My friends, however, began to comment that my mood was changing for the worse, and it was true that a degree of cynicism and anxiety was creeping into my perception of the world. I was, after all, dealing with the darkest aspects of the human psyche and I started to feel a sense of unease. I began to wonder whether the atmosphere of prison reform would last. It seemed to be progressing well, but maybe we were overlooking the possibility that this juggernaut of creative change might have been carefully stage-managed by the crims. Perhaps my cynicism was just a result of daily exposure to prison and criminals.
The prison administration had become so relaxed that an unprecedented Sunday family carnival was organised to celebrate the prison’s new progressive programs. On the day of the carnival, relatives and civilians were free to wander around, all the better to appreciate the momentous changes that had been wrought. The curious could peer into cells and even have themselves locked up for a few brief moments. Dignitaries were invited to officiate at the opening ceremony. Although there was no Ferris wheel or other amusements, the feeling on that day resembled a country fair.
A few of the more influential prisoners contrived to gain admission for female friends from the media and legal worlds. One of the true mysteries of life, which still baffles me, is the capacity of some intelligent women to topple head over heels in love with notorious criminals, a syndrome that became common with the loosened discipline during my tenure at Parramatta. Each morning a bevy of professional women, charmed and excited by the attentions of hardened and violent recidivists, would scamper down the corridors for a contact visit with their beau. The women seemed blithely indifferent to the vicious acts these men had repeatedly committed.
The merest professional detail was cause for a hastily organised ‘conference’ with female solicitors, or repeated interviews by women journalists. While the administration quickly saw what was happening, they turned a blind eye in the spirit of reform and the subtle quid pro quo that governed relations between officers and top dogs. Since the latter were required to maintain stability in the jail by threats or standover tactics, they were in return allowed some leeway.
But concern was growing that the prison reforms had reached their apogee, and decline was inevitable. The prison staff, many of whom had always been sceptical about the reforms, began to openly voice their disenchantment. Murmurings in the press added to the disquiet.
My own altruistic fantasies were rudely trampled into the ground early one Sunday morning after a very pleasant night spent in the arms of a girl I’d met at a party. My new friend was still asleep when I left for the local milk bar to buy the makings for breakfast. In banner headlines, the tabloids screamed ‘Breakout Foiled’. I grabbed a copy and my heart sank. It was compelling reading.
Over six months or so, Toby Lanigan, an exceptionally dangerous crim, had constructed a tunnel from his cell that extended all the way out beyond the prison walls. Working alone and through the night, he tirelessly shovelled and scraped while others slept. A few trusted pals were eventually enlisted to help and the escape was imminent. When the block master key somehow fell into his possession, Lanigan was inspired. Let my people go, he thought, and thirty of the state’s most evil felons were invited along for the frolic.
Up to the last day, none except the trusted few knew when or how the escape would take place. Lanigan’s error was to tell the imbecile of the wing that his freedom would arrive much sooner than he thought. This man contacted his mother to say that he’d be home for dinner that night, and to set a couple more places since Toby Lanigan and a few friends would be dropping by. It was only her community spirit that alerted the authorities to what had been going on under their noses. After an extensive search, the tunnel was uncovered. It was fortunate indeed that the plan had been foiled: among the would be escapees – the wing imbecile, in fact – was none other than Michael Murphy, who in 1986 was one of the pack animals who raped and murdered Anita Cobby. Her death shook the nation.
I returned to the girl’s house in a worried state and immediately attempted to contact Harry Duff, to no avail. Harry had spent a sleepless night with the troops searching for the tunnel entrance, which was eventually discovered beneath Billy’s cupboard. As the scandal exploded, shrapnel hurtled towards the prison administration and the reformist board, whose ‘antics’, according to the press, had nearly resulted in the worst jailbreak ever.
