Pentridge: Voices from the Other Side preserves prison history
Murders, bashings, rapes, floggings and routine humiliation: Pentridge prison’s barbarity still haunts those who called it home.
Murders, bashings, rapes, floggings and routine humiliation: the massive bluestone walls of Melbourne’s Pentridge prison enclosed an isolated and often barbaric world. Men were set to break rocks as punishment. Others were kept in isolation, and reacted by spreading their faeces over the prison walls — a protest known as a “bronze-up”. Women, imprisoned in the small and short-lived women’s section, somehow became pregnant. Mentally disturbed prisoners slashed themselves, or swallowed sharp objects, or cut off body parts. Others filled their cups with urine or vomit and hurled the contents at guards.
Australia’s last execution took place there (Ronald Ryan in 1967), as well as the last flogging. From 1850 to 1997, Pentridge loomed over Melbourne, and became a byword across Australia for the horrors of jail.
The urban heritage specialist Rupert Mann was 15 or 16 when he first scaled the walls of Pentridge and began to explore inside the decommissioned prison.
Obscene graffiti that spoke of desperation and futility covered many of the walls and there was dust and filth and corrosion, but Mann, now 32, also began to see the raw and often unpalatable history of the place. When the Pentridge site was sold to developers and the destruction of many of the buildings began, he knew that he had to keep a record.
“It was important social history, and it was being destroyed,” he says. “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t done it.”
So he began taking a series of stark and graphic photos and, in time, tracking down people who had a connection to the jail — former prisoners, a journalist, a singer, a warden. He interviewed them at length and, adding their words to the photos, produced a book. Pentridge: Voices from the Other Side tells the story of a prison where humanity was tested and men and women treated with routine brutality. He wrote an introduction for each of the narratives, which are told in the first person.
Three of his interview subjects have since died, and Pentridge has been radically transformed in the years since he began the project. “I was 23 when I started that book, and 24 or 25 when I interviewed most of these people, and at that moment in my life I was really interested to ask: ‘How did you survive this place?’ ” he says. “Then I thought if you could learn to survive Pentridge, you could survive anything.
“And it’s not true, of course, because many prisoners say that learning to survive in prison is completely different to surviving in the outside world.”
Since it was first sold, various sections of the Pentridge site have changed hands a number of times, with a number of stages of demolition. Mann says that these days soaring blocks of flats are in the works, and much of the prison’s history — especially the years since 1900 — is being papered over.
“Prison is the place where the human experience is distilled down to its essence,” he says, adding that exploring Pentridge and listening to the stories of despair and sheer wretchedness had weighed heavily on him. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the old-fashioned gumshoe journalist work of tracking down potential interview subjects and inviting them to tell their stories.
In one case, he travelled to Kuala Lumpur to find out what had happened to a former inmate. In another, he combed through old phone books, visited possible street addresses, and searched social media sites for relatives.
Many of the people he contacted refused, and the only female prisoner interviewed for the book insisted on anonymity.
When Mann had made the connection, he took his interview subjects back to Pentridge for photographs. He remembers Noel Tovey, now a recognised figure in the arts world as the first Aboriginal ballet dancer, and awarded with an AM, walking back into the prison where he was incarcerated in 1951 for the “abominable” act of buggery, and Brian Morley, who as a journalist saw Ryan hanged, going back to the scene of state-sanctioned homicide that haunted him for so many decades.
“To see Noel returning to the cell for the first time in almost 70 years — the cell where he tried to commit suicide, where his ancestors told him he would find a better life — to see him walk into that cell again and face that past; and to see Brian walk up to those gallows that horrified him and haunted him for almost his entire life: it was the antithesis of what the developers were doing, which was burying that history in order to make it palatable,” he says. “Noel and Brian were looking at it dead-on.”
In recent times, Mexican-themed cocktail parties and fashion shows have been held at the blood-soaked site, and a two-hour ghost tour is on offer for $48 per visitor. At the same time, Mann says, a 19-storey block of apartments is planned for construction inside a small prison yard, surrounded by the massive bluestone walls, with a watchtower at one corner.
