Jail for sale, complete with grisly history, a ghost or two, and a host of angry locals

One of the country’s oldest lock-ups can be yours for just $20m. But beware: the 200-year-old jail comes with some surprising additions.

Berrima Correctional Centre includes 60 cells, a watchtower and two cottages, all ringed by sandstone walls. Picture: Supplied

If you’re in the market for a great escape from lockdown, one of the country’s oldest lock-ups can be yours for just $20m. But beware: the 200-year-old Berrima jail, now up for sale, comes with a grisly history, a few ghosts, and some very angry locals.

In its time the prison has housed some of NSW’s most high-profile felons, including Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid, bent detective Roger Rogerson, corrupt corrective services minister Rex ‘’Buckets’’ Jackson and celebrity drug dealer Richard Buttrose.

One of the 60 cells.

Rogerson, who did a three-year stint there for hiding $110,000 in secret bank accounts, once ­described the place as “a dog’s jail” – one for informers, paedophiles and crooked cops. But now the forbidding prison has been decommissioned and put on the market, amid fierce community opposition. Built in the 1830s by convicts in the hamlet in the Southern Highlands, 120km south of Sydney, the 1.9ha complex includes 60 cells, a watchtower and two cottages, all ringed by sandstone walls.

Berrima prison cells circa 1914. Picture: State Library of Victoria

And if those walls could talk, what a story they might tell. In the course of its colourful and, at times, grim history, six people were marched to the gallows ­inside what became Berrima Correctional Centre.

The most famous was Lucretia Dunkley, hanged in 1843 alongside her lover Martin Beech for murdering her husband with an axe. The judge ordered that the pair be buried standing up – so they would never rest in peace.

The skull of Lucretia Dunkley. Picture: Supplied

Their severed skulls were sent to the Sydney Museum to be studied, but their graves remain within the prison grounds, believed to be marked by two small crosses on the southwest corner. Historian Ros Dale, who worked at the prison for 15 years, believes Dunkley’s ghostly presence is very much alive in the town. “She’s still hanging around in spirit form; there are heaps of stories about spirit activity,” she said.

The grounds of Berrima prison.

Australia’s first serial killer, John Lynch, was also executed at ­Berrima in 1842 after he went on a rampage murdering 10 people, ­including a young girl Mary McNamara.

But for Joseph Hedges the horrors of Berrima prison are personal. When Mr Hedges was just 13 years old his father Albert, a warder, was assaulted and left for dead by two prisoners, who ­absconded in a stolen vehicle.

Inside the prison complex.

“He never worked again. He ended up suffering from very ­severe headaches, worse than ­migraines, and his skull was fractured like a hard-boiled-egg shell,” Mr Hedges said.

Mr Hedges is worried about the fate of the plaque honouring his ­father that was installed inside the prison, and had hoped the building would be preserved as a tourist ­attraction.

Former detective Roger Rogerson leaves Berrima prison in 1995 after serving a three-year conspiracy sentence. Picture: Paul Hutton

Berrima Residents Association president Eric Savage said the ­prison cast a long shadow over the town of about 700 residents, many of whom strongly oppose the ­prison from falling into private hands. He said Berrima was unique in Australia as the Georgian-era outpost that time forgot, the town having never been developed – and the prison is its heart.

“You could write an opera about Berrima prison, or Jimmy Barnes could write a song,” he said.

“Berrima was planned by Robert Hoddle, who laid out Melbourne, and it doesn’t have an overlay of 19th or 20th-century buildings, so the colonial landscape is still there, and that’s why the decision over the future of the jail is so important.

“It is intricately involved in the history of Berrima. If all the promise and opportunity that the jail provided in public infrastructure is sold off in a fire sale, it would be a tragedy.”