AS I sit in my cell writing this on a bitter cold Sunday morning my hands are a mixture of dead numb and pins and needles. It is so cold in my cell you could hang meat in it, but it is warmer in the cell than outside.
It is quite beautiful when I come out of the cell in the morning. It is dark dawn and the cloud, or fog, hangs heavy just above the roof cage of the prison yard, and as I look at the hills that surround the prison it is as if the clouds or fog have cut them in half.
It is a very surreal, yet quite beautiful sight. I will never grow tired of casting my eyes towards the tree-covered hills around this place. It is a lovely view and the hills look so close that I could reach out and touch them. I can even see the fire tracks and walking paths that wind their way through between the trees.
If someone walked up these hills and stood and waved we could see them quite clearly and wave back. Every night or afternoon as I walk back with the rest of B yard, from our mess room to our cells for the night, I cast my eyes over these tree-covered hills. It is a wonderful sight for a bloke in prison.
The trouble is most of the guys here have come from the logging industry. They look at the trees and you can nearly hear the chainsaws start up in their heads.
In Pentridge the best view available to me on a good day was the bloody Kodak factory, about a mile away across some paddocks.
This jail has an almost make believe feel to it. It is a Clayton’s prison – the jail you’re in when you’re not really in jail. Or a pixie prison from a tall tales nursery rhyme. I wake up every morning with the feeling that none of it is real.
It is a very petty, silly little place, yet very cosy and comfy and relaxed, like the sort of jail you’d send your old granny to. The fact that they take themselves so seriously is all part of its totally ridiculous comic magic.
I feel as if I’m the prisoner of a Monty Python joke in a Dennis Potter movie, especially once a week when the farmer’s daughter comes in to visit me. The thought of Chopper and the posh farmer’s daughter has created some scallywag comedy around the prison.
One of the prison staff joked with me the other day, ‘Hey Chopper, how much do you love this girl?’ and Bucky yelled out from behind me, ‘Thirty grand an acre, that’s how much.’
Everyone laughed, but it was a bit hurtful, even though I found myself joining in the comedy of it all. What am I going to do with Mary-Ann when I get out of this place – if I ever get out? I don’t want to lose her, but I don’t want to cause her unhappiness either.
When you’re in jail and a woman starts to visit you she has a captive audience and the poor bugger behind bars comes to depend on her visits and a love develops, and when the prisoner gets out of jail he feels a deep obligation to repay this debt of love and loyalty.
It’s a case of ‘I stuck with you when you were in jail, now you make my dream come true’. It is like befriending a wounded wild animal in a cage and over a period of time the animal teaches himself or learns to trust you, rely on you, count on you, depend on you, and love you. Then one day the cage is gone and the animal is free.
This is what happened with me and Margaret. I went from a prison of bluestone walls and iron bars into a prison of mental and emotional guilt, caused by a deep sense of obligation to repay love and loyalty. I used to stand on the back steps of our place in Launceston, which was full of thousands of dollars’ worth of domestic household bullshit that women love so much and I’d say, ‘Margaret, I love you, but I’m telling you right now I’m not happy inside my own heart’.
I don’t want to be mentally and emotionally kidnapped while I’m in jail and walk free of one prison only to be taken into another of pots and pans, washing machines, fridges and freezers, microwave ovens, double beds and doonas, lounge suites and new carpets, drapes and knick knacks on the wall, with some nagging female giving me hell for not coming home on time for my din dins, and wanting to grab her bloody handbag and come with me every time I head for the door.
‘Where are you going? Where have you been? What are you doing? What have you done?’ This is the nightmare women put you in.
You don’t want to lose them but you don’t want to become their bloomin’ prisoner either. Bucky asked me what would I do if I got out and was on my own? My answer was that if I had my own way I’d get out and live in my mate’s pub, write books to pay the bills, bang the tail off every dirty girl I could get my hands on, gamble my guts out and drink myself to death. I mean, really, is that too much to ask?
And if things don’t work out with me and Mary-Ann when I get out of this shit, that’s exactly what I will do. Just live in a pub by the sea, write books and be on my own. Maybe Damian Bugg QC could come over for a holiday.
