Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  For the two years since the 1974 Bathurst riots, authorities had always denied that prisoners had been shot and that one man had been left paralysed. Yet it only took a bit of legwork for me to track down 25-year-old Dennis Bugg to a residential care facility in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. No one had ever visited Bugg before. No one was supposed to know he even existed. He spent his days watching television in the company of several other equally immobile young men, most of them paralysed as a result of motorcycle accidents. I had not made an appointment, or announced myself, so at first they regarded me curiously when I simply walked in and asked which one of them was Dennis. When they saw that I was an unaccompanied young woman who was interested in one of their number, several of them began making sexually explicit catcalls. I engaged in harmless banter with them. I wasn’t offended by what they were saying. Rather, I felt immensely sorry for these men, their lost lives and the fact that no one cared about them.

  Bugg was serving a sentence for stealing, which had been supplemented with extra time for trying to escape, when he had been shot in the back during the riot on 3 February 1974. He had been due for parole two days later. After he dropped to the ground three other prisoners helped carry him to safety.

  ‘They fired at us all the way,’ Bugg told me.

  Bugg finally got his parole on 12 February, but by then he was incapacitated in Sydney’s Prince Henry Hospital. The Corrective Services department turned down his parole officer’s request for $1500 to pay for a wheelchair and other equipment. Instead, Bugg was charged under the Crimes Act with offences relating to the riots at Bathurst. A few times he rode his hospital-supplied wheelchair into the traffic on busy nearby Anzac Parade, which was interpreted as a suicide attempt, so he was scheduled to Callan Park, a psychiatric institution. After just a month Callan Park demanded he be removed, saying he was a medical patient, not a psych case. Bugg was sent to the home where I found him three years later. During that time, neither Bugg nor his family had ever paid a bill for his care; the home told me ‘the government’ paid. The charges were never proceeded with. Dennis Bugg was simply hidden away from public view—and public scrutiny.

  I also found a prison officer who went on the record and described the floggings ‘the screws’—as the prison officers were called—were expected to administer regularly to ‘tracs’, the so-called intractable prisoners, who were sent ‘to the Jacaranda festival’ as the notorious Grafton jail was known. The ‘reception biff ’ at Grafton was famous throughout the NSW prison system and crims dreaded being sent there. Better to endure the freezing cold of the windowless and non-heated stone cells at Bathurst, and the occasional biff, than the guaranteed savage beating of your naked body when you arrived in the warm climate of northern New South Wales and which was followed by a regular weekly walloping. I interviewed Max Williams who had spent 27 years of his life in institutions of one kind or another, including a stint at Grafton in the 1950s. For a time he and fellow Grafton inmate Darcy Dugan were Australia’s two most notorious criminals. ‘We used to get a hiding regularly about once a week. I used to get flogged on Thursdays,’ he told me. ‘Just in normal conversation someone would say “Aren’t you due to be biffed?” And I’d say, Jeez, what’s today? It was Thursday. Well it was my biff. And this was every week.’ Grafton had broken Max. He’d lost his hair and nearly half his body weight. Like many other prisoners, he turned to writing as a means of expression and escape. After his eventual release he became a renowned poet. He was a gentle man but his past never left him. He willingly told me about it and Justice Nagle made sure that he gave evidence to the Royal Commission; his description of Australia’s Gulag featured on the second page of Nagle’s final report. Grafton was, Nagle reported, ‘a regime of terror’.6

  I was also able to obtain corroboration for an atrocity that occurred after the Royal Commission had ended its inquiry.7 I learned from his lawyer that two days after the commission finished taking its evidence, Bernie Matthews had been beaten unconscious by the screws at Katingal. The whole rationale for Katingal was that it was supposed to use sensory deprivation instead of physical brutality to quell prisoners. But Matthews, who had endured the Grafton ‘biff ’ five years earlier when he’d been sent there for trying to escape from Parramatta, had been bashed at Katingal as well. I found out the name of the doctor who had treated Matthews and who confirmed his injuries and I then called the superintendent of Katingal, whose spluttering obfuscations were certainly not a denial of what had happened.

  Bernie Matthews had been an important witness at the Royal Commission, giving first-hand accounts of brutality that was so severe it was hard to comprehend it was happening in New South Wales in the 1970s. Now clearly he was getting paid back. Matthews became a writer while he was in prison, writing poetry and plays and, since his release, has published Intractable, a book about his prison experiences8 and he still maintains a blog. I had met Bernie at Parramatta and I gave him his first job as a journalist, getting him to write a review for ‘BookWorld’, the paper’s book pages which I edited for a time. I think he was the first serving crim to write for the paper.

