did, but am still waiting as I found myself ordered by Laid-Back Lester to watch another cock in action, this time pissing into a jar. A random is generally done at the hour of Lauds when piss is least dilute. Two male officers, which back then was most, and well I recall my first rencounter with my first female officer, who’d hair like Lola in Run Lola Run, and silenced a yard full of outlaw bikies by telling them how she often pushed her husband’s bike off its stand, came into the gatehouse saying ‘who do I need to fuck to get a coffee round here?’ Last we heard of Gillian she was governing Dillwynia — in this case Tosh and me, were to watch the micturition, having first conducted a strip search, then screw a lid on the warm jar and affix a seal in the inmate’s view. The details would be written on the seal. The security seal number would be entered on a form and the inmate asked to read both form and sticker and attest the numbers matched but he couldn’t produce could he, so he had to be placed in a dry yard for two hours but we didn’t have one, so I was consigned to remain in his slot and watch he didn’t try to ‘flush’ i.e. guzzle water, all pretty pointless as rockies are rarely on the gear and seldom subjected to a random. But it got me out the way. And by the time the two hours was up, the body upstairs had been removed — I reckon Lester hadn’t even seen it — and I was sent in with mop and bucket to rid the slot of shit and semen. I told them in Rome the man had been a gasper like Michael Hutchence stroke David Carradine but they didn’t seem interested. I also thought it strange that no one had bothered to interview me, but when I remarked on this to Tosh he replied ‘You are jest a baggy.’
I didn’t ask the inmate’s name and as Tosh had removed his door tag, it wasn’t till I was driving home through Pomeroy it hit me. I had seen that head of hair. I’d seen that man before.
You could never actually count on going home till you made it out the gate.
We had some twenty-five years beforehand given each other a perfunctory nod, but we’d moved in different circles and attended different schools. I’d gone to Goulburn High (Justice and Tenacity) while he’d been at St Pat’s (Age Quod Agis). It would have been the year after I left Goulburn we met and all it amounted to was a nod of the head.
Autumn term was Michaelmas term at Sydney Uni in them days and during Easter break I came home to Goulburn on the train. I still had Brenda my Catholic girlfriend, and as all Tykes, which didn’t include me or my father, we being lapsed Tykes, ex-Tykes, would faithfully visit the Stations of the Cross, which since 1955 had meant traipsing round the Presentation Retreat, I’d said to the lovely Brenda, with a vulpine cunning, I don’t really want to be traipsing round with three thousand people come Friday, but I wouldn’t mind seeing these statues that I’ve heard so much about. See, I figured once I got her into that garden I could paw her about. Medieval Muslim writers allude to the monastery garden with a smirk, suggesting an ancient association with sex and alcohol. Up we went to Marys Mount early that Holy Week, and I recall being mightily delighted to see the garden, as I thought, deserted. Women were debarred from the monastery buildings though not from the monastery garden. Yet just as I was making my move, I heard a voice shout ‘Brenda!’
Looking up, I see a youth about my age, barefoot and wearing a long black mantle, clinging to a cross on a plinth. He is using a toothbrush to clean between the marmoreal fingers of a half-life-sized Roman centurion, cruelly engaged in giving Jesus a Chinese burn to get him back to his feet.
‘Simon!’ said Brenda ‘what are you doing up there?’
He laughed and it seemed to me that I could no longer exist as she ventured into duologue with him, ignoring me. He ignored me.
I never saw her more animated. Whereupon I dumped her and took up with a Sydney girl, though we did eventually marry. It was probably nothing more sinister than glamourous newsreader chats with bland weatherman under final credits, but you never forget the face of a rival, not at that age, if he’s platinum-blond.
It was surely Simon Bourke, who on profession took the name ‘Simon of Cyrene’, which is pretty much the same name, but seeing his stat dec had been conferred on him by Mercy Sisters, it may have been some kind of twisted tribute he was making them, who would know. He was a creature of the Catholic Church, our Reverend Rocky Buzzacott.
And always I see him clinging to that Ninth Station, Jesus Falls a Third Time.
Can be hard in the retard yard to scab a tab of eccy
While finding little boys to woo would take a deal of reccy
But ‘pon my soul if that’s your goal you’ve not been thinking clearly
You don’t need pill or partner should you judge yourself sincerely
Let execution then proceed
A smidge past the last-minute reprieve
Fall of the House of Paul
Mumbles died powerless, and don’t we mostly? Can you suppose Don Bradman, up the road there in Bowral, the greatest sportsman who ever lived, with batting average four standard deviations from the international mean, succeeded in putting from mind he’d scored a duck in his last innings? No one draws comfort from what he used to be.
The day after Mumbles’ funeral I returned to Kenmore Cemetery, formerly St Patrick’s Cemetery, to inspect the headstones on Craig’s Hill. The Gothic chapel, extended to incorporate smokestacks and catafalque, was once the Marulan Catholic Church. The date ‘1869’ may still be seen on the stone tympanum. In 1937 the church was moved to its present location to become the mortuary chapel for the local religious. One of the still-extant stained-glass windows was donated by the Sisters of Mercy, another by the Sisters of St Joseph, a third by the Christian Brothers, a fourth by the Sacred Heart Sodality, a fifth by the Children of Mary. They remain, as it were plucked from the bowl of eyes on a taxidermist’s bench, as the property of Sidney Craig Funerals. In 2005 the Church sold the chapel for use as a crematorium. The bones of Cork-born Bishop Barry beneath the floor were disinterred and the statue of St Patrick, widely considered a remarkable likeness, removed. Most of St Patrick’s Cemetery had already been sold to the Council but a moiety was retained by the Church, so that spilling down the slope of Craig’s Hill today you will see the remnant of an era now dead and buried as the folk beneath, for no more Sisters of Mercy depart Westport, County Mayo, and no more local graziers’ daughters put their hands up for a life of unpaid labour. Australian nun population peaked in ’66 even as traditional garb was being replaced, post-Vatican Two, initially by that laughably cut-down version, soon to be binned entirely.
I was looking for the grave of a certain Mercy Sister which, when I found it, implored me ‘Pray for Sr Mary Bridget Poidevin’, which I did. I learned she ‘died 15/7/86. R.I.P.’ which was the day after the day I began work at Goulburn Gaol. The headstones of religious don’t give you the date of birth or profession (item: not true of the Galong Redemptorists). There are more than two-hundred Mercy Sisters, Sisters of St Joseph and Sisters of St John of God buried in Kenmore Cemetery and from the late 1940’s the family name is included on the headstone: ‘Pray for Sr Mary Josepha Coen, Sr Mary Juliana Johnson, Sr Mary Aquinas Chalker’. Prior to this Mercy nuns were stripped, in death as in life, of original sin: ‘Pray for Sr M Baptist, Sr M Magdalen, Sr M Columba’. The most recent religious grave I saw was that of Sister Mary Lucina Burt, who died in 2007, the least recent that of Sister Mary Teresa, who died in 1871.There are eight-hundred-odd Mercy Sisters more or less alive in Australia today, none I imagine Celtic youngsters and many of them very old women. Madeleine Lawrence RSM, Religiosa Soror Misericordiae, died in 2012 at the age of one-hundred-and-ten, having entered St Michael’s Novitiate and Scholasticate in Kenmore Street Goulburn in 1919, an era when the Code of Canon Law specifically forbad a Church funeral being given anyone about to be cremated. Maddy died at Mt St Joseph’s, the Mercy retirement convent in Young, up the hill on Campbell Street from
