during the forties.
Eleven a.m.; the gaol would have been in lockdown had there not been training the previous day, but even so, fifty or sixty two- and three-stripers are present, and many retirees, some in suits, most in leather jackets, though I wore my cream Fair Isle sweater. In a life lagging, twenty-odd years, I made it to Assistant Super, a one-pipper that put me in charge of a wing, but I keep to myself. I never had much to say and I always drink alone, so I made myself unmemorable and that way I survive. Mind you I was forty-two when I became a baggy, 14 July ’86, and the herrenvolk didn’t at first like the cut of my jib, though I’d played tighthead for the Dirty Reds and before that Sydney Uni and my family is well known round Grabby. Took a year before they’d let me hold a set of keys.
Also present in civvies I see many long-term non-custodial staff, most of whom had a soft spot for Mumbles. What would have been, in his day and mine, Welfare and A and OD workers, nowadays designated SAPO’s and Senior SAPO’s and Psyches and MOSPs, and of course today we have a general manager rather than a governor. By the door, receiving commiseration, the family of the deceased and greeting all as they enter, Ron Woodham, only baggy ever made it through to commish. Ron Woodham, forty-six years in the service, retired in 2012 but still serving on the Parole Board. Ron Woodham, who told the Prisons Minister in 2005 ‘My job is to watch your back. My job is to ensure that, as you step down, you will be bruised and not battered.’
That same minister (Hatzistergos) remarked on vacating the portfolio, ‘Anyone could run Corrective Services with Ron Woodham in charge.’
Too true. Say what you will of Ron he took the job seriously. He could recite to you chapter and verse the form of every one of the ten-thousand-odd scumbags housed in the state’s twenty-eight gaols. He was famous for it. He knew Who was Who in the Zoo.
We heard how Mumbles became a baggy three years after Ron, in ‘68. That was the year our A-wing decedent, July ’86, was ordained priest. Though the service was conspicuously secular, a counsellor from the Apostolic Nunciature in Canberra read a message from the Concilium Legionis Mariae, from which we learned Mumbles had been a member of the Dublin-based Legion of Mary, and had done good work for the Legion, though the nature of the work was not specified.
Craig Funerals, who own the hearse and run the Craig’s Hill Crematorium, have a couple of speakers set up outside the now-deconsecrated chapel, but the amp isn’t properly working so we can’t hear all that’s said. We hear enough. We hear the music, selected by Mumbles who died of cancer in the Canberra Hospice; Jailhouse Rock for the note of manly levity, It’s a Wonderful World to bring a tear to the eye, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door from Guns and Roses. I stood apart among the headstones of the Catholic religious who are buried there in their hundreds. I’d never before been to the place, didn’t know it existed. You drive past the gaol towards Tarlo and turn left at the hostelry of Patrick Confoy.
A few one-pippers are glancing my way invitingly but I ignore them. They didn’t have to vote me off the island, friends; I took a powder. Perhaps they imagine I’m a former inmate planning a disturbance. Built like Brad Thorn, Mumbles; six-foot-six, nineteen stone and a bit of a short fuse. Give an Islander Yard gaffer pause, the prospect of a blue with Mumbles. Mumbles began working life, as we heard from Ron, as a mechanic in Barry. No little Australian boy dreams of becoming a screw. Some of us are former jumbo pilots, some master mariners, some butchers, some graziers, all lured by the prospect of steady pay for doing bugger-all with untold overtime. In the early noughties you could pull a six-figure annual wage at Long Bay.
Whereas today, when they lock down X-wing, they leave it unattended overnight.
In his final posting Mumbles departed to become a desk jockey, assistant commish, while I stayed on until the DIC witnessed on my first night overwhelmed me. It took a while.
It may have been suspected I was a dog breeder. In his retirement Mumbles devoted himself to the breeding of dogs, and we heard from Ron how he wouldn’t just sell a dog to anyone: you had to satisfy him that you were a fit and proper person to own a dog. A young female two-striper had a Neapolitan mastiff on a short leash, which in due course entered the ex-chapel to pay its last respects to its breeder.
I got on well with Mumbles. We shared some hard times but we also shared a liking for the phrase ‘these cuffs are too tight’. Back in the late eighties before CCTV, we had twenty-five deaths — murders, suicides, ODs — within the space of two years, and you should see the paperwork for any Death in Custody. It is big.
To cite one instance; a young man, who’d OD’d on ’done and benzos, acquiring his benzos presumably via the hairy handbag, wasn’t on the MMT. So someone who was had regurgitated methadone syrup in payment of a favour and does it taste foul, but off the ’done, out of gaol, back to using, back to gaol: the well-worn path. Mumbles didn’t leave the district when he retired as governors usually do. A former inmate of my acquaintance was astounded to encounter him in a Woolworths’ aisle. ‘Hello Mr Sheehan’ says the ex-inmate. ‘Call me Mumbles,’ mumbles Mumbles.
Son of Man can these ashes arise, can these ashes live again?
Then prophesy upon these ashes and say, O ye dry ashes when
Ye took a turn in the cinerary urn, Hold on says Ezekiel
Thy Word has not been heard since fire pulverized the bone
So when the last trump sounds I fear
Nary a cupboard door may stir
Alligator pair
I often drive to Canberra on Sunday after Mass as it’s an easy drive from Goulburn, and scenic too, if you like Hereford cattle and Lombardy poplar. I can drive home through Stunnedaroo and Stunning. I wouldn’t want to live in Canberra: a warder has to knock on your door at Alexander Maconochie, that’s the prison they named after the Norfolk Island Gaoler. If too drunk to drive, I will check myself into University House to rest my paws on the butterbox joints of a Fred Ward wingback easy chair that would have been fashioned of Blackwood by one of Jennings’ Germans, though many of Jennings’ Germans were actually Dutch resistance. Putting the past as best they could behind in 1950, Jennings’ Germans ventured to a Canberra then the size of Goulburn, to hypostatise for Fred his unique, bespoke furniture that confers the comfy Modernist ambiance on the ANU. My father rather fancied himself a frustrated cabinetmaker and took me as a boy on many a visit to old Acton. We would sneak abashed in and out of various buildings.
Weather being fine, I may cycle or stroll round the lake, which takes a couple of hours by cycle if you ride out through the Jerrabomberra Wetlands. I acknowledge a frisson to see a gowned man sitting in the garden of the hospice. I search his face for signs.
In the case of rain, I might browse in the National Library, depress myself. Once in a while I used to take in a film at the Arc Cinema, pretty much out of action these days owing to budgetary constraints, which is a shame, although the Sunday viewers, myself included, were mostly flashing a concession card. The Cinema, which is in the National Film and Sound Archive building, used to be the Institute of Anatomy, had Phar Lap’s heart on display, is a fine example of Monaro Art Deco, and ran in its final season a selection of Ingmar Bergman films, most of them new thirty-five millimetre prints courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute, that focussed on the relationship between Bergman and Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, one of the many actresses with whom he’d enjoyed a tread albeit his main muse. I viewed the entire season, because I recall seeing Wild Strawberries and The Virgin Spring at the Savoy in Bligh Street when I was new to Sydney during my undergraduate days. It was the only venue in Sydney screened non-English foreign films. I saw the paedophile Roman Polanski’s
