During my prison years I wrote between 3000 and 4000 parole letters for my fellow inmates, plus thousands of other pieces of correspondence and appeals. On top of that I religiously sat at my computer and bashed out more than 560,000 words in my personal diary and painstakingly kept prison journals. Add that to my Master of Arts in Writing and I generated millions of words inside DPFC, representing many tens of millions of keystrokes.
Four years later I found myself a PhD candidate at Swinburne University of Technology and I had to find a way to turn my journals into a doctorate: a new ‘significant original contribution to knowledge’. Obviously my area of expertise was prison and the women inside it, so I felt well placed to take an in-depth psychological look at human behaviour, at community and at women. The question was how to put that original knowledge across in a compelling and engaging way. I couldn’t rightly submit half a million unvarnished words straight from the hard drive and expect people to read it, let alone draw nuanced conclusions from my base material.
I had been going from strength to strength as a public speaker at that time. I didn’t have a business card or a website, let alone an agent, but through word of mouth I kept getting invitations to speak on issues related to the prison system, public welfare, addiction and rehabilitation. My PhD supervisor at Swinburne, Chris Sinclair, had been to a few of these sessions and one day she came up with a brilliant idea. ‘Why don’t we make it into a play? Some kind of performance?’ she asked. ‘That way we can really bring the story off the page and breathe life into it.’ I adored Chris, still do, and was happy to do whatever she suggested. The PhD then took on the form of Artefact and Exegesis. The performance would be the Artefact.
‘Well, if it’s anything like public speaking then I’m all for it,’ I enthused and thought to myself, ‘This is going to be shit easy.’
It wasn’t at all like public speaking and it was anything but shit easy. I decided to call my one-woman play Revlon and Razor Wire – a fifty-minute performance featuring twelve important and instructive tales from my time in prison. I explored themes through vignettes that told stories about my incarceration, my sentencing, strip-searches, muster and the harrowing tales of the women I was locked away with, like Janice the Down’s syndrome inmate and some of the tragic girls who had died. There were lighter moments, too, like the story of the ‘fuck you snakes’. And the play traced my journey from motherhood to maximum security and the girls’ metamorphosis from my daughters into prison babies.
The process of preparing to perform the play was incredibly hard. Aside from the writing, script editing, stage direction and props, there was the small matter of the lack of a lectern. While I was somewhat cocky when it came to public speaking, I soon discovered I was indeed a glossophobe when it came to being onstage as a ‘performer’. Without a podium to stand behind I might as well have been as naked as during my first strip-search. It took six months of rehearsal to be able to stand still and deliver my lines without veering off to the right or left if there was a chair or a prop onstage that I thought I could put between me and the audience. Meanwhile, Revlon and Razor Wire became a big production very quickly.
Before I knew it we had moved from the intimate High School Theatre at Boronia to the famed La Mama Comedy Courthouse Theatre in Carlton, where things really stepped up in terms of production, music, staging and lighting. It was a much more intimate room, too. Overwhelmed by the closeness of the audience I asked that the two front rows of seating be removed to put more distance between me and the audience. I had gone from a super-confident, entertaining, in-control person behind the speaker’s lectern to a nervous wreck on the open stage. But I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. One night I looked out to see Brendan Money was sitting front and centre in the crowd. He laughed extra hard during the story of the Great Sand Heist. Afterwards he came to see me.
‘It was fantastic, Kerry,’ he said. ‘But for some reason I was expecting to laugh a lot more. You’re such a funny person.’
‘I didn’t want to come across like I loved the place too much!’ I shot back with a grin.
‘Fair point,’ he said, ‘but we certainly had our moments, didn’t we?’
Revlon and Razor Wire wasn’t the only time my journals came in handy. In 2011 I was contacted by a TV producer named Lara Radulovich who was in the process of remaking the series Prisoner, which would eventually screen on Foxtel. I had never been a fan of the original show but I was certainly familiar with its cult status in Australia. Lara and the series writer Peter McTighe invited me to be a consultant on the remake that was to be called Wentworth. They asked me to contribute ideas to the plots and characters, but they also relied on my advice for authenticity. They’d write scripts and send me episodes so I could go through and scrawl notes correcting the writing for lingo and believability. ‘This woman wouldn’t have said that. That exchange could never happen. This woman wouldn’t have acted like that, otherwise she would have gone to Protection. No one talks to an officer like that …’ and so on. It was a lot of work.
