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Author
Biography Paul Frisby was born the son of a doctor in 1948 at In 1977 he joined the A sea change to Recently Paul has worked for 10 years for his local Council. His interests include carriage driving, classic cars and baroque music. Prologue This book is set some time in the late 20th
century and is about jails and some of the people in them. Any resemblance of
the characters to anyone living or dead is coincidental; coincidental to the
fact that individual traits from people known to me, from Tumbarumba in the
south to Townsville in the north, have been used to build composite characters;
and coincidental to the existence of both the good, amazing and downright
disgusting people portrayed herein. Setting the book in time is however somewhat irrelevant.
Unfortunately the world described has been created many times over throughout
history. At the time of writing it sadly continues in the same form into the
future, both in However, readers unacquainted with the correctional
environment should not rush to pass judgement on individual characters. Prisons
are a world with their own rules, and the methods that people on both sides of
the wire use to survive or escape it may at times seem to be extreme and selfish
to outsiders. Policing again has its own rules. After experience in corrections I need to thank Joan, my
doctor; for keeping me from the edge of the precipice. The work would not have
been completed without the encouragement of Anne-Maree. Above all thank you, gentle reader, for buying and reading the thing so the effort has not been totally pointless, or without financial recompense for my courageous publisher.
CHAPTER 1
Deputy Superintendent William George Augustus (Billy) Black had every right to
feel a sense of pride as he sat, facing south and somewhat untidily for him, on
the retaining wall of the car park at the Long Bay Complex of Prisons. He had
just said his farewells to the Regional Commander and the boys and girls in the
Emergency Squad. Even the Commissioner had turned up for fifteen minutes to say
goodbye. He
let his eyes drift across the cityscape; the aircraft taking off and landing at
their safe and predictable intervals from Kingsford Smith Airport; the towering
cranes of the Botany container port; past the main gate and the Prison Hospital;
to the concrete blockhouse of the former Katingal Maximum Security Prison which
had been his operational home for the last 11 years. Out of his left eye a flash
from the chromium plated pips on his shoulder caught his attention. His eye
followed his immaculately pressed uniform sleeve down to the crisp white edge of
his shirt cuff to the black hand framed below. The seat of his trousers would be
getting dirty from the brick wall he reflected – but now it didn’t matter.
Leaving dirt behind him had been the story of his life he thought. Not a bad
life for an aboriginal boy from the bush, forty one years of age, seventeen
years of service, a part time university degree all leading up to his present
status as a Deputy Superintendent with long service and bravery medals.
Tomorrow, he and his wife would be putting this life behind them, leaving on one
of those planes out of Kingsford Smith, flying north to his new job, in a new
State, in a newly reformed correctional system. He was General Manager designate
of the Thomastown Correctional Centre. He
was facing a challenge, he knew that. Taking over an old style prison and
turning it into a modern correctional centre was not going to be easy. His new
Director-General had made it clear he should expect resistance to change, but
had told him he would be fully supported by senior management and the Minister
in making the overdue change work. Of
course he had seen it all before in Not
that he had done much time in jails himself. Just a couple of months after
graduation from the training college and almost straight into the Emergency
Squads, with lots of slack time that made the slow remedying of his lack of
education a relatively straightforward, if not an easy, task. He would miss the
place. Seven jails in one complex, the camaraderie of the system, and especially
the Emergency Squads. Even his uniform, once despised but now a part of his
self-image as well as his public one, would now be a thing of the past. The new
system he was going to had civilianised their management. He would have
to invest in a new wardrobe. On a
personal basis the move looked good. Why
had she agreed to marry an aborigine he wondered? True, they were both brought
up Catholic, himself by the missions, she in the family tradition; but it was
quite a step marrying from a proud Italian migrant family into an aboriginal
one. She was always devout, and he could best be described as a token believer.
Perhaps if her father and mother had lived in As
it was her parents were in the bush and she had been staying with a family
friend, a Housing Commission tenant in Malabar, who had been trying to raise
three daughters on a government widow’s pension and had welcomed the help that a
lodger with a regular wage, a love of kids and the ability to cook had brought.
He had been a relatively well off with a good career and a low rent government
supplied house. A meeting in church one Easter somehow developed, and he now had
a white skinned, well olive skinned, Italian wife with a passion for everything
– food, wine, and the good life. Although her inheritance of a big outgoing
personality, including a propensity for shouting matches about which she
obviously felt no guilt, confused and embarrassed him at times. Quiet and
conservative she was not, colourful she was. She would probably make a success
of a restaurant he reflected.
