang on the cell doors with their batons just to be smartarses. There’s nothing before or since to compare with that place. I realised later that it did a lot of damage to me psychologically. None of us came out in good shape.’98
The single event he could look forward to was the weekly visit from the Catholic priest, Father Leo Downey. Although not a Catholic, Shepherd, in common with many other Mount Eden inmates, regarded the priest as ‘a real gentleman. No one had any dealings with the Anglican padre — he was considered on the side of the authorities.’99 After some persuasion, Shepherd was allowed to complete his minimal high school education by correspondence, and while still inside he gained a University Entrance qualification, possibly the first Mount Eden inmate to do so.
Two fellow inmates, Ron Jorgensen and George Wilder, were gifted and enthusiastic visual artists and conducted a years-long campaign to be allowed to pursue this interest from their cells. Shepherd, who had first met Wilder some years before the riot, regarded him as ‘a lovely bloke — not a violent bone in his body’.100 Yet Wilder was serving a crushingly long sentence among very violent men, and he hoped to spend some of that time creating artwork. In a rare piece of good fortune for him, the Justice Department asked a volunteer prison visitor, Grace Shaw, to meet with Wilder. She then appealed to luminaries of Auckland arts and culture such as novelist Maurice Shadbolt, historian E. H. McCormick and artist Colin McCahon for help in providing the caged folk hero with outlets for creative expression.101
In late 1965 Wilder’s advocates began asking prison authorities to allow him the use of drawing paper, pencils and charcoal in solitary, and these materials were reluctantly permitted a year later.102 Labour MPs took up his case and convinced Justice Minister Hanan to allow Wilder oil paints, brushes and an easel.103 ‘If we are to rehabilitate even the most difficult prisoners,’ said MP Colin Moyle, ‘we should do our utmost to see they are gainfully employed as much as possible.’104
Buckley, however, refused to allow Wilder to have these materials in his cell, so his art-making was restricted to the few hours spent each day in the dayroom. In protest at this and other petty restrictions, all 12 prisoners in the security unit went on hunger strike in September 1967. Some held out for six days and the Justice Department considered force-feeding them, until Labour MP Martyn Finlay visited the unit and agreed to take up their case.105 His intervention saw small improvements — meals were served on a table instead of on the cell floor — but Buckley continued to obstruct Wilder’s artistic ambitions.
Colin McCahon, then a lecturer at the Elam School of Fine Arts, visited Wilder at the high-security unit weekly, and attempted to offer constructive critiques through two sheets of bulletproof glass.106 Wilder’s skilful, somewhat romanticised charcoal portraits and landscapes were exhibited in Auckland to some acclaim, and an art school in Connecticut, in the US, awarded him a correspondence course.107 These encouraging steps towards rehabilitation saw him transferred to Paparua Prison, Christchurch, in 1968. There he proved an exemplary inmate, working hard as a Braille transcriber and a budding short story writer, and he was released on parole the following year after serving eight years of his 19-year sentence.108 ‘I’d put a gun to my head rather than go back there,’ he told a reporter soon after his release.109
The remaining inmates of Mount Eden’s high-security unit were transferred in 1969 to the newly finished D Block at Paremoremo. This block, described as ‘a longterm isolation facility’, was the most secure section of a no-expense-spared maximum-security institution, the most advanced prison the country had yet seen.110 Yet its clinically clean interior, all electronically controlled sliding panels and automatic warning systems, appeared to its first occupants like a hotel in comparison with the cells they had left behind. Shepherd was in no doubt that ‘[i]t was good to get out of Mount Eden’ and equally clear that ‘cruel and brutal conditions breed cruel and brutal men’.111
After serving his time at Paremoremo, Shepherd called on contacts and expertise accumulated at both prisons, and joined the increasingly brutal Mr Asia heroin-smuggling syndicate, which made millions of dollars before an international police operation caught up with them in 1986. Shepherd was given 25 years’ hard labour without parole, and served almost 15 of them, mainly at ‘supermax’ prisons such as Goulbourn, south of Sydney, a nineteenth-century stone-built cousin to Mount Eden.112
No other single event in Mount Eden Prison’s long history has had the same far-reaching effects as the 1965 riot. In the most dramatic way possible, it confirmed to politicians and ministerial officials that a maximum-security institution built to leading international standards regardless of expense could be postponed no longer.113 This realisation dismantled any remaining arguments that the old prison could still contain high-risk inmates while meeting modern expectations for penal management.114 After 1969, Mount Eden became redundant in terms of its original function as the country’s maximum-security prison. It would remain in use for many more years, but would never again command the same authority and significance within New Zealand’s justice system and wider society.115