Mind you, Mary-Ann is clever. She knows all this and tells me she won’t let it happen. Time will tell. It seems that not only is the jail I’m in surreal, but my whole life is becoming more and more dreamlike. And the more that life crashes in on me the more that room in a pub by the sea sounds good to me. Write a couple more books before I die, pouring Irish whisky down my neck as I go, spinning out on the roulette wheel and pulling on a few hot little blondes along the way before I climb quietly into my coffin.
Bugger what you think, it sounds great to me.
BY May down here it’s winter as far as I am concerned. Mary-Ann sent me in some special ‘Made in New Zealand’ long underwear that they wear down at the South Pole and I sleep in the bloody things under seven blankets. I’m writing this with my overcoat on and with one glove on my left hand, and the hand I’m using to write with is nearly frozen.
It gets below freezing level in these cells at night. They have an electric heater bolted into the wall of every cell and we get three hours of heating per night which really means that the heater comes on in four and five minute bursts over a three-hour period and one five minute burst at about 5.30 in the morning.
Thank God the laundry where I work is warm. Eddy the head, the boss of the laundry, put me in charge of this big industrial size ironing machine and I feed damp pillowcases into it all day long with three blokes at the other end folding the bloody things up. The old ironing machine punches out some heat.
They put all the ratbags down the laundry and it’s meant to be the worst job in the place, but I love it. In winter it’s the only place to be. It even has its own showers.
When I got here there was talk of making me the new jail barber. But the Governor knocked that idea on the head so instead they gave the job to Micky bloody Chatters.
Micky is a top bloke and my friend, but he is the last bloke any sane person would want to see placed in charge of scissors. Let me tell you, if Micky walked into a shearing shed, the sheep would go on strike.
If a bloke came into Risdon charged with poisoning 100 people they would put him in charge of the kitchen.
I’m still getting into trouble over the contents of my mail. They had a go at me last week for making mention of staff members by name in my letters. To call the Governor or any of the various deputies or staff members by name is forbidden, which means that when I write to Mary-Ann I am unable to use the name of her own sister, since Mary-Ann’s sister took a job here as an education officer and actually sits on the bloody classification committee. Imagine me marrying into the classo board. God help us all!
Half the staff seems to be related, half the inmates seem to be related and a good quarter of both sides seem to be related to each other … and I will probably be called up to the Governor’s office for writing this. I’ve never encountered a situation like it before.
I’ve been in this jail about two years so far, and I haven’t put a foot wrong. I haven’t said a word out of place to a single soul. I am in reality a model prisoner, yet I am still looked upon as some sort of freak and viewed with suspicion and paranoia.
I’m so polite to the buggers it’s almost sickening, and the more I smile the less they trust me and when I frown they trust me even less. Oh well, they can pay full price for the new book when it comes out.
As I write this the wind has turned funny and the night rain is blowing against my cell window and door. It’s a strange sort of night. I know I’ve mentioned the word ‘surreal’ before but it really is. All I’m waiting for is for the Governor and a dozen or so of the prison staff to break out in song and dance and the Dennis Potter movie would be complete.
As I stand in the prison laundry all day long feeding damp pillowcases into the hot rollers of the ironing machine, I find myself spinning out into daydream land, or returning to the mental and emotional safety of the sentimental memories of my past. It’s like The Singing Detective.
At night-time in my sleep I escape the prison walls into the world of my dreams and during the daylight hours my mind dances or flutters between the cold reality of my situation and the surreal non-reality of my daydreams. I travel back in my mind’s eye to my childhood and teenage years.
Now that I’m nearing my 40th year my daydreams never sweep me away to the fantasy of the future, but to the best and sweetest times of my past. And despite the horrors of my past life, there have been some sweet and wonderful moments.
My mind is caught up in reliving a past adventure or a sentimental memory, but in jail it is like a fantasy. Was I really there? Did I really do that? Was that person real? The past is like a fantasy as it is only a dream in your mind. The future is also only a dream. The only thing that is real is now, and now is always so boring, or so it seems.
Instead, we wonder what tomorrow will bring and while we await that adventure we recall with sentimental longing the magic of yesterday. The present, then, is only a boring waiting room between yesterday and tomorrow. For me, in jail, tomorrow brings nothing and so I look back to yesterday.
