Untold Pentridge Prison stories from behind the bluestone walls
These days you may do your weekly shopping there or dine at the restaurants but for 146 years Pentridge Prison housed Australia’s worst criminals. These are the untold stories of those who worked alongside them.
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Michelle Wright thought she had dialled the wrong number.
She must have.
There? They wanted her to perform … in there?
For them? With them? Was that safe?
Yes, it must be the wrong number, the then 18-year-old theatre student from Blackburn North thought.
She was meant to ring the Mess Hall Players – a theatre group which had put out a call for female actors to audition for its showing of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – and must have entered an incorrect digit.
Except this was no misdial.
Little did she know the Mess Hall Players was not your ordinary crew of amateur actors getting together to rehearse a few lines at the local town hall after a day on the tools.
A detail perhaps lost on the flyer.
Instead of teachers, tradesmen or cafe owners, her castmates included murderers, armed robbers and violent thugs.
And the number she dialled to tee up an audition?
Pentridge Prison.
“So I went,” Ms Wright – now a Pentridge tour guide – recounts in a staff breakroom inside the old E-Division building.
“All the actors and all the crew were prisoners and these guys interviewed me and auditioned me and I got a couple of parts in the play.
“Everyday for four months I came into the main gate of Pentridge, was escorted down to A-Division and we rehearsed and put on the play for five weeks.”
The rehearsals appeared like any other.
Except where an actor on the outside might miss a session because they had a sick kid at home, Ms Wright’s castmates had court appearances or were booted off the project after contraband was found in their cell or were transferred elsewhere (that’s showbiz for you).
“We got to know the guys really well,” she remembers 43 years on.
“They had lives I could not imagine. Even to this day I know some of the crimes were horrific and some of the guys were in there with life without parole or multiple life sentences and yet they were my fellow actors.
“They were lovely, polite, funny, charming and it’s still very difficult for me to reconcile the two identities of these guys.”
Plastic Jesus on the dashboard
Peter Prideaux stares at the books on offer inside the reception area of the Pentridge prison museum.
“They should have Chopper’s books up here,” he says.
I use this as my cue to show I had done a little homework before my catch up with the former H-Division prison guard.
“He mentions you in his books doesn’t he? He said you had a real Aussie sense of humour and that H-Division ran like clockwork with you in charge,” I say, trying to sound casual and not as though this had been rehearsed.
“You forgot he said I was one tough bastard,” he replies with a playful shove felt through my thick winter coat.
Being a “tough bastard” wasn’t just a prerequisite for the inmates to survive, but equally as important for the guards.
Especially in H-Division.
“It wasn’t a place for the faint hearted in those days,” he says sitting on a bluestone wall opposite where the prison chapel used to be (now a massive IGA supermarket).
“This place was often tense. I loved it, I’ve got great memories at this place and a lot of sad memories, a lot of hard memories.
“It kept Melbourne safe from robbers, from serial rapists and murderers so it served Melbourne very well.
“But the good far outweighs the bad but I liked it when it was a little tense. It kept you on your toes.”
At 29 Mr Prideaux became the first officer to graduate from the academy and move straight into H-Division — the ward at Pentridge filled with Australia’s most notorious criminals; an ensemble that included Russell St bomber Craig Minogue, Rod Collins and gangster Victor Peirce.
A cast not to be taken lightly — as one British staffer soon came to discover.
“A bloke came out from England and wanted to change the format a little bit and bring weights into H-Division and I said ‘you’d be bloody crazy, don’t do it’,” Mr Prideaux says.
“I said ‘if you bring in weights here you’re crazy ... mark my words.’
“Well three weeks later the most notorious prisoner in Australia Alex Tsakmakis was hit with weights in a pillow slip, cracked his skull open and died, killed by Craig Minogue the Russell St bomber.”
Mr Prideaux was also the guard who locked up Julian Knight hours after he killed seven people on Hoddle St in August 1987.
“He came in and the rules were explained to him. The whole process was filmed because the Attorney-General wanted to make sure that no one touched him,” Mr Prideaux says.
