Lycra strangling his muscles, he is back-page news. ‘Swain Wins Again’ screams the headline, the local paper covering yet another of his two-wheeled triumphs.
‘I just loved it,’ he continues. ‘Wish I could still love it now.’
His frantic fingers have filled the dining table, sun-soaked at the back of his lonesome one-bedroom battleaxe, with newspaper cut-outs. He is suddenly distracted.
‘That’s him,’ Swain says, pointing at another newspaper. ‘You know? It’s … him. Him that did this, you know?’
Swain is pointing at a photo of the man who put him in hospital for 11 months, including five weeks in a coma. His finger shakes as it hovers over the image of the criminal. This is no longer a back-page sports story in the local paper. It’s the front page of Sydney’s Sunday Herald.
The headline: ‘Australia’s Most Violent Prisoners’.
Swain stares down at the man who cost him his job, his house, his wife.
‘Oh well,’ he says. ‘That’s the price I paid. It wasn’t his fault. It was the job. I knew that it could happen, and so does everyone else who works there. That’s Goulburn.’
Swain takes eight pills a day and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic epilepsy.
He still can’t read or write. Mail is stacked in his kitchen, little envelopes wrapped in rubber bands. Bills? Insurance pay-outs? Mortgage statements? He doesn’t know, and he won’t know until he can find someone who will come over and read them to him. There were plenty of volunteers at first – he was front-page news, after all – but now the news-print is yellow and torn at the edges, and Tim is running out of rubber bands.
Swain’s ex-wife, Jane, sits beside him for his first-ever interview. She helps him with his words when he is stuck, and recalls the things he can’t remember.
‘We were booked to go on a holiday just 23 days later,’ says Jane. ‘We were going on a six-week trip of a lifetime. We’d been saving up for it since before we got married. The night it happened … I remember sitting there and thinking about the trip. I was told he had a fractured skull, and I was just like, Okay, fractured skull – he should be okay for the trip. I had no idea. I had to cancel it two days later, and then I was sitting in the hospital with Tim’s dad getting “that chat”, the one you see in movies. It was about the life support, and whether or not to turn it off. The doctor said I might want to think about it, and we did because we knew Tim wouldn’t want to live his life as a vegetable.’
The machine kept him going, the plug was never pulled.
‘It ruined my life,’ Swain says. ‘Everything was taken away from me. I just wanted someone to kill me. I wanted to be dead.’
Swain is finally ready to confront his demons. He has agreed to talk about the day his skull was shattered and a piece of his brain was left on the prison floor.
Didgeridoos and Table Legs
Swain looked at his fellow guard.
‘Stop bitching, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s not that bad. It’s a job and it pays the bills. Quit if you don’t like it.’
Swain had had enough of the complaining guard – a young rookie fresh to the job.
Oh well, Swain thought. It’s only for one shift.
Swain was counting the days down to his belated honeymoon; 23 sleeps until he would be in Canada with the love of his life and fellow Goulburn employee, Jane. He had taken today’s shift in B Wing as a one-off. The usual guards were sick, maybe some were on holidays.
Think of the money.
He climbed high above the landing and into the metal warders’ cage.
‘Mate, zip it and do your job,’ Swain said. ‘They will be coming up soon. Keep your eyes open.’
Swain and the young officer perched over the prison on west watch, waiting for the inmates to return to their cells. Swain looked across the wing – all concrete, steel and violent men. His back-up, Robert Hursey, a veteran guard nearing retirement, and Sharon Madden, a young woman just starting her career, were in another metal cage.
East watch is in position.
Swain looked down at his watch: 2.59pm. The inmates, 30 in this maximum-security wing today, had a minute to muster. The murderers, rapists and thieves would have their names marked off a list before returning to their cells with their evening meals. Or so Swain and his fellow officers thought.
‘What the fuck is he doing,’ inquired junior, pointing towards a hefty inmate dragging a table along the cold concrete floor.
‘Shit,’ Swain muttered.