Memories … of my father cracking his hard-boiled eggs on my head as we sat together on the back steps. Memories of myself and the rest of the little school kids marching around the playground to the tune of Click Go The Shears at Thomastown State School. Memories of myself as a nine-year-old boy and the local gang of kids chipping in with all our pennies and halfpennies to come up with the princely sum of one shilling in order to bribe the mentally retarded girl who lived down the road to undo her shirt and show us her big tits.
We would stand there in true boyish wonder at the sight of it, or them, reaching up to feel if they were real.
Then afterwards we would con the poor girl with the big tits into buying a shilling’s worth of hot chips with salt and vinegar for us all. In the early 1960s a shilling’s worth of chips would feed a small army.
As I stand there feeding the damp pillowcases into the hot rollers of the ironing machine my mind springs out into the memories of past insanities and magic adventures. Past sexual adventures that I thought little of at the time, yet have haunted my mind ever since my return to jail to drive me just that touch more insane than I already am.
Some women, once met, cast a spell on you and the memory of them haunts you till the grave, and I’ve met many such women in my time. Yes, my body is in prison but my mind is sailing in the wind. Thank God.
WHEN the breakfast, lunch or tea bell rings, we all stand on parade, and after our names are called out we have a ten-minute wait in line before we march off in a disorderly fashion to get our food.
It is on the muster line that some of the best comic remarks and conversations are to be had and heard. Although silence is meant to be maintained, it rarely, if ever, is.
It was there that I learned, to my horror, that the only two people on the whole muster who had ever heard of or seen the great movie classic Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman, was myself and a Melbourne crook called Harry the Greek.
Paul Newman played the role of Lucas Jackson in the movie, which has influenced a generation of scallywags, crooks, knockabouts and tearaways.
It is an all-time classic and tells you about jail life. When Luke Jackson’s mother dies he comes back into the chain gang barracks, picks up his old banjo and with tears in his eyes sings this song: ‘I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I’ve got my plastic Jesus sitting on the dashboard of my car, dressed in colors pink and pleasant, glows in the dark ’coz it’s iridescent, take it with you when you travel far. Get yourself a sweet madonna, dressed in rhinestone, sitting on a pedestal of abalone shell, goin’ on ninety but I ain’t scary, coz I know I got the Virgin Mary assuring me that I won’t go to hell.’
All right, it may be true that as a singer Paul Newman makes a great salad dressing, but to anyone who has done time, it means something. If they’ve seen it, that is.
I’ve got the first verse of that song tattooed on my lower back and I guess it’s safe to say that it is my favorite movie of all time. I will have to speak to the bloke who gets the videos for the prison and get him to lift his game. Anyone who hasn’t seen that old classic should hang his head. There was the great scene where Luke tried to eat a huge amount of boiled eggs for a bet. These health conscious days, if they made a remake they’d cut that scene because of cholesterol levels. The new flick would have a rough, tough crim gobbling down tofu or lentil burgers.
The number of young blokes who have not only never read the works of the great Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, but haven’t even heard of them, is quite sad and amazing. These aren’t fresh off the boat Vietnamese, these are fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth generation Aussie kids – Tasmanians whose family heritage goes back to the early convict days.
I mean these are fair dinkum ‘she’ll be sweet mate’ bloody Aussies, and they’ve never heard of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Some of the young crims here think culture is something you make yogurt with. They believe they can learn about Asian history by watching Ninja Turtles. They think Henry Lawson bowled for Australia, and Banjo Paterson’s is a theatre restaurant in Adelaide.
Can you believe that? Yet the same young men know the words off by heart to half the songs AC/DC ever wrote.
Who was it who wrote Poor Fellow My Country? Xavier Herbert? Well, he wasn’t far wrong, was he?
The Americanisation of Australia seems to be the problem. The Yanks killed Phar Lap and Les Darcy and they have been trying to kill off everything Australian ever since. The buggers have nearly done it and I’m just as bloody guilty as everyone else for falling victim to it.
