After yet another one of our verbal showdowns – this one over her refusal to give fifteen festering women a single squirt of shampoo – the Tarantula decided to extend my punishment to everyone else in the cells. With my final insult still hanging in the air, she stormed off and returned with a clutch of officers wearing their blue rubber gloves. They herded us into the drunk tank while our cells were turned over, then each woman was pulled out of the tank and forcibly strip-searched. But try as she might, the Tarantula could not break my spirit. There was only one way to cripple me and I had to be careful not to think about it too much. Or think about them, as it were.
Like every mother, my children are a fundamental part of me. They are the embodiment of my very heart; more important than the sun and the air. I would gladly die for them if I had to. Shannyn, my sparky little ‘Mini-Me’, was seven and Sarah the cuddly, dreamy blonde was just five when I was marched out of our home. By leaving them I was now hurting them. I don’t have the words to express the agony this realisation inflicted on me, particularly knowing I was powerless to stop it. If I thought about my girls too much or too deeply I felt myself start to unravel to a point where I might start to cry and never, ever stop. Some days it was relatively easy to distract myself with the present task of surviving in lock-up. Other days, not so much – particularly if I knew it was raining.
We couldn’t see, hear or smell the outside world from inside our hollowed-out brick. One evening I heard an officer remark that it was raining and I badly wanted to go out and stand in it, tilt my head to the heavens and feel the droplets kiss my face and wash away the grime and shame. In the next moment I became grief-stricken and panicked. Shannyn and Sarah would always run to me during a storm. I’d scoop them into my lap and coo that they were safe with Mamma. When it stormed I’d hug them tight and show them how to count the seconds between the lightning and thunder so they knew when it was moving away. ‘What if they’re frightened now?’ I shrieked inside my head. ‘They need me!’ I convulsed in spasms of sobbing that I thought might last forever. I knew then I had to put all of those memories into a little box, close the lid tight and store it deep within me. ‘Open at Own Risk.’
Unlike most of the mothers alongside me, I was blessed that my babies were in the care of an excellent father. However I felt about how he’d treated me, I knew with certainty that he cherished our girls and would always try to protect them from harm. On one level I was enormously sad for him; I knew the heartbreak he’d see in their eyes every day – I heard it each time their little voices pleaded down the phone. ‘Mamma, please come home. Please!’ He was the one who had to explain that Mamma simply was not coming home. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not for years.
The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted my daughters back. To do that I would have to fight hard. They would have to be my pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. No matter how far into the future that rainbow arced, they would be on the other side of the prison walls when I walked out. I chose not to add my tears to the rain. I chose to battle instead. The first step would be bringing the girls to visit so they could see me and I could start to explain why Mamma had to stay in the prison. There was no way I was going to have them brought to the Moorabbin Hilton for fear of scarring them forever. We agreed that their father would bring them after I’d been transferred to Deer Park. The days would pass quickly enough.
In the dead of night a woman was thrown in the tank for minor drunk and disorderly charges. But she was no ordinary tipsy girl. She was known to some of the inmates in the cells opposite ours as being from a major Melbourne crime family. She was blind drunk, withdrawing and clearly pissed off at being incarcerated. Her furious objections set the other women off, which only sent Miss Crime Family into hysterics. Unwisely, she attempted to intimidate the girls by bragging about her underworld connections and to ‘square up’ against them. I could hear the girls on the other side trying to work out her identity through a process of deduction. They also knew the crime families and had close and personal associations with various members of the one cited by our new guest. They weren’t at all intimidated. Finally, one figured out who she was and the psychological torture commenced. It didn’t take long for the girl in the drunk tank to go quiet as the women mercilessly taunted her. After a while everyone went quiet. You could hear a pin drop.
In the next instant there was an explosion of noise. The watch-house door was almost torn off its hinges as a stampede of boots thundered into the cellblock. We could hear their panicked exchanges. The girl had stripped naked and was in the process of hanging herself. They managed to get to her in time. Instead of calling for an ambulance, they simply removed her clothes from the cell and left her there naked. After all, she was breathing! She was silent and no longer a threat to herself! What more could you want? It was all sorted in under ten minutes. On the way back out one of the officers commented that it was raining outside. I rolled over on my vinyl mats and tried not to think about my girls.
The days ahead brought only more chaos. One afternoon a very large, very powerful woman named Kath was brought in. Apparently, as soon as she’d arrived in a divvy van, she’d tried to fight every officer at reception. So, of course, they quickly threw her in with us. Kath wanted out – now – and she figured the best way forward was to take one of the girls hostage. Kristy was the unlucky one in closest reach. Kath wrapped one of her massive arms around her neck and threatened to break it as she dragged her to a back corner of the yard like a lion with prey. Five officers burst in and tore Kath off Kristy, placed her in a vice-like headlock and hauled her into an isolation cell. By now a pale shade of blue, Kristy slumped to the floor and lay there dazed and unattended by the officers.
That incident was just par for the course in the cells, so I was more than a little relieved when – twenty-four days after I was first thrown into that dank, freezing cellar – the time came for my transfer to the women’s prison at Deer Park, or the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre (DPFC) as it is now known. It housed around 300 women and was adjacent to the men’s maximum-security Port Phillip Prison.
A few of us who’d been at Moorabbin the longest were going over as a group. I couldn’t believe I’d soon see the sky again; maybe even feel sun on my skin or wind in my hair. Most of all, I was excited, though also somewhat daunted, by the prospect of seeing Shannyn and Sarah. Hopefully they’d still recognise me – I’d shed almost ten kilos in three-and-a-half weeks.
We were marched from the yard to an enclosed garage where the Brawler was waiting. It was the biggest steel cattle truck I had ever seen; a fearsome-looking beast that would have been right at home on the set of a Mad Max film. This lumbering prison on wheels contained separate enclosures for women and men, and even had solitary cages for troublesome prisoners. There were no lights, no windows and no ventilation. I wouldn’t be seeing the sky after all – just suffocating pitch blackness.
Three claustrophobic hours later – after dropping off and picking up prisoners from various courts – it became obvious that the Brawler had left the city. The driving became erratic and very, very fast. With no seatbelts to tether us to the steel benches, we were all thrown about like rag dolls. One woman was knocked out cold. It was obvious that as far as the driver was concerned he might as well have been carting garbage to the tip. Finally the Brawler slowed and the gates rolled up at the DPFC. Only then did it finally sink in that I was no longer in the wretched Moorabbin Police Holding Cells. That part of the nightmare was over. In a few days I’d be seeing my babies. With that to look forward to I started to feel a little like my old self again.
It was 2.30pm on Wednesday, 11 June 2003 when the door of the Brawler swung open and emptied me into a new chapter in my life. As I stepped down into the open I was assailed by sunshine and the smell of grass. I could have cried with gratitude but the moment was short-lived. ‘This way, ladies,’ a woman said, and led us to the reception building where we were promptly locked in a three metre by three metre holding cell. It was immediately apparent that this place was the real deal.
The first thing I noticed was the demeanour of the officers. These were Corrections Officers, not police. For one thing, Corrections Officers smiled and didn’t seem to yell. They were also ranked according to the little dots on the shoulders of their uniforms rather than stripes. They didn’t carry guns and they generally seemed less threatening – to me, anyway. Not so the other girls; they’d all been here before and knew the drill. I peered out the cell window and across a concrete quadrangle – ‘the compound’ – to catch my first glimpse of the razor wire that ringed the entire complex. I’d only ever seen the stuff in movies and now it stood ominously between me and my liberty.
If Paul Galbally was right, I would be here for the next two years.