  The Nagle Report began with an 1843 quote: ‘Society has the right to punish, but not to corrupt those punished.’ It was from a book by Gustave de Beaumont, a French magistrate and prison reformer, and the man who accompanied Alexis de Tocqueville on his famous journey to inspect the emerging democracy of the colonies in America in 1831–32. The report ‘laid out the horror of the 33-year Grafton regime, recommended closure of the state’s newest prison, Katingal, and made a large number of mainly reformist recommendations for improvement in prison conditions and amenities,’ wrote David Brown in an assessment of the Royal Commission 25 years later.9 The NSW prison system had developed into a ruthless regime where deprivation of liberty was no longer seen as sufficient punishment. There is no doubt that many of the prisoners I interviewed or wrote about were dangerous and violent men, but many of them had become so because of what was done to them in prison. Max Williams had been released after serving ten years for stealing an alarm clock and for several escape attempts—and went straight to a gun shop. He planned to kill two of the screws and then shoot the rest of them when they turned up for their mates’ funeral. Mad as a cut snake, he remained free for seven days before being sent back to prison. As I noted in my article, you could not describe Grafton as rehabilitative. I knew other crims who were sexually impotent after being released. Many had severe psychological problems. Anyone who’d been to Grafton had trouble looking you in the eye, something that had earned a flogging inside.

  In the 1970s as we tried to grapple with notions of crime and punishment, and liberty and incarceration, we absorbed the new literature that was addressing these issues in a profound and unprecedented way. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was published in English in 1974 and the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s very influential Discipline and Punish, about the evolution of Western prisons, came out in 1975. This was the environment in which my articles were published and that, together with the Royal Commission offering the hope that justice might be at hand, gave them a resonance they might otherwise not have had. It was also a time when many, including me, were campaigning actively for individual prisoners who, we judged, had been treated unfairly by the system. The Free Sandra Willson campaign, instigated by a group of women calling themselves Women Behind Bars, succeeded when Willson was released in 1977 after eighteen years served ‘at the Governor’s pleasure’ for murdering a taxi driver in Sydney. Our case was not that she wasn’t guilty of the worst crime imaginable, but that the state had given her an indeterminate sentence. A life sentence for murder was generally around thirteen years then, but Willson had no hope of release because although after an initial determination of insanity, when she was later judged to be mentally competent, her sentence was never reviewed. There were many such injustices and anomalies in the NSW prison system and they provided rich fodder for activists, reformers—and writers. In addi
tion to my journalism, I also engaged in some creative writing. A year before the television series Prisoner and long before Wentworth in 1978, I collaborated with my friend Daniela Torsh on a short film we called Saint Therese based on the experiences of women in NSW prisons.

  In October 1976 I left the paper and went home to Adelaide. My youngest brother Jamie, aged only seventeen, was dying of cancer. I expected to be gone three months, I’d told Suich when I sought leave without pay, but he died just three days after I got there. He had been diagnosed more than eighteen months earlier with Ewings sarcoma, a rare bone cancer that mostly affects children, and our family had been utterly changed as we tried to deal with his illness and treatment. None of us coped well, but while I held up when giving support or counsel on the phone, it was a different matter when I saw my little brother in the flesh. In January he and his best friend, Chris Ryan, had come to Sydney to stay with me for a few days. At the airport, I watched him make his way off the plane and was horrified. His gaunt grey face told me he was going to die soon and, total coward that I was, I simply could not bear to look at him. I dropped the boys off at my house and went to work, and then to the pub. I kept ringing them from the phone booth in the pub’s lounge, guiltily assuring them I’d be home soon. I simply did not know what to do, physically or emotionally, to help him. Nor could I deal with my inner turmoil as I raged against the total unfairness of it all. Over the eighteen months of his illness I made several visits home to spend time with him. We played chess or listened to his favourite music but we never talked about the cancer. He never complained to me or to our mother about the agonising pain that never left him, although he confided in a couple of his school friends, boys his age who came to see him every single day once he was no longer able to go to school. He died, finally, on 24 October,10 and our family descended into a shattered state of grief mixed with relief that his ordeal, and ours, was finally over. Just a few days later came the phone call saying I’d won a Walkley Award for Best Newspaper Feature for my prison articles. It felt like an obscene intrusion and I did not want to tell the family, but they had welcomed the distraction. On 5 November I found myself in Perth’s Sheraton Hotel listening to speeches by the premier, Sir Charles Court, and the widow of Sir William Walkley, the founder of Ampol Petroleum who had created the awards in 1956, and who had died just a few months earlier. The Walkleys were a lot smaller than they are today, with just five awards, all of them for print journalism, but I suspect they are still an equally inebriated event. I rampaged around the room giving my views to anyone who would listen, as well as those who seemed reluctant to hear my opinions. As I recall, there were very few women there and certainly no other female winners. But I received many compliments and congratulations from women in the industry, many of whom expressed genuine pride at a rare win by a member of their sex. A few people were pleased because I was a late-starter; it meant that there was hope for other oldies. I was 31 at the time and, I am pretty certain, the youngest winner. I felt an immense pride at winning this prize because of the tough subject matter. In some ways I was more proud than when I’d published Damned Whores, one year to the day earlier. My book had been reprinted three times in 1976 but that seemed remote from me; I could not see people buying or reading it. I received almost no feedback. Journalism was more tangible. It was immediate, and the reaction—whatever it was—instantaneous. Gratifying. Or terrifying. Depending on the story.

