Breakout: tales of hope from inside a female prison in Darwin
A trailblazing podcast reveals smart, funny and ironic storytelling beyond the suffering of women in Darwin jail.
In an isolated corner of the Darwin Correctional Centre, a few dozen female prisoners have spent the past two years working on a project that’s (probably) a world first.
The result is Birds Eye View, a 10-part podcast series launched in March. The creators believe it’s the only audio series to have been made by women inside a prison, but have been cautious about claiming the title in a medium as diverse as podcasting.
Either way, Birds Eye View is a remarkable achievement in communicating the breadth of life in jail with empathy and immediacy. Series producer Johanna Bell says the group was focused on pushing beyond established stereotypes about the stories of those inside Australia’s prisons.
“The women decided that they were tired of the narrative that … women prisoners are worthless, and sort of irredeemable.
“What we didn’t want was to make a podcast that was just about these women’s stories of trauma, because the women I have worked with have had really difficult and complex lives, but they are way more than their suffering. They are also smart, and funny, and great at irony.”
Bell, a community arts worker, was approached by the Northern Territory government two years ago to run a storytelling program for the women inside the Darwin Correctional Centre.
The prison houses around one thousand prisoners at any point in time, but only 80 are women. For safety reasons, the women are restricted from accessing any areas at the same time as male prisoners, severely limiting the facilities they can use.
Bell opted for an audio storytelling workshop rather than something written as she knew that some attendees were likely to have low literacy skills or have learned English as a second language.
“A lot of podcasts these days are made very quickly, but part of our approach was to work very slowly,” she says.
“A lot of the women in this project didn’t know what a podcast was when we started.
“We spent three months in the prison before we brought any recording equipment.”
The group agreed that it was important to have a variety of hosts and narrators to capture the diversity of the women inside, rather than focusing on any one story.
Renae, nicknamed “Rocket” by her friends, remembers feeling uneasy when she first heard about the audio producers who would be visiting the jail once a fortnight.
“At first I was untrusting. I was like, ‘Oh, what — you want to record me? Oh, yeah, this is gonna be great, they’re gonna use everything against me and blah blah blah’.
“But then as we got to know the people who were doing the podcast (Bell and co-producer Leah Sanderson) I began to relax a little bit and trust them. It’s been a long, slow process.”
Another resident, Taise (all podcast participants agreed to only go by first names on air), says she was mostly just curious as new programs were a rare thing during her time in prison.
“At first I wandered up to see what it was … there’s not much to do in Sector Four.
“A room full of other women who I basically live with sharing their stories from here there and everywhere? It was really warming, and I guess the whole room built a nice little bond together. It was a good escape to go up there each time,” she says.
It’s an opening for a punchline Rocket can’t resist.
“Don’t say escape and jail in the same sentence!”
That line of cheeky, honest humour is a thread that ties together so much of Birds Eye View. Prisoners share poetry, take the listener on a guided tour of the facility, conduct book reviews.
Recording a podcast inside a prison is, unsurprisingly, a very complicated affair. The producers had to fill out a form for every piece of equipment they brought into Sector Four, down to the batteries and cables.
Birds Eye View relies entirely on music created by NT-based female artists for its score, and its theme was created by Darwin musician Caiti Baker using musical samples recorded inside the prison. At one point that meant cramming 18 women inside a single toilet cubicle in the search for flattering acoustics. When the group wanted to listen to material together, their only option was the prison.
Bell describes the broad success of the project as an exercise in elevating unheard voices and shining a light on hidden parts of the Northern Territory.
“It’s very difficult to empower people inside a system that’s designed to disempower,” she explains.
Bell kept waiting for a call from the prison’s administrators saying that the podcast had been cancelled, a call that never came.
To celebrate the podcast’s launch, Sector Four hosted a listening party with wireless headphones and chocolate cake, an item that was even trickier to get inside the prison than microphones or recording equipment.
For Rocket, Taise and all the women who poured their lives into Birds Eye View, finally sharing their stories with the rest of the inmates was an intense experience.
“Watching people listen was … it was unreal,” says Rocket.
“I had no idea that we could invoke that much emotion from a person by letting them listen to a snippet from my life. So, it was really validating, I guess.”
“It brought everybody together. It made us realise that we’ve all come from similar situations,” adds Taise.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was really good.”
Listen to Birds Eye View on your favourite podcast app.
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