When I arrived at work the next day, the place was overcome by a sea change. The disgruntled officers were emboldened. Any sanctions against the old-style regime were swept away in an orgy of recriminations and ‘I told you so’s’. Calls for the reintroduction of much stiffer discipline were irresistible when the tabloid press were baying along. ‘Mad Professor’ was just one of the epithets coined by the newspapers to denigrate the Department of Corrective Services’ chairman, Professor Vinson. It was only a matter of time before all of the reform board’s positive achievements were buried.
De Tocqueville, the eminent French historian, in writing of the French Revolution said that to try and wrest newfound liberties from formerly oppressed masses was to invite disaster. Resistance and reaction by the prisoners to the ‘turn of the screws’ would surely not be far off.
Immediately, I could tell that the mood of the jail had changed. There was more tension in the air and, despite still enjoying considerable trust from the prison officers, I sensed that the halcyon days of creative programs and free interaction were coming to a close.
Several months after the tunnel was discovered, I was in Goulburn at a conference for prison psychology when the word came through: ‘Parramatta Gaol is on fire!’
Details were sparse, but gunfire had been heard amid the riot, and preliminary reports indicated injuries among prison officers and prisoners. Hostages were possibly being held within the jail complex. Widespread destruction had occurred. The lack of information fuelled hysteria.
I drove pell-mell back to Parramatta, keeping in touch via radio reports, which only suggested continued escalation. When I finally arrived that night, the scene resembled an airplane crash. The prison was encircled by fire-fighting vehicles, police vans and trucks, SWAT teams and ambulances. Sirens blared and red and blue flashing lights swept the hellish scene. Large Klieg lamps illuminated the main prison buildings. The fires, burning out of control, lit the night sky with orange as clouds of smoke billowed into the air. All was confusion and shouting. Everyone was tense, jittery.
I recognised a familiar prison officer, his face streaked by soot and his uniform badly soiled. ‘No one’s allowed in or out, Tim,’ he advised me gravely. ‘It’s too dangerous. They’ve gone wild.’ I asked him where Harry was. ‘Watching from his flat. We’re keeping him informed.’ (Domestic frictions had recently forced Harry to shift into the apartment that the department furnished for the use of the superintendent across the road from the prison.)
As I took the stairs two by two to the flat, I reasoned that perhaps Harry was co-ordinating strategy from above with advisers and tacticians by his side, like Churchill in his war room. I entered and quickly made for the balcony. Lit by the fires, the view was comprehensive and took in the historic sandstone wings, towers and perimeter walls, topped by coils of crisp barbed wire.
But any illusions about Harry’s command of the situation collapsed once I caught sight of him. In a stained singlet and baggy Y-fronts, stubby in hand, he stood silent and motionless, utterly absorbed in the spectacle. ‘This prison reform stuff, Tim, is fucked,’ he mumbled. Harry was unreachable.
I, too, became lost in contemplation. It was time to move on. Both of us knew that nothing now could save our hopes and dreams in the face of this debacle, this carnival of destruction.
Harry left Parramatta a short time later to take up a position as the superintendent of Silverwater Prison. The situation at Parramatta had become too hot. He was replaced by a more traditional superintendent whom, it was believed, could steer the jail back to its traditional role of being an end of the
line institution. Harry enjoyed a more leisurely pace at Silverwater Prison, which at that time was a low security jail. After several years he made a triumphant return to Parramatta Gaol, where he remained until his retirement. Sadly, within a year of leaving the prison service in 1989 he was dead from a massive heart attack.
Although Harry and I only worked together for a few years at Parramatta, we stayed in touch. I was eternally grateful to him for the wisdom and experience he had bestowed upon me. Thanks to his patronage, my experiences during that time at Parramatta had been greatly enhanced and I felt that my learning curve had been accelerated by about a decade rather than a few years.
TRANSITION
After the cataclysmic events of the Parramatta Gaol riot, I realised that there would be no possibility of developing further rehabilitation programs in the prison. I began to think about working in the private sector in either forensic or organisational psychology.
