Illywhacker

The gaol they put him into was Grafton and you only have to drive through those ugly big gates to get the smell of what sort of place it is. Even before I saw my cell I knew this was no ordinary country lock-up. And although they boast in Grafton (town) that there has been only one execution in their gaol, the Brylcreemed chemists and clerks who tell you this do not mention the sane men who have hanged themselves in their cells.

It is a gaol dedicated to knocking the bejesus out of people, and if you are a tough guy they put you in "trac" and the warders come and visit you in your cell each night until you weep and beg to God to let you die. They are not nice noises to hear coming through your walls at night and, believe me, you hear everything. You hear a button brush against a wall and when poor Simmons hanged himself at last, his biggest problem was doing it so he would not be heard and I have read no sadder thing than the official account of how he used blankets and coir mats so he could take his life in total silence.

When I was an author I was party to a book called Gaol Bird which claimed I was a prisoner in Grafton Gaol, but once I had read the tattooed messages on the screws' arms I knew that I must get myself transferred out of there. Gaol Bird was a pack of lies -I spent no more than one soft month in Grafton during which time I made myself into a nice old man. I shuffled and tottered and you would not recognize the fellow who came cycling up from Nambucca a week before so cocky about his life that he abandoned a pretty widow with a business of her own.

Oh, you would not believe what a brown nose I was, a smiling snivelling wretch of a thing. I bent my spine and let my dentures clack when I smiled.

I got my transfer. They shipped me up to Rankin Downs near Coraki. Rankin Downs was brand new at the time, a sort of Promised Land for prisoners according to the Grafton grapevine. There were no locks on the door and you could get an education or work in the bush planting flooded gum.

Rankin Downs was a lovely idea. This was not apparent when you first saw it, but I am sure the intentions behind it were good. I am sure it was not the plan, not originally, to build it on the edge of a paperbark swamp, but perhaps its creator, its champion, had too many enemies in the department. Perhaps he lacked stamina and they wore him down, getting him to accept one compromise and then another. He saw it on a map and it looked perfect. It was only later that he saw they would have to build the camp on a gravel platform on the edge of a swamp, but he was an optimist. He kept going forward. He nearly lost his scheme countless times and in the end he was pleased to accept the long huts from the army. Perhaps he did not appreciate that they were cold in winter and boiling in summer, or perhaps he did, and still thought it a superior situation to a proper gaol. He was right, this weak tender soul in the Department of Corrective Services, but there is many a man who would have thanked him if he might have fought, just a little harder, and got us some wire to keep out the mosquitoes.

Rankin Downs may have been a prisoners' paradise, but it was the lowest rung for the screws who did not care for either the isolated site or the standard of their own accommodation. We were not put in the charge of bashers – they were right at the top in Grafton – but we got the moaners, the whingers, the ones with flatulence and bad breath, the ones their fellows could not stand to watch eating.

I could give you a long list of my complaints about Rankin Downs, that bleak, muddy, dusty, shadeless place – but I will also say this in its favour – you were permitted to look the screws in the eyes and you could sleep at night without listening to beatings. One slept without fear in that place but when Reg Moth was let into my so-called "cell" that night, my balls went tight and my mouth dry. Moth was not a screw. He was the sergeant who had arrested me, a wide square-headed fellow with big ginger eyebrows and thick hairy arms. He had a dented chin, big fleshy ear-lobes and a pair of very pale blue eyes that bulged demandingly from his florid face. He had a voice like a man who smokes forty Craven As a day – hoarse, cracked, given to phlegmy interruptions – but I don't recall him smoking. He parted his hair straight down the middle, across the flat plateau of his big head and although he was neat and polite, there was something contradictory in his eyes as if he were a neat polished chest of drawers full of tangled laddered nylon stockings.