And then the madness began. In four minutes, Swain’s dreams – and his body – would be crushed.
The prisoner hoisted the table over his head before hurling it to the ground.
Crash!
The table exploded.
‘Get ’em!’ screamed a wiry inmate as he scooped up a dislodged table leg: 15 centimetres by 15 centimetres of Australian hardwood. ‘Come on!’
A posse of frenzied inmates kicked and grabbed at the wreckage, turning the splinters into weapons. Others darted into cells, reappearing with more broken furniture, metal shivs – even a didgeridoo. Swain looked at the cage door; it was locked. He and junior were safe. They would wait for the reinforcements to rush in with their shields, batons and, most importantly, their tear gas.
‘Oh no,’ Swain said, looking west. The rabid mob, fully armed and rampant, was rushing towards the other end of the wing.
‘Kill the dogs!’ the prisoners cried as they stormed towards Bob and Sharon.
Something was wrong.
‘Their latch is open,’ Swain yelled. ‘They’re not locked in.’
Bob was not getting any younger, but Swain knew the war veteran could handle himself. But a woman? Swain cringed.
‘She is going to get raped,’ Tim said. ‘We have to help.’
Swain unlocked the latch and pushed open the cage door – the only thing keeping him safe from the 30 maximum-security inmates, now armed and threatening to kill. The metal slapped shut as he and the rookie officer began their charge, junior ready to put his life on the line for a couple of strangers and a job he didn’t want.
The noise was deafening. The inmates were screaming and shouting, bashing and banging.
Swain and junior were sprinting halfway up the wing, rushing across the landing towards the prisoners and their prey, when …
Whack!
Swain saw the blow coming, a flash of wood rushing towards his skull. But there was nothing he could do – no time to duck, dodge or dive. An inmate, one that had it in for Swain, had launched from a cell and driven a table leg into the side of his head. The wood cracked Swain’s skull, the force of the blow lifting him off his feet. The officer was down but not out. Blood rushed from a gaping wound in his head; he dragged himself from the floor.
Crash! Smack! Bang!
The inmates came in from everywhere. Kicking. Punching. Swinging. Stomping. The pain was excruciating. And then everything went black.
‘The code red was called and we all just stopped,’ recalls Jane, who was working in the Emergency Response Unit on the day of the attack. ‘We could tell by the voices on the radio that it wasn’t your usual disturbance, that it wasn’t a prison yard fight or even a brawl. And I knew it was Tim that was in trouble, even then, because I knew he was working in there at the time. There were only four officers in there, and I knew he would have been in the thick of it.’
Jane ‘geared-up’, a term officers use for putting on protective clothing and arming themselves with batons and tear gas, and bolted to B Wing.
‘It was over in four minutes,’ Jane says. ‘We raced over but a response team was already deploying gas. There was gas everywhere, and they were dragging them out, one by one.’
Jane looked across at the man lying on the stretcher. The officer’s blue prison shirt was now red. He was not moving.
‘I didn’t even know it was Tim,’ Jane says. ‘They were all going to be injured, so I guess I didn’t think too much about it.’
The man covered i
n blood was indeed her husband. A nurse was pushing against his broken skull to keep his brains in.
‘The nurse was with him, so I thought, That’s good,’ Jane continues. ‘So I just ran into the wing to do my job. I helped put the last few inmates away and came out, not thinking about it at all.’
The riot now over, a fellow officer confronted Jane: ‘You better come with me. You need to be with Tim.’
Jane was led towards an ambulance.
‘I had no idea if it was serious,’ Jane says. ‘I just thought, There he is and he is being treated. They told me to go to hospital with him. There were at least ten who needed to be taken to hospital that day, and Tim was just one of them.’
Or so Jane thought.
There were signs – not in blazing neon, but more the invisible-ink variety.