As it turned out, this next phase of my career crept up on me. Good fortune by stealth.
I was invited to a Christmas party in Melbourne hosted by leading forensic psychiatrist, Dr David Barnes. At the time, I was dating a Sydney gal who had moved to Melbourne and, ever eager to see her, I accepted Barnes’s invitation mostly so I could spend time with her. During the course of the evening, I was introduced to Barnes’s associate, Dr David Sime, a prominent Welsh forensic psychiatrist.
‘David Sime, lad,’ he said, with an outstretched hand and a grin on his face.
I was twenty-seven, confident but green. He was fifty-seven, a Fulbright scholar and considered a leader in his field in the UK.
‘Tim Watson-Munro,’ was my slightly intimidated response.
‘I hear you are doing marvellous work in the New South Wales prison system. Have you ever thought about living and working in Melbourne?’
I was taken aback. I had certainly thought about establishing my own practice, but I imagined it would be years away and in Sydney where I had always lived.
But Sime had me on hello. Ambitious to the core, I could not resist the chance to work with one of the best. It was an opportunity to share rooms, to receive training from Sime in assessment and also in running a busy practice – not to mention the contacts: there was no obvious downside. So I resolved to give it a go and moved to Melbourne in 1981.
Despite its incessantly tedious claim to be ‘The World’s Most Liveable City’, Melbourne is viewed by most Sydneysiders I know as a try-hard, poor cousin – best known for its absurd weather and peculiar type of football. The misguided rivalry is intense (particularly if you live south of the border). For me, back then, it never tweaked my radar. I’d had no reason to think about Melbourne, until suddenly I was moving there.
David and I shared rooms in an old terrace house in Victoria Parade, Fitzroy. I leased the upstairs room, which seemed grand in contrast to the almost cupboard-like dimensions of my prison office. It had high ceilings, a fireplace and an elongated window peering out to the street below. At times, I felt overwhelmed by the rapid transformation in my working environment.
In the beginning, the flow of work to me was slow, but David’s belief in me meant I was nonetheless busy. My practice was essentially related to assessing prisoners who were either facing trial or had been found guilty by a jury. Due to my association with David, I was introduced to leading criminal practitioners, including John Phillips QC, who ultimately became the Chief Justice of Victoria. John and David were well patronised by Bob Kumar, a leading criminal lawyer within the Victorian Legal Aid Commission. Bob was a ‘king maker’ who controlled the flow of work within the commission. Consequently, a number of murder cases were referred to me within the first few months of my arrival in Melbourne. Not shackled to the criminal jurisdiction, David would undertake civil assessments as well. Car accidents, work trauma and family law formed the daily grist of my exposure.
David was a kind, generous and knowledgeable man. Despite our considerable age difference, he became my closest confidant and an extraordinary mentor. Back in the early 1980s there was little supervision for forensic psychologists and I was left to do my work alone. At times I found this overwhelming but, when he could, David would discuss and debrief each case with me. And whenever I had any downtime, I would sit in, observing him at work.
My assessment work was complemented by regular appearances in court. Despite my young age, I embraced the opportunity to strut my stuff by providing evidence from the dock. Many practitioners eschew appearing as experts. It is not for the faint hearted and you are only as good as your last gig. If you falter, go to water, or are so stupid as to reach beyond the province of your field of expertise, it can prove to be fatal for your reputation and future work. The medico–legal game is like any other, boasting highly competitive practitioners with turbo-charged egos who delight in hearing of a colleague being eviscerated in the box.
I, too, was blooded in this way, as nothing beyond experience itself can prepare you for the onslaught of a well-prepared attack from the Crown. The choice then becomes clear. Lick your wounds, be better prepared next time, stick to what you know, and learn from the experience. Or, find a less stressful occupation.