This country has a great history and yet you wouldn’t know it. The kids walk around with baseball hats on, shirts with gridiron teams’ emblems on the front. They have pictures of American basketballers on their walls. They think Chips Rafferty invented the potato cake.
We look up to Yankeeland heroes and look down on our own. It makes me bloody sick. Too much bloody television, if you ask me. It’s killing us all. Kids should not be indoors watching television, they should be outside, punching on with their mates, getting a bit of fresh air and doing a bit of male bonding.
Mind you, my distaste for America does not include Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Paul Newman and Edward G. Robinson. God bless them all, the dirty rats.
ONE of my pet hates is the way Aussie country music has gone. These boys and girls make me cringe with embarrassment when they bung on accents like they were brought up in Mississippi. It is yet another case of the Americanisation of Australia.
You get truck drivers from Nowra who sing like Willie Nelson. You get cowgirls from Queensland who sound like they were brought up in Dallas.
Yeah, they call it Aussie music,
With their Mississippi twang,
Singing down home Yankee songs,
With a touch of Aussie slang,
They sold out to Waylon Jennings,
And sing Rockabilly Blue,
But what they all forget,
Is that Aussie land has its legends too,
Yeah, I know Tex Morton’s dead,
And his songs are getting rusty,
But there’s one Aussie Boy who won’t die,
A legend named Slim Dusty,
And what about Banjo Paterson,
And a bloke named Henry Lawson,
Old Flash is dead and gone,
But we’ve still got Smoky Dawson,
They get up there to Tamworth,
With their Texas hats and bash,
But as far as I’m concerned,
They can jam their Johnny Cash,
Give me Waltzing Matilda,
And the Road to Gundagai,
Hell, I’d rather hear Chad Morgan scream,
Than Willie Nelson cry,
Did you know that Hank Williams died,
With a needle up his arm,
He was just a southern junkie,
And a long way from the farm,
So if you want to sing Aussie country,
And become a legend too,
Forget the Yankee Doodle shit,
And stick to Old True Blue.
THE day I hear Slim Dusty sing the American national anthem is they day I’ll get a rope and a chair and hang myself.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I have just attended what is called a poetry workshop conducted by a noted Australian poet and author, Dorothy Porter, bless her heart. She put us through a somewhat spaced-out semi-psychological trip into the world of the modern poet.
Apparently Lawson and Paterson are yesterday’s men, swept aside with the wave of an academic hand. The poets of today seem to be taken with the autumn leaf that fell to the ground while the author sits on top of the fridge crying tears that belong to the next door neighbor’s goldfish, all to the tune of one hand clapping.
Perish the thought that anyone should write a poem that actually rhymes. Miss Porter was much taken with the Japanese style of poetry called ‘haiku’. Yes, that’s what Aussie land needs, a little more Japanese culture jammed down our simple literary necks.
I read a poem to Miss Porter. It went down like a fart in church. I don’t know haiku, I like my fish cooked, I eat red meat and I drink my coffee out of a mug, not a glass, so I will never be considered a trendy. But one thing I know, and that is that my poems rhyme.
These government grant authors and poets may think of me as some dumb bar-room story teller, but I think some of them are ‘Beam me up Scottie’ space cadets. Some of these people seem to think if it comes from Australia it must be crap. As far as I am concerned give me the local product every time.
Miss Porter may be all the rage in the sushi bar set, but I reckon I’m not too bad when it comes to a bit of Aussie-style poetry. You be the judge. Here’s a couple, one about my old mate, the former Chief Magistrate of Victoria, Darcy Dugan, and the other about Supreme Court judge and head of the parole board Frank ‘The Tank’ Vincent.
He sat on the bench,
For many years,
He gave us laughs,
And sometimes tears,
He had a way,
All his own,
And for style,
He stood alone,
With smiling face,
And big bowtie,
My word, he did look classy,
Every crook in Melbourne knew him,
The Magistrate called Darcy.
For classic courtroom comedy,
In Australia we are not short,
And the funniest of them all,
Sits in a Melbourne Court,
The Mick Irish son of a tough old dockie,
Heart of gold, but his head’s a little rocky,
The Chairman of the Board,
As every crook will know,
They tried to pull his coat,
But he still let the Texan go,
He hits ’em in the courtroom,
Like an Irish tank,
The knockabout Judge,
They all call Big Frank.