‘It was the Aboriginal wing,’ said former 2IC of B Wing Ian Norris. ‘At the time, they were segregating inmates by race because of all the racial problems. We had known tensions were high. Myself and the senior, John Walker, had talked about it. We even reported that something could happen. It’s the type of thing you get a feel for, not something visible. Not something you have proof of. You get a feel for the way the inmates are reacting and talking to you. It’s almost like they are talking to you but they are not really switched on to what they are saying. They had a way of sort of fobbing you off. I can’t say that they did this or did that; it was just a general mood. They were being really polite before the attack, and that tells you to watch your back. We did searches through the wings – we do six random ones every day – and we found little notes and things and gave them to the intel officers. They said it was nothing. John and I had worked in the wing for a few weeks on a permanent basis, and we were picking up things from the scumbags.’
The inmates, at least the timid ones, were asking to be locked away.
‘That’s a pretty good sign that something is going on,’ Norris said. ‘They want to keep away from trouble. Inmates were scared and wanted to be on their own. We told the governor that something was going on, but we weren’t sure what. You need to tell them if you get that feeling because you cover your arse if the shit hits the fan.’
The warning was dismissed.
‘The governor didn’t feel like it was necessary to take any action. If they were certain something was going to happen, they would lock down the wing. They would do a full ramp through the wing for hidden weapons and things like that. But he let this one slide. He didn’t think there was anything going on, just a little bit of tension between the inmates. We thought he was probably right.’
He wasn’t.
‘Ronald Priestly was just a nasty piece of work,’ said Norris of the man who had already put the hit on Colombian drug dealer Lara-Gomez. ‘He had an evil tongue. He was always ranting and raving, carrying on like an idiot.’
Ronald Priestly, from Moree, New South Wales, was serving a sentence of 32 years for murder. He was a career criminal, first jailed when he was ten. He was known as ‘Big Daddy’, and with attack dog James Sonny Paulson by his side, he ruled the wing.
‘They weren’t the sort of blokes you’d mess about with,’ Norris said. ‘If there was something going on, they were involved. Because of [Priestly’s] manner, you couldn’t really put anything he’d say aside. You would always have to take it seriously and put it in your case notes. The other crims seemed to listen to him, and I don’t know for the life of me why. He was always in the shit for something. He had certainly spent time in the High-Security Unit for trying to thump an officer. They put him in there for a couple of weeks to calm down, and when he came back he was fine.’
But not for long.
‘He started getting angry,’ Norris continued. ‘Like any crim, it doesn’t take long for them to get pissed off about something else. There was talk he was pissed off because an officer said something to him in a yard. Maybe someone threatened him or told him he was nothing. We thought, What sort of idiot would say that? I have no idea whether that’s true or not, but that’s what was going around.’
Priestly’s anger was contagious.
‘It was one of those small wings and it didn’t take much to fire them up,’ Norris said. ‘It had about 35 or 40 cells on top, and it was mostly two-out. There was one four-out cell. The maximum capacity of the wing would have been 50 or so [inmates], but there were only 30 in it at the time.’
‘I actually enjoyed working in that wing,’ Norris continued. ‘It was reasonably quiet and I had experience with Aboriginal people. But it was a pretty miserable place to look at with nothing but concrete walls and a steel table.’
Priestly and Paulson instigated the riot. They had stockpiled weapons and stirred discontent.
‘I was on two days off when it happened,’ Norris said. ‘I don’t know who threw the first punch, but I know they were both involved. The crims were very well prepared. They had table legs broken off, ready for action, wet towels ready to be used as gas masks. There is no doubt Priestly started it. He was the type of bloke who made the bullets and gave them to someone else to fire.’
Jane agrees: ‘They were the ringleaders alright. They had weapons ready and had planned the whole thing. We think they were actually planning it for later in the week. The riot happened on Tuesday, but things that have come out later say it was planned for the Thursday. Priestly had been locked up in the pound for three days and came out very angry. He said, “Stuff it – let’s do this thing today.”