In many ways, my childhood had prepared me well for my unfolding career. From an early age, my debating skills were honed through dinner table discussions with my father. He was unequivocally brilliant and delighted in brisk debate on all types of topics. His depth of general knowledge was mind-blowing. Be it politics, broader social issues or football, I quickly learned the skill of catching and dissecting an argument mid-flight. My survival depended on it.
This early experience proved to be invaluable in preparing me for the art of the courtroom joust. Developing the skill to anticipate a line of questioning, and to rehearse your response well ahead of the day, enabled me to present my opinions in a generally seamless way. With time, I acquired a formidable reputation as an expert who was able to dispatch even the trickiest questions under cross-examination, which at times, extended to days.
This led to more work. Despite my growing reputation in practice, at times I was highly stressed. Cashflow was irregular as I rapidly learned that many lawyers would hold onto fees until the last possible day before paying. Compounding the dynamic, I was just twenty-eight and looked about twenty-three. In order to camouflage my youth, I grew a beard.
With the passage of time, my referral base grew and so too did the complexity of the cases which were sent to me. These included murderers, rapists, armed robbers, paedophiles, and the ubiquitous drug addicts. I was making a good living. In the first year of private practice in Melbourne I had earned four times my annual government salary. All the trappings of early success ensued. Fast cars, fast life, and an escalating consumption of booze. I was blind to how much of a stretch my working hours were. And, at times, I was lonely. I had lots of friends and social engagements in Sydney and I found the adjustment to a fairly solitary life in Melbourne difficult. This led to even longer working hours, followed by extended sessions at the Taipan, a local piano bar. A short stroll from my rooms, it became my regular haunt from 6 p.m. until the early hours – a place to disengage from work and to create some form of social life. Only the lonely truly know the lonely. It was a sludge trap for similarly afflicted folk.
Looking back, I think this was a time when the seeds of my self-destruction many years later were planted. The crazy hours of self-employment, social isolation and self-medicating with grog became the daily norm until I reconnected with one of my first girlfriends.
Sue and I first met as students at Sydney University. I still recall the moment I spied her in an anthropology lecture in the Wallace Theatre. She took my breath away. Her beauty was overwhelming. As fate would have it, she lived in the beachside suburb of Cronulla and had previously dated Jimmy Manzie, a close friend of mine since school days. He was studying law but is best known for establishing the iconic 1970s chart-topping rock band Ol’55. Indeed, such was Jimmy’s love of Sue that he penned the be
autiful song ‘Stay While the Night is Young’ expressing his profound affection for her. The song charted in 1977.
After that memorable anthropology lecture, Jimmy and I were sharing a yarn outside Fisher library when Sue walked by. To my disbelief, she joined us. The chemistry was instant and powerful and I asked her on a date to the cinema.
We watched The Three Musketeers at the State Theatre in Market Street. During the film, our mutual attraction was electric. And yet, despite my generally confident approach to life, on this night I was unsure of myself. I knew this woman was very special. Radiant beauty, a black humour and brilliant. She was studying education and focused on the career which awaited her. She was born to teach. As the plot on the screen unfolded, so too did my strategy. I feigned an obvious yawn, stretching my right arm before placing it around her shoulder. To my delight, she snuggled into my embrace, whispering ‘What took you so long, honey?’
I relaxed.
I drove her home after the film, with a long detour to a pizza parlour located close to her house. At that stage, she lived with her parents in a magnificent waterfront property at the end of a long peninsula.
I pulled up outside her house and was intoxicated with the dazzling moonlit view, the smell of salt in the air and her. We were both overcome by an explosive passion.
In those early hours of the morning, while I was parked outside of her house, swept up in our mutual desire, her father walked by.
A true gentleman and a good bloke, he ignored us and continued down the street. Nonetheless, it was an awkward introduction for me.
The following morning, Sue rang and invited me to meet the clan. She was the eldest of six, and her parents and siblings were delightful. I felt completely at home and sensed that we were both at the beginning of a long, shared journey.
Dancing with Demons Page 6