While the propaganda on current affairs shows might have you believe that ‘supermax’ prisoners like these live in near clinical isolation and don’t know who is in the surrounding cells, in reality the inmates can and do yell at each other. Some days the abuse, death threats, mockery, paranoid delusions, and so on rage from early in the morning until late at night. Working and mixing with suitable prisoners selected from the thousands in custody might be a little more rehabilitating, but that would be common sense and you know what they say about that: it’s not common.
The logic that prevails in jail is more of the Catch 22 kind: if a prisoner in solitary has a predictable response to solitary and gets weirder, more hostile or more suicidal, then the authorities use such responses as justification for keeping them in isolation.
CHANGE
In Chris’ only known act of ‘lagging’ a fellow prisoner, he warns Barwon authorities that an inmate is plotting to take Barwon’s governor hostage and behead him unless Australia withdraws its forces from wars in the Middle East. To Chris, that sort of violence is simply unacceptable.
His warning is taken seriously and the inmate is moved, but the incident adds to anger towards Chris from extremist Muslims in prison.
Chris, who has replaced Buddhism with Islam at the time of writing, has been seen as a traitor since making it known he didn’t buy into the jihadist ideology of jailed Melbourne terror cell leader Nacer Benbrika (another person Chris has argued with in solitary’s cabin-fever slanging matches).
Fellow Muslim convert and serial killer Gregory Brazel wrote at length to Chris, angry at his previous shit-bombing of a child killer who happened to be Muslim (even if Chris has been inclusive of all faiths and persuasions in his shit-bombing phases), telling Chris to:
Turn from this betrayal of your Brothers … if you are a truly committed Muslim, and never ever backbite a Brother Muslim again … for if you do so, and … continue in your backbiting, [it] will only bring doom and gloom upon your head … it will blacken your heart and soul, and, thereafter, you will be lost forevermore.
Sounds like any other day in isolation for Chris, who tried to kill himself again a couple of weeks ago.
When we started the MAYHEM project Chris told me that he would give the book a tragic ending and he’s doing his best to be true to his word. Annette knew something was up when she hadn’t heard from him; he normally rings his mum every day. Her repeated calls to the prison kept getting fobbed off until she learnt that there’d been an ‘incident’.
When Chris was eventually allowed to use a phone, he told her that very late one night about a week and a half earlier he’d sliced open a vein in his arm and lay down to die but that the next morning guards found him drenched in blood but alive.
This isn’t life, he told her.
Maybe you despise crims. Maybe you hate them telling their stories and you cheer on the silencing machine that keeps jails such secret worlds unto themselves (for a BBC article I asked Corrections Victoria a stack of questions about the use of solitary and they refused to answer even one) and that brings in Proceeds of Crimes Acts to stop the few who have the drive and talent to write from earning a quid from books instead of from the dole (or crime!). Maybe you think they deserve to rot in cages.
Well, don’t forget that crims, this subhuman breed, were the founding population of the modern nation of Australia. When British forces invaded and set up shop in this vast old land, who did they bring by the boatload?
Crims.
And for decades the crims outnumbered the screws and free settlers.
So if you think you’re an Aussie complete with a larrikin streak; a healthy scepticism towards authority and bullshit disguised by politeness; a code of standing by your mates through thick and thin; a taste for risks, gambles, and getting well and truly hectic after a good payday; a dislike for wimps and whingers, and a belief in toughness as a virtue, then spare a thought for the down-and-outers that made Australia.
It’s rotten that Britain’s losers, its unwanted, helped to dispossess the First Nations of this great southern land, but they did not come by choice. These were expendable people shipped across the world against their will and subjected to however much force or deprivation the State felt was necessary to control them.
In the colonies, some ran free to become bushrangers, men including John Caesar AKA Black Caesar, Martin Cash, and Jack Donahue AKA the Wild Colonial Boy.
Most did not break out and go bush.
When we look back on bushrangers, including famous freeborn outlaws like Ned Kelly and Fred Ward AKA Captain Thunderbolt, we can argue all day about where they sit on scales of villainy and heroism, but it’s all from a great distance.
Because it is so damn hard to know what it was like to be them.
Had more of the convicts, bushrangers or otherwise, given detailed and vivid accounts of their lives, then we would understand our strange and murky history so much better. Too often instead we rely on official reports and journalists’ superficial accounts.
Just as we do now.
And so many potentially hugely insightful stories of, from, and within our criminal underclass are never told in the first place due to the secrecy of prisons and laws like the Proceeds of Crimes Acts which keep the minority of jailbirds capable of writing a coherent and insightful book from becoming authors.
Chris would be in that minority. This is amazing in itself given that he didn’t even finish Year 8 and that, in the decades Chris has spent in custody since first being locked up at the age of 13, he has received bugger all education.