Huge amounts of the show were based on my journals. Bea Smith, the main character, was built around my story, but she was written as a woman who killed to avenge the death of a daughter. The other girls in my unit could tune in and see versions of themselves portrayed by actresses, too.
Watching the show made me miss the women inside even more. Renate Mokbel was the only ex-prisoner I kept in contact with socially, although my best mate Carolyn Beasley was another lasting and constant friendship I made inside prison. Because I was released ahead of Renate I started visiting her terminally ill mum, and she and I became close. On some nights Renate’s little boy would stay with his grandma so I would go over there with buckets of his favourite KFC to give him a little bit of continuity from his environment at DPFC. I know Renate would have done the same thing for me had the roles been reversed. Thankfully Renate was back in the community to bury her beloved mother, a day we again spent together mourning lost family. To this day, we both adore each other’s children and our prison family bonds will last a lifetime.
Had you told me while I was in prison that I’d one day move back in with my ex-husband I would have – quite honestly – bet my life against it. But desperate times called for desperate measures. In the first few years after I was released my housing situation was very unstable to say the least. At one point – after moving out of Swinburne’s temporary student accommodation – I found myself homeless. My ex-husband got wind of this and kindly offered me a place to stay with him and the girls. ‘Not like a relationship or anything,’ he said.
‘You’ve got that right,’ I assured him.
So there I was, suddenly back in a home setting with Shannyn and Sarah for the first time in six years. I spent a lot of time with them and even felt a bit more like a mum. Over a month they started to trust in me again and realised I wasn’t going to be hauled back off to prison. Then their father started complaining about what time I got home and how I wasn’t grateful, and I was out of there by that afternoon. I didn’t realise it then but this crushed the girls. After all they had gone through, it had been hard for them to finally open up their little hearts and invite me in to make myself at home. Then I tipped over the furniture and ran out the door again. To this day, however, I remain extremely grateful for my ex-husband’s gesture at the time. It took some guts in front of his new judgemental friends.
The distance that prison creates between people who love each other is just immense. I hate to admit it but there were times when I deliberately avoided the girls. There were also times when I didn’t have enough money to be able to do things with them. It made me feel less of a mother than ever. It was easier for me to go out with Carolyn and friends from Swinburne all night instead and let them buy me drinks, switch off and not worry about being a mother. The next morning I would be riddled with guilt and would try to phone them. Sometimes I was able to make it up to them, but not always, and I’d feel as far away from them as ever.
The girls never lived exclusively with me. Their ‘home’ was always with their dad and although I had ceased being a green jumpsuit–wearing criminal to Shannyn and Sarah, I was definitely more of a side figure than their mother during those years. I slowly worked on rebuilding my emotional life to the point I could offer some kind of stability to them.
While that disconnect started to heal over time, I realised some things that had been broken in DPFC were actually beyond repair and best left as they were: in pieces, never to be the same again. A great example of this is Christmas. Both of the girls are ultra-Christmassy; Sarah even wears a shirt with little Santas on it. She is a full-on Christmas elf, they both are, which I absolutely adore. I don’t see them on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning and they always have lunch with their dad – a time-honoured tradition. Interfering with that is the last thing I’d want to do. I don’t put up decorations or go overboard with presents and fuss, but I love the fact the girls come over on Christmas night. We have a special dinner and they stay over so we can hang out on Boxing Day. The unspoken message is: ‘OK, I’ll be a little bit Christmassy with you for one night because that’s what you want, but then it’s back to normal tomorrow.’ The fact is, prison changes you and you never change back.
Unlike just about every other ex-inmate, I was extremely fortunate to fall into a new career in academia. Even though I’ve worked hard in every role I’ve held it has never been lost on me that some of the women who waved me goodbye at DPFC would have resumed a life of misery or died after they got out.
At Swinburne University I ascended to the role of lecturer in Media Studies before becoming a receptionist and Freemantle Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Ormond College. I adored the community there. Then, in 2017, I interviewed for the role of Academic Administrator at a college in the Melbourne CBD. Although I felt I’d done quite well during the interview, it must be said nobody asked me questions like, ‘Have you ever been convicted of a serious offence?’ or, ‘Have you spent time in a maximum-security prison lately?’ I was quite conflicted because I felt they had the right to know my criminal background but, at the same time, I really needed the job so I wasn’t going to shake hands with the dean and the board, sit down and say, ‘Hi, everyone, my name is Kerry Tucker and I was sentenced to seven years’ prison for fraud.’ I decided I would let them get to know me first and then gently bring it up.