Still, he adds, the current developers are doing a better job of acknowledging the dark history of Pentridge than some of their predecessors, although many of the buildings associated with more recent memories of the site have already been demolished.
He understands something had to be done with Pentridge, simply because prime real estate in the middle of Melbourne could not simply be left to lie, but he would have preferred a little more of the site’s tormented history to be preserved. “There’s a middle ground that could have been achieved,” he says. “Certain sections could have been left undeveloped, with more intensive development in other areas on the site.”
He finds the current mentality of pushing Pentridge as a delightful residential site a little difficult to understand, and likens it to Alcatraz being marketed as a convenient location for modern living.
“It would have been wonderful to have kept some areas of Pentridge, even just a couple of cells, with the original graffiti on the walls,” he says. “It was really a question for a heritage specialist, but unfortunately Heritage Victoria couldn’t force the developers to do it, and the National Trust and the Moreland [City] Council, which opposed a lot of the development, didn’t have a strong voice.”
This original graffiti, some of which is pictured on the inside front and back covers of Mann’s book, and has now been either demolished or painted over, is sometimes lurid, often obscene and occasionally pornographic. Unsurprisingly, it is liberally larded with swearwords as, indeed, are some of the first-person interviews.
Mann didn’t flinch from using the obscenities, and neither did his publisher, Scribe, although he says some of his interview subjects had second thoughts after reading their transcriptions. Each subject had the right of veto, and Mann sent them copies of the interviews after they were conducted, and again just before publication.
“By the time the book got close to publication, it had been six years since the interviews had been conducted, and quite late in the piece I decided that I needed to give all the interviewees the opportunity to look at it again,” he says, pointing out that some of the subjects, such as the Aboriginal actor Jack Charles, had become much more public figures and it was only fair to offer them a chance to review.
“Most didn’t have changes, but some did,” Mann says, “and it pushed the book right to the line, that process.”
The singer Paul Kelly is another interview subject — he performed at Pentridge in 1985. And Peter Norden, a former chaplain at the prison, provides Mann with a reflective account of his time there. Pat Merlo, a former prison warden, was deeply upset by the suicide of a female prisoner. And Franciscan sister Clare McShee, who spent a long time counselling sex offenders locked up in the prison, remembered them with compassion.
Naturally, writing and compiling the book prompted Mann to think deeply about the world of prisons and prison reform.
“Creative people, and people who see the world a bit differently, can naturally come up against the law,” he says, “because the law is rigid.” That rigidity has caused a lot of pain, he adds, and often almost unendurable suffering, but it also inspired a number of people to write, to act, and maybe to dance.
“There’s someone like Noel Tovey who’s written about his experiences in Pentridge in two autobiographies, and Ray Mooney, whose experiences in [the prison’s] H Division resulted in plays and several books,” Mann says.
“Gregory David Roberts wrote Shantaram in Pentridge, twice, because the prison officers found what he’d written on toilet paper and destroyed the book. And then he wrote it again from memory.” Before writing Shantaram, Roberts escaped from Pentridge in 1980 and fled to India, where he lived for 10 years. But he was later caught and sent back to Pentridge, where had to wait out another six years (including two in solitary). He claims prison guards twice destroyed his Shantaram manuscript.
Law-breakers such as Roberts, and like some of those Mann interviewed, have often been physically or psychologically wounded by their peers, their parents or simply by the world, and locking them up does almost nothing to rehabilitate them and often only serves to entrench their anger and fear. Mann has found that the severity of the prison regime serves to hone humanity down to the bone, leaving only the primal emotions.
“Prison is a place where the human experience is distilled down to its essence,” Mann explains, mulling over his years of investigating, thinking and talking about Pentridge. “We believe prison is separate from the outside world, but in a way it’s more real than the real world. People’s behaviour in prison reveals so much about the human condition, the resilience and fragility of the human spirit.”
Rupert Mann’s Pentridge: Voices from the Other Side is published by Scribe.
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