‘There wasn’t a regular staff member in that wing on that day. All the officers were doing overtime. Their timing was perfect. Priestly should not have even been in that wing. He should have been in segregation. He had behavioural issues and had been sanctioned. But they let him out. Even the way they did the muster wasn’t right. Unit 4 should have been last, which would have allowed more staff to be there, but it wasn’t. It was the most dangerous wing and, for some reason, they mustered Yard 4 first. If only a couple of things were different, it may not have happened.’
But happen it did – and it was Goulburn’s worst ever riot. Ten officers were injured in less than four minutes, and the 30 prisoners caused a staggering $1.8 million worth of damage.
‘You should have seen all the shit,’ Norris said. ‘And I am talking shit, literally. Shit had gone all over the floor when they had smashed their toilets, and they were also using shit as a weapon, throwing it around. I was one of the guys who went in wearing a bio-suit after the police had finished their forensic investigation, and I spent a week cleaning shit from walls. We hired high-pressure water jets. It was a horrible job … The stench was just unbearable. And blood was everywhere – on the walls, the floor. It really was a sickening sight.’
The inmates had trashed everything in the wing.
‘The beds were destroyed,’ Norris said. ‘They’d been concreted into the wall with massive stirrup bolts, but that didn’t stop them from ripping them off. They tore toilets off, too … and shelves, cabinets and tables, which they used as blockades to try and stop the emergency units from getting in. They dislodged everything with their bare hands or smashed them to bits with table legs. I was shocked to see the damage; the water damage alone was huge. Police had been in there for a week doing forensic work before we were allowed to clean it up. It was hot, hard, heavy work. A week or two later the contractors started putting it back together. All the bedding had to be replaced; it all had to be retiled. The whole wing had to be refurnished. Everything was broken.’
And so was Tim Swain, now in hospital in an induced coma.
Changing Channels
Jane walked into the stark-white room and looked down at her husband.
‘There was a post-it note stuck on the side of his head,’ she recalls. ‘It said “don’t touch”.’
A machine was the only thing keeping Swain alive: blip … blip … blip. Half his skull was now missing, all soft tissue and exposed brain.
‘Tim was airlifted to Canberra,’ Jane continues. ‘He
needed emergency surgery because his skull was fractured and his brain was swelling up. He went in for the surgery at 1am and then was placed in an induced coma.’
Doctors feared Swain would never wake up. They were sure he had suffered brain damage, but to what extent they didn’t know. Blip … blip … blip.
Jane and Tim Swain’s father considered pulling the plug.
‘I don’t know why we didn’t,’ Jane says. ‘There were just little signs that gave us hope.’
Swain opened his eyes five weeks later.
‘The swelling in his brain had gone down, and they were able to turn off the machine. We didn’t think he would make it, but he was so fit and healthy. I’m sure any other officer would not have survived. He didn’t drink or smoke, and he was athletic. His strength got him through. Well, it kept him alive anyway.’
Tubes flew, ripping from his arm as he slammed the hospital bed.
Pherrrrrrrr. Drool poured from the edges of Swain’s mouth as he shouted babble. He hit the bed again, crying more incoherencies. Bbuuuu-balaaaaa. ‘I couldn’t even talk for two years,’ Swain says. ‘I think that was probably the worst part, because it was a living nightmare. I could still think fine, and I knew what I wanted to say. I just couldn’t get the words out. I would end up screaming. I couldn’t tell people what I wanted. I remember wanting coffee, little things like that, and I had no way to tell anyone. I was telling them in my mind, but my mouth was saying nothing.’
Jane, utterly helpless, endured the painful tantrums.
‘He would end up beating himself and the bed,’ she says. ‘He was trying to tell us something, and we were looking around, trying to work it out – things like having the channel changed – and he would end up losing it. It was horrible.’
Swain, a skeletal 38kg after emerging from the coma, knew people were laughing at him.
‘There were [hospital staff and friends] that thought I was retarded and treated me like it,’ Swain says.
‘They were smartarses, and I couldn’t do anything about them. Some people thought it was funny. That really pissed me off.’
Australia's Most Murderous Prison: Behind the Walls of Goulburn Jail Page 6