That turned out to be easier said than done when I got the job. I was itching to confess but it never seemed to be the right time to tell my co-workers that I used to hang out with the likes of Tania Herman and Donna Fitchett. How to raise the subject? Finally, after a few weeks of indecision, I could stand it no more and one Friday I made myself the promise that I would tell the dean on Monday when I went to work. I’d have the weekend to practise what I’d say.
Before I could learn a word of my lines, though, I was invited out for Friday-night drinks with a few of my new colleagues, and they blurted out that they knew about my time as a guest of Her Majesty. One of the staffers had Googled me apparently.
I was horrified. Would this mean I’d be fired? What did they think of me now? Before any thoughts could spin wildly out of control, they gave me a hug and reassured me that they didn’t care. I was so moved I could have cried.
But I still hadn’t told the dean, so I spent an anxious weekend worrying about how he’d react. My job was on the line. I barely slept that Sunday night as thoughts about what he might say crashed about in my head. On the Monday morning I knocked gently on his door and asked if I could speak to him. I explained about my past and said that I’d been hoping to settle into the role before letting people know that I was an ex-prisoner.
‘Kerry,’ he said, ‘we all know and no one cares. You were hired on your merit as the best person for the job and that hasn’t changed. We think you’re amazing.’
‘You don’t know me,’ I replied, grateful he simply accepted me for who I was.
‘Well, I look forward to getting to. And if anyone has an issue with you, come to me and I’ll sort it out.’
‘No, no. That’s OK,’ I said. ‘I really appreciate it but that’s not how it works. I can look after myself. I will never cause you any grief but I will deal with people on my own terms.’
Mostly that entailed me taking the piss out of myself. If there was a farewell or someone had a baby and a hat needed to be passed around for the gift, I’d make a crack: ‘It’s probably best that it’s not me!’ It was important to try to make people feel at ease. After all, I did go to prison, I did commit fraud and people have a right to feel however they do about that. If people didn’t like me for what I’d done in the past, then that was OK. I got it. But I was confident that once they got to know me they’d eventually realise I was no Medusa.
The way I saw it I had paid for my crime and I had proven myself over and over again. I pleaded guilty, didn’t appeal my sentence, didn’t ask for Legal Aid or community funds for my defence, remained in maximum security all the way without asking for any breaks, reductions or preferential treatment. I earned my degree the same way an outside student would, with high distinctions and a HECS debt to pay off – and managed to do so without the internet. I also worked hard to forge a career and happened to be fun to work with. So, if people still had a problem, I could rest assured it was theirs and not mine.
The notoriety that I could have lived without at work gave me the platform I valued when it came to advocating for women’s rights and improvements to the judicial and penal systems. I’ve spoken at more than 500 community events and worked hard to give women in prison a voice in the community. Women in prison are far and away the most marginalised group of women in Australia and I was only too happy to stand up and speak on their behalf. I know how the prison system works, how the courts work, how the criminal world works and I know how these different threads come together to form a web in which women can easily become entangled. Whenever I speak, whether it’s a debate on TV, a talk in front of 200 people or an interview with 100,000 listening on radio, the first thread I pull is making the point that no prison sentence should ever be trivialised. The loss of freedom is huge and it’s important to acknowledge that first. Once that’s out of the way we can get down to the nitty gritty.
My work as an advocate has given me some incredible opportunities. I have been invited to address the Melbourne City Council with the Lord Mayor, attended a private function at Victoria’s Government House with Alex Chernov, the then Governor of Victoria, I have gone to VACRO (Victorian Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders) functions alongside the wonderful Justice David Harper, and been asked to be an ambassador for the fabulous community service Wear for Success. I have even volunteered in the courts. A few years ago I was invited to address the State Conference of the Court Network, a voluntary group that provides support for people interacting with the judicial system. The audience included the network’s patron and the then Governor-General of Australia Quentin Bryce. I had the pleasure of meeting her afterwards and she asked me what the most pressing concerns were for women in prison in Australia. I told her it was the people who had no business being imprisoned in the first place – people like Janice.
My overarching belief, however, is that prisons do work. Yes, they can work a whole lot better, but I have seen prison save lives. And one life saved is enough. There are many more women who would have been dead if it wasn’t for the Corrections system. For the most part, it’s not the prisons that break people – it’s what happens to them in society. And while I paid a dear price in prison myself, it made me who I am today. And I like that person.