“We put him in the last room at the end (of H-Division) which was the ‘wet cell’ where they’d put you in a smock and you would sit on a mattress with a toilet roll and two litres of water and would be observed.”
Knight was in H-Division for several years before he was transferred to Port Phillip prison alongside Russell St bomber Stan Taylor.
“They would never put (Knight) in mainstream with everyone else. He would’ve been killed in one day,” Mr Prideaux said.
Knight was also known to show off the forensic images of his offending to other inmates.
And then there was the division’s lockeroom leader — Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read.
It was Chopper who gave Mr Prideaux the nickname “Lars” during one of his first shifts in H-Division — an exchange which kicked off a friendship that spanned decades.
“Chopper asked me where I came from because I looked very Nordic,” Mr Prideaux remembers.
“He asked me if I’d seen that film Journey to the Centre of the Earth and if I remembered that big blonde guy with the pet duck because apparently I was a dead ringer for him.
“Chopper thought his name was ‘Lars’ so he started calling me Lars, except that character’s name was actually Hans.
“But the nickname stuck and everyone called me and still calls me Lars.”
Another one of Chopper’s favourite films was the Paul Newman classic “Cool Hand Luke”, with his favourite scene being when Newman sings about a “plastic Jesus on the dashboard of his car”.
Chopper loved the scene so much he sang the song in front of a crowd at his 50th birthday.
At his 2013 funeral — attended by 50 of his closest family and friends — Mr Prideaux placed a plastic Jesus statue on his casket.
“And I’ve got a matching one on the dashboard of my car,” Mr Prideaux said.
Pentridge today
A couple of dozen years since the prison closed and the country’s toughest crooks were hauled off to Barwon, Pentridge is a hive of activity.
Locals walk through the old courtyard with shopping bags, international film buffs line up at Palace Cinemas and groups of friends laugh over a round of craft beers at a bar.
Inside H-Division primary school students walk in and out of the 39 cells restored by the museum — run by the National Trust — as part of the new “Vagabond” school tour.
The tour — designed by tour guide Damien Beard — has students follow in the footsteps of an 1870s undercover journalist (known only as Vagabond) who got a job as a dentist inside the prison, without any qualifications, to get scoops on the goings on behind bars.
The journalist’s real identity is unknown to this day.
Australian International Academy King Khalid Coburg student Iksander, 10, who completed the Vagabond tour, said it was “incredible” how a bustling shopping centre was once a “terrible” prison.
“It’s really weird how they turned this prison into a supermarket,” he said.
“You couldn’t even get in or sneak in and know people are doing their shopping here or watching a movie.”
Mariam, 12, said the tour was “fascinating”, particularly walking around H-Division and exploring the “tiny” cells.
The mystery still stuck behind the walls
If these bluestone walls could talk, they may just provide a clue on one of the biggest unanswered questions haunting Victorian history buffs.
Who hanged Ronald Ryan?
Much is known about the notorious Ryan — the last man hanged in Australia after he was sentenced to death for the murder Pentridge prison warder George Hodson during an escape.
His hanging was met with large protests outside the prison walls, with his death penalty sentence dividing the community.
Most of Melbourne could probably be accounted for on the day of the controversial hanging — February 3, 1967 — except for one notable figure.
The bloke who pulled the lever.
“No one knows that hangman’s name,” Mr Beard says.
“Their identities were protected by that stage, they were government officials. They wore disguises to hide their identities.
“Some people did know but they took that secret to the grave with them.”
And in the grave it will, most likely, remain.
Among the famous Pentridge mysteries that have been solved was the whereabouts of Bushranger Ned Kelly’s remains.
Kelly was transferred to Pentridge from Beechworth in 1873 before he was sent off to the “Sacramento” in Williamstown.
In 1929 — 49 years after his hanging at the (Old) Melbourne Goal — his body was moved to a mass grave at Pentridge where it remained untouched for more than 80 years.
It was only in 2011 when scientists used DNA evidence to identify Kelly’s remains at the Pentridge grave site, with these returning to his family who later held a private funeral for him in regional Victoria.
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