Meet Tracey-Lee Melrose, the woman in charge of Bathurst, one of Australia’s toughest jails
Jail boss Tracey-Lee Melrose has managed everyone from cannibals to bikies. The head of historic Bathurst jail says brains go further than brawn when wrangling 850 inmates.
Police & Courts
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Tracey-Lee Melrose is boss of one of the toughest jails in the country.
She has managed cannibals who ate their nipples and ears, self-mutilators who got out their intestines or shoved plastic garbage bags up their nose, a quadriplegic drug baron who needed fellow prisoners to help him stay alive, and rival bikies who have to be kept in separate wings or they will kill each other.
As the new governor at Bathurst jail, she is leading a record number of female corrective services officers, alongside the other three women now in charge of major jails including Goulburn Jail and Supermax, the highest-security prison in Australia, medium-security St Helliers at Muswellbrook and female-only Dillwynia.
Of the latest NSW Corrective Services recruits, 35 per cent were women.
In 2021, almost 28 per cent of frontline custodial and Security and Intelligence correctional officers were women, an increase from 26.5 per cent in 2018.
With a maximum of 850 inmates, she said that running a jail was about brains and not brawn and being a woman can defuse a situation.
“You don’t have to be tough to do this job. It’s called tact,” she said.
“It’s just common sense and the ability to navigate the procedures and understand the individuals you are dealing with.
“There are not many cases where male inmates attack female officers because they are ostracised by the other inmates. Traditionally they won’t raise their hand to a woman.
“I don’t consider myself smart. I was a housing kid who left school at 15.”
When she joined prisons aged 23 after travelling around Australia, officers were not only banned from talking to inmates, they didn’t acknowledge fellow officers until they had been there for 12 months.
“Male and female, we were all ostracised until we had proven ourselves. You sat by ourself and no-one spoke to you,” she said.
Behind Bathurst jail’s imposing 1888 gates, its original echoing steel doors with their bars and hand-sized padlocks and walls permeated with the smell of 130-odd years of jail life, Ms Melrose said the tough-facade image of a prison officer was changing.
“Over the past 30 years I have seen it go from bash, crash, rack and stack ’em to engaging with inmates one-on-one. You need to know them to address their needs,” Ms Melrose said.
Bathurst has new wings, but four of the original wings remain, and have changed little since they were built, apart from the addition of toilets, wash basins and electricity in the cells.
In the 1970s, Bathurst was the setting for notorious prison riots and a massive blaze, leading to violent reprisals from prison officers. The riots inspired the Cold Chisel hit, Four Walls, and ultimately led to a royal commission into prisons.
Bathurst is now maximum, medium and minimum security.
As well as education and work, inmates now have tablets in their cells to say goodnight to their kids. Oranges, which were banned because they were used to brew prison hooch, are about to be reintroduced.
But it is far from “touchy freely”, and Ms Melrose said there are times when the hairs on the back of her neck stand up walking into a wing where there is going to be trouble.
Members of the Alameddine crime family are among the high-profile inmates currently at Bathurst. It has also housed corporate crook Rodney Adler and Michael Murdoch, one of the five killers of nurse Anita Cobby,
It also housed Ms Melrose’s former boss, Michael Coutts-Trotter, who spent almost three years behind bars for heroin smuggling in the 1980s and went to become head of the NSW Department of Communities and Justice. He is currently secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet.
“Are they (inmates) still treated like criminals inside? Absolutely. But loss of freedom is punishment in itself,” Ms Melrose said.
“Whenever I have this uniform on, I have no gender.”
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