That’s unless you count lessons in displaying one’s anus when instructed, crafting makeshift knives and clubs, racial segregation, hand-to-hand combat, filling out forms, the use of poo as a weapon, the necessity of never giving a fuckin’ inch, rolling up one’s bedsheets, and how to spot gaps in security systems. And this is during the Clever Country’s Innovation Age. Who are we kidding.
As I wrote at the start, Chris is not getting any money from this book. He has, however, now had the opportunity to bypass the media’s cardboard cut-out crime writers and show you – and maybe one day the young girl he has lost the opportunity to father – what happened to a little boy with a curse upon him.
Don’t believe in curses?
Of course you don’t. Neither did I. But I do now. And I know that curses aren’t just made of evil spells and blighted stars. They’re also built out of people like us – out of the indifference or worse of people who don’t want to look at the dirty bastards below in case we see a bit of ourselves down there.
*
A LAST QUESTION TO CHRIS:
Q. If you were pardoned tomorrow and could go anywhere, where would you want to go?
CHRIS:
I’m not telling.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Annette Binse for her trust and courage. You’re a hell of a woman: tough, sharp, and good company. Thanks to Barry Binse for, among other things, putting up with yet another round of attention due to your misbegotten brother. Thanks to Angus Fontaine for being an unnaturally calm and understanding publisher full of great ideas. Thanks to Brett Collins. Thanks also to Danielle Walker, Josh Durham, Victoria Chance and Rebecca Hamilton. Thanks to Claude Robinson. Thanks to Richy Cooke. Thanks to Matty Bramall. Thanks to all the media students at the University of New South Wales who endured lectures peppered with references to ‘bronzing up’. Thank you to the author of the Gospel of Luke for having Jesus Christ tell the thief crucified beside Him that this day they will be together in paradise. Thanks, of course, to Lord BADNE$$ himself, Chris Pecotic, AKA Chris Binse, for trusting me with his epic tale. I don’t know what star fell the night you were conceived but it was a doozy.
Heartfelt thanks, finally, to Renae and Avalon. If writing’s hard going at times then close proximity to writers is worse. Much worse. Good on you for still liking books.
About Matthew Thompson
Matthew Thompson is a writer
and adventurer with a University Medal in English and a broken nose. Areas of his reportage include rebel domains of the southern Philippines, mind-shredding shamanic rituals in Colombia, X-rated underground gameshows in Portland, Oregon, and mixed-sex boxing in Australia. Matt has written for the BBC, the Sydney Review of Books, the Australian, Inside Sport, the Sydney Morning Herald, Dazed & Confused and many others. Matt is the author of the bestselling My Colombian Death, and its acclaimed sequel, Running with the Blood God. He has a doctorate in literary journalism and has made documentaries broadcast in Australia by the ABC’s Radio National and in the United States by National Public Radio. Born in the USA but living in Dungog, NSW, Matt is a firefighter and rescue operator with Fire & Rescue NSW, as well as being a Conjoint Fellow with the University of Newcastle’s Centre for the History of Violence. He has taught journalism at universities in Australia and Fiji, telling his students that if they well and truly get stuck into writing then there will be casualties.
Read more about Matthew at:
www.matthewthompsonwriting.com
Also by Matthew Thompson
My Colombian Death
Running with the Blood God
Matthew Thompson
RUNNING WITH THE BLOOD GOD
What are the limits on how a modern life can be led? And what happens to those who defy them?
Troubled that life’s vastness is shrinking as our crowded, stale civilisation overruns wilderness of every kind, professional trouble-seeker Matthew Thompson roams the world chasing those who will live freely whatever the cost.
Thompson hunts his free-spirits through a gut-wrenching crackdown in totalitarian Iran, amid rebellion and wretchedness in the Philippines and into the historical rubble of Serbia and Kosovo, before landing in America’s counter-cultural nirvana, Portland, Oregon.
Running with the Blood God is a hell-raising ride which leaves Matthew Thompson’s My Colombian Death shaking in its wake. In this incredible work of reportage with the pulse of a thriller, Thompson walks the line where the liberty of the individual is often a matter of life or death.
“Thompson walks with the kings of the human spirit. The
few, those happy few, who lead us to be stronger, braver,
better, and sometimes just a little crazier.”
John Birmingham
First published 2016 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd 1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Matthew Thompson 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
Photographs on pages ix, 86, 89, 97, 152, 312, 331, 333, 339, 340, 343, 347, 356, 358, 361, 362, 365, 368, 383 and 392 courtesy of Victoria Police.
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
EPUB format: 9781925480696
Text design by Josh Durham
Typeset in Janson by Kirby Jones
Cover design: Design by Committee
Cover images: Courtesy Victoria Police
The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked should contact the publisher.
Some of the people in this book have had their names changed to protect their identities.
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