There were no children though. It had been a problem at first, but then they had
recognised the finality of the situation. Not that they hadn’t tried. However
Maria had a range of previously unidentified problems with her internals –
including endometriosis and one non-functioning kidney. So they had no children
and they were now too old to take advantage of the march of scientific progress,
even if their careers hadn’t taken over and become their main interests. At
least, her family back in As
he looked over the scene before him for the last time, he recalled the first
time he had seen it, as a schoolboy from the top of a number 394 bus. Even then
it had seemed to draw him, although it was vastly different in those days. There
had been a relatively insubstantial grey painted brick wall topped by three or
four token strands of ordinary barbed wire. Where the That
memory fascinated him now. He had always wanted to know what went on behind
those grey men, behind the grey wall. It seemed almost pre-ordained. He had now
found out, and it was time to move on, knowing about the grey men, who now wore
green; and knowing perhaps too much about the men in blue and how problematical
they could be; knowing about Long Bay and looking to the future.
There was another side to Deputy Superintendent William Black and it wasn’t so
confident. Billy Black had to admit he was scared. He had given up a life of
security and status to throw himself into a challenge he was afraid he couldn’t
meet. So
he was an Ab that had made good. Bloody brilliant. He had made good because he
had always been scared. He had been scared of his old school master at primary
school in the bush. The red neck favoured the use of a stick to instil knowledge
into the heads of “little black bastards”. He had been scared of the priest too
who frightened the mission kids into going to school on pain of everlasting
damnation; which wasn’t far from the truth when he reflected on the problems of
aboriginal crims. He had been so scared that he did go to class often enough and
actually studied a bit. By 10 years of age he could read and write. He
had been scared to death of coming to Sydney too, leaving town early the next
morning in their ancient Holden after a couple of old men had called to see his
often drunken father one evening. He had been even more frightened when his
mother and two elder sisters hadn’t come with them and his father wouldn’t say
why. Then
there was La Perouse. Those were the days in the sixties when La Perouse
featured three things: a golf course where the southerlies blew with unmitigated
foulness on bad days; the Prince Henry Hospital with the last leprosarium in the
country; and the colony of Abs who lived as far south on the peninsula as they
could be pushed by white civilisation without falling into the sea. They
were neatly hidden beyond the hospital and the golf course on the east, and the
oil refinery and the cemetery on the western side of the peninsula. A
round topped MACEM
[1]
fence now replaced the old brick wall and token barbed wire around the prisons.
The silver barrel on the top of the fence looked like a long, sinuous and
surreal snake. How things had changed! The
system had changed too, with the introduction of Unit Management. No longer were
prison guards just turnkeys. They had to be social workers now, case managing
small groups of inmates. They were now called Correctional Officers – or to the
old screws care bears. He
knew the theory alright, but he had to admit he had been shit scared during his
time in jails after induction training. They had tried him for a week in the
Remand Centre, and then in the medium security jail. Both times he got the Uncle
Tom treatment and both times he couldn’t take it. He had only managed a few more
months in segregation where paedophiles, informers and the other lower orders of
the system were sent for their own safety. So
in the finish he had done all his time in the Emergency Squads, servicing jails
from outside. Doing routine searches, supervising escorts and breaking up the
occasional riot. That was easy too. He was young and he was surrounded by his
mates, and they just had to follow their training. Shit, he only got his bravery
medal for going into a leaderless mob and pulling another officer up off the
ground and out. He couldn’t even remember doing it; let alone thinking about the
consequences. I probably only got away with it because the mob was too surprised
and disorganised to stop me, he thought.
Perhaps courage would also come now with a lack of deliberation. How the hell
was he going to be brave as the first aboriginal prison General Manager in a new
State? There were too many opportunities to fail, and the worry of imagining
failure was another worry in itself. At least he had Maria, he reflected.
Although he had enough self understanding to recognise the extent of the mother
surrogate she could become. Bloody good home cooking too, and that meant a run
every morning to keep the weight down.
Hell, he thought with a surge of anxiety, why hadn’t he had the sense to stay
where he was. He took in the view with one last sweep of his eyes. I am, no I
was comfortable here he thought. An Ab with a steel snake totem. The modern
aborigine – a bloody Uncle Tom winding wire around his brothers.
[1]
MACEM – MULAWA ANTI CLIMB EXPANDED MESH:
a wire mesh fence topped by a steel barrel along its length at
least 1m round to make climbing impossible. Viewed from above such
fences look like shiny snakes. Such a fence was first built in NSW at
the Mulawa Women’s Prison at Silverwater. A different version of such
fences are topped with one or more coils of razor wire – which cuts as
it goes in, and cuts as it comes out. Click on the cart below to purchase this book:
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