  After a year I felt I was getting the hang of journalism. I liked it and it seemed that I was good at it. I had learned so much in a very short time and I hoped I would be able to continue to develop. Suich and Whitton pushed me. I was now investigating procurement in the Defence department, probing for potential corruption in the multi-million-dollar deals that kept the military supplied. I was hoping I might uncover something similar to the Lockheed aircraft bribery scandals that had been exposed in several European and Asian countries. Australia purchased aircraft from Lockheed. I did not know where I would end up, with the story or with my life. I just knew that, for now, I was where I wanted to be. I felt I could do anything, not just because of what I was doing at the paper but because of another challenge I had set myself. Ever since I had been fished from the Adelaide baths spluttering and close to drowning when I was about ten, I had been afraid to put my head under water so I could not swim. It was time to conquer that fear. Before work each day, I went to the Sydney University pool and, with help from Rose Creswell, who tutored English at the university, and some other very patient friends, I learned to blow bubbles with my face under the water. I learned to float, to not panic at being adrift. It would be many more months before I could swim a lap, and even longer before it became effortless, but one day I had the breakthrough. Suddenly and dramatically I went from floundering to swimming. I swam a whole lap without gasping, and then another, and another. I still had a lot to work on with my stroke and my speed, but I had made my body respond to my will. I felt I was doing a similar thing with my journalism, always testing myself, pushing harder and taking whatever risks were needed.

  We were one of the first papers to do team journalism, where several reporters worked together and told a story from different angles or multiple points of view. The first was a lengthy article entitled ‘How Women are Trained: If it’s not rape what is it?’ published in early December 1976. The article became notorious because of the shocking story it told of ‘trains’ in the Far North Queensland town of Ingham. Bruce Stannard had first heard about this extraordinary phenomenon when attending a media seminar in Brisbane. He had met Heather Ross, a young woman from Ingham, who told him about a local sexual practice that, she said, amounted to pack rape. According to Ross, a train might begin on a Saturday night as a couple left a social event and other men would make a yanking motion in the air, like a conductor pulling the cord on a train, and yell ‘Too-hoot. All aboard’. As many as 50 men would then follow the couple, to the nearby cane fields or a vacant lot, and all of them would have sexual intercourse with the woman. These trains often ran three times a week, Ross said. There was rarely a complaint to police, she told him, as the culture of the town, which was largely populated by descendants of the original Italian immigrants, had very traditional attitudes towards women. The girls who had been ‘trained’, as the local lingo put it, were regarded as ‘sluts’. Even when they had not consented.

  ‘They have an absolute contempt for women. A hatred,’ Ross told Stannard. ‘They despise any girl who is prepared to have sex.’

  Stannard returned to Sydney and got on the phone. He had been sceptical initially that such a story could be true—in the 1970s surely such behaviour would not be tolerated. But a quick chat with an Ingham detective-sergeant confirmed not only that rape was common—between 30 and 40 local women had been raped, he said—but the police were largely powerless to do anything about it for lack of evidence. They did not even bother to record the complaints any more.

  Evan Whitton was in the chair at the time because Suich was on assignment in Tokyo. As a former Truth reporter he had a nose for a good crime story and was keen to pursue this one but, partly guided by the young American writer Bruce Hanford who had joined the paper at Whitton’s instigation, he agreed to a novel approach. It was unusual for the paper to send any of us much farther afield than a nearby capital city; it was unheard of to send a team of three to a place as distant as Ingham but it turned out to be an inspired decision. The team was Stannard, who had got the original story; Hanford, who would bring an editor’s eye and a gonzo sensibility to the exercise; and me, the feminist who had written at length about rape in her book and who could now draw on that background when she interviewed the young women who had been ‘trained’. What we did was a first for Australian journalism: a team effort where we split the reporting along gender lines and where we inserted ourselves into the story, New Journalism style, as we tried to get the truth about what was happening to the girls in this town.

  We spent just a day in Ingham, driving to and
from Townsville in a rented car, and checking into a motel room that would serve as our base and from where we could make telephone calls. We had done enough preliminary work to know who we wanted to talk to, and where to find them, but we still managed to cover an enormous amount of ground in a very short time. I concentrated on tracking down and talking to several of the young girls while Stannard and Hanford talked to the cops, to the local newspaper editor and to several of the perpetrators including, amazingly, the man who was the chief organiser of the ‘trains’.

  ‘None of the sheilas get raped or anything like that,’ he told the two Bruces. ‘It’s just the way they are.’

  I heard a very different story.

  A seventeen-year-old who we called X and who had a baby told me how she had been raped at age thirteen when two girls in a car with some boys had invited her to come into town with them: ‘Instead of going to town, they took me out near the mill. There were five men and they all raped me. I reported it to the police. But I didn’t have enough evidence. I wasn’t bruised enough.’ She knew the men but they avoided her for some months afterwards, crossing the street so as not to have to talk to her. That all changed, she told me, after she had the baby that had resulted from the rape and, two days before the birth, the same men raped her little sister. The boys were ‘real proud’ after that, X told me.