EVERY now and again the jail allows concerts. The last show the prison put on was a South African bongo player and it went down like a turd in a punch bowl. What this jail needs is what Pentridge put on in the early ’70s – a strip show with a professional stripper. I happen to know several professional strippers who would be only too pleased to come into the jail and put on a properly-run show for no charge whatsoever.
Any inmate wishing to attend the event could cough up $5 and all the money could be given to the prison sports and recreation fund. You’d get at least a hundred prisoners wishing to attend, it would be a fun night out and a good little earner.
It would also lead to prisoners making a great effort to behave in jail. They would remember what pussy looked like and would be on their best behavior to get out as soon as possible.
‘Alexandra the great 48’ nearly caused a riot in B Division in Pentridge when she put on a show. But when the South African bongo player showed up at the Pink Palace only about seven inmates bothered to attend. At least a properly run and tasteful strip show would encourage prisoner interest.
If we do happen to get a few strippers into the jail, they won’t miss me. I’ll be the bloke in the front row looking as flash as a rat with a gold tooth. Two gold teeth, in fact, and that’s not all. In September Dr Carlton, the prison dentist, fitted me with my new super-duper cobalt chrome false teeth, which include two solid gold teeth in front. I’ve had them in ever since. They fit a treat and my smile is the envy of the prison, with every crook in the jail with teeth missing – and there’s a few – now wanting to invest in a cobalt chrome denture with gold teeth as an optional extra.
Ahh, Chopper, you old trendsetter. But as I said to the boys, if you really want to look like the Chopper, get them bloody ears off. The mention of the razor blade slicing through the ears soon separates the men from the boys.
MY young legal advisers Peter Warmbrunn and Anita Valentine come in to see me occasionally. Painless Pete is turning into a bonny courtroom buccaneer, and Anita Valentine is well-named: my heart skips a beat whenever I see her. I’ve promised to toss a nice murder case her way some time in the future, when she feels herself ready for the big one.
I tossed Anita Betts a nice case in the form of the Amanda Carter murder mystery – a 13-year-old mystery and probably the biggest murder case in Tasmania this century. The accused sought my advice regarding legal help when he came into the remand yard in 1993 and I promptly advised him to forget all others and hire Anita Betts. I’m sure I can muster up a nice little murder case for young Anita Valentine when she is ready to rock and roll. That reminds me. I must toss a murder case to Peter Warmbrunn next time a nice little stabbing or shooting or acid bath killer jumps up.
My wise old legal adviser and courtroom chess player Mr Pat (God Bless Him) Harvey, the solicitor who helped save my neck in the ‘Sammy the Turk’ murder case, once said to me, ‘Chopper, a criminal lawyer’s reputation is made or broken in the remand yard of a prison.’
That advice I passed on to Anita Betts, and she in turn to Peter Warmbrunn, and he in turn passed these words of wisdom to the lovely Miss Valentine. Meaning that Anita Betts and her legal firm practically live in the remand yard at Risdon, visiting clients, and have grown into the strongest legal firm in Tasmania. While all around them, most of the other lawyers in town are starving to death. Ha ha.
The so-called big name lawyers in Tassie prior to my arrival in the state have sunk like the Titanic. They were big ships once, but they are all at the bottom of the sea now. Why? Because criminals decide who the best criminal lawyers are … a small point that lawyers forget. If I stand on the muster line in front of the whole yard and I’m asked by a young bloke in trouble, ‘Hey, Chopper, I’ve got Mr So-and-so as my lawyer, what do you reckon of him?’ and I spit on the ground and say, ‘Sack the bum, he’s a rat and you can’t trust him’, then I’m afraid that’s one sacked lawyer.
You need more than a legal degree to be a lawyer. You need to care, because you’re dealing with men and women in trouble. Guilty or innocent, these poor buggers are at their wits’ end. Some are on the edge of suicide or, at best, a nervous breakdown.
The remand yard of a prison is a cold and lonely place, and your lawyer for that period in your life is your only true friend, and my advice to any who seek it, is to pick your friends wisely.