Meanwhile back at the Writer’s Room.

A sunset from a few weeks ago, I took it with my phone camera. The splash of orange on the lawn is a reflection from the glass ball hanging from the veranda roof.

We went to a naming day ceremony and in the garden they had a small pond.

Water Lily

‘Help! I’m being pollinated.’

Reflections.

Bougainvillea’s at Brookwater Golf Course, we had Mother’s Day breakfast in the club house.

Agaves flowering by the club house, there’s a Lorikeet feeding on the flowers.

The 18th hole is very photogenic.

So many feathers, so many colours. A Lorikeet having his post lunch preen.

My offerings for the week, if nothing else they are colourful.

Cheers

Laurie.

Midweek Poetry. A Mother’s End.

Relationships between mothers and their children seem to change as the young become adults. If the early life of the child is one of some happiness and love then I’d like to think it would get better. When it’s one of pain and abuse in its worst form then life can only get more complicated, a genuine love hate relationship that shatters ones soul. After my father died mother moved to the Gold Coast and lived alone in a tiny flat. She seemed happy with her life but couldn’t stop interfering in mine, an abyss formed in our relationship that lasted for four years. At 5am on a Monday morning I woke to get ready for work, then fell asleep and found myself standing by her bed. She writhed in agony, mouth wide open in the throes of what I found out later to be her first heart attack of the day.

I woke up feeling unwell and a little disturbed. The rest of the day I suffered chest pains and a splitting headache and on returning home went straight to bed and slept. My youngest brother rang at 7pm and told me she was in hospital having suffered a heart attack, the second one outside the chemist shop in Tweed Heads. I drove straight down with my wife and two other passengers, the eerie forms of my dead grandmother and uncle sitting quietly in the back seat. When we arrived at the hospital I went straight to her room in ICU. Standing at the door the room changed from a dark place filled with machines and mother on the bed, to a bright white room with her lying dead in a shroud. The poem says it all.

A Mother’s End.

It came, we hadn’t spoken for so long.

Was the shared pain so great?

I felt yours in the morning when I flew to your side,

Did you see me?

The hospital room, quiet, clinical,

machines keeping you here.

It vanished.

Your shroud covered body

took its place.

I knew the end was here.

Your face a marble effigy, lines gone.

I took your hand, we whispered ‘Sorry,’

I saw beaches drenched in moonlight

and you, walking alone.

You left us a little piece at a time,

visiting the other side.

Holding your hand I saw them waiting.

Your spirit rose in a ball of light,

a swirl of colours that stopped in mid air.

Were you waiting for me to follow?

I had no tears left,

I’d already grieved.

I think you loved me once,

that was long ago,

far away.

Was I your comfort?

You were a casualty of the war of life.

Were your wounds greater than mine?

Why didn’t you shelter me from

the shrapnel of your failure?

Laurie Smith copyright 2013

This photo was taken on the ship coming to Australia in 1960.

It’s the only picture of her where I think she was truly happy.

YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW, part 3. The Perils of Drinking Port and Bull Ants.

The Perils of Drinking Port. I only ever drank two alcoholic drinks before enlisting, the first one my sister and I drained the ‘empty’ sherry bottles at our parents anniversary party. I was 10 at the time and the second was a beer with the Old Man the day before I left to enlist. I had heard beer referred to as piss and didn’t believe it could taste like that. How wrong was I? You know those adverts where they show old fashioned breweries and outside there are several huge draught horses hitched up to wagons? After my first glass of beer I knew straight away that the horses provided the amber fluid. However as the years have passed and my palette has matured I have come to the conclusion that it is only the stallions that provide it.

You had to be at Kapooka for a few weeks before you were allowed to drink in the wet canteen, and wet it was. When the term swilling beer is used my thoughts go back to those halcyon days of recruit training. At 17 I was still underage for consuming alcohol, I loved a double sarsaparilla or a coke and sneaked in a vodka or two. That was enough for me, for a while. Some blokes let the ferret run with a vengeance and I can still hear the laboured strains of vomiting drunks. It’s fine if they are outside it’s when they stagger through the barracks sharing their largesse with everybody that it becomes tiresome. The canteen hopped every night after dinner, quite a few of the blokes seemed to live there and suffered badly the next morning.

I learnt many valuable pub lessons there: Don’t walk in with your hat on, if you kept it on after the count of seven you had to ‘shout the bar,’ and that’s a lot of drinks. Loose change on the edge of the pool table wasn’t ‘lost’ and you could upset a few blokes when you picked it up and used it. My apparent ignorance and the intervention of a kind soul saved me from six blokes who wanted to ‘beat my effing head in.’ It’s a small world, he came from the same town in England and I never saw him again after that. Ah, the kindness of strangers. If you turned your empty glass upside down on the bar it meant you wanted to fight everyone in there, you soon turned your glass up the right way. I think these rules were made up by people who were shy and had trouble meeting other folk.

One night I stayed back at the barracks to catch up on my housework: polish boots and brass, scrub webbing, iron, wash, sew. At ten o’clock a huge commotion took place at the far end of the hallway, yelling, screaming, spewing. Then, “Get him a doctor Sarge he’s dying.” – “He’s not dying, he’s pissed now shut up and put him to bed.” Sound advice and maybe we can all get some sleep. Then it started, I’ll come back to draught horses. For those who have never owned a horse let me tell you one thing, they fart. A lot. Loud, sonorous, disturbing farts. We’ll call the unfortunate ‘dying’ drunk, Jacko. A tall, gangly youth with a shock of blonde hair and from what I could gather a horse’s bowel. It went like this, “Ohhhh, I’m dying. Please Mum where are you? Bluuuurt! My head hurts ohhh I’m dying.”

By this time I’m curious and stand in the doorway of my room to watch the proceedings, Jacko’s room is directly opposite and his bed faces the door. The Duty Sergeant comes back after a worried delegation of recruits race to his office and annoy him, “Undress the stupid drunken bastard and put him to bed. If he does die then come and tell me.” His mates drop him on the bed and begin to strip him off, Bluuuuurt! Bluuuuurt! After the ewwws and oh God’s someone says, “Let’s light his farts.” When a drunk has a good idea and announces it you know it will end badly. It’s a fact of life. Another drunk grabs Jacko’s ankles and pulls them up to his head, giving one and all a view of his white skinny arse encased in even whiter underpants. “Who’s gotta match?” Several boxes of them are shoved at him, “Okay, wait for it, wait for it.” Bluuuurt! Strike, a tiny flame then a huge orange and blue one, inside Jacko’s underpants. Bright enough to light up the faces of the eager audience.

Luckily for Jacko, he’d drunk a pint bottle of port wine on his own, this provided him with enough anaesthetic to forestall any pain. As the smell of smouldering underpants filled the air someone threw a blanket over him and they beat a hasty retreat. Before reveille the following morning I was up and getting my toiletries together, I heard Jacko’s door slam and a pitiful groaning. I looked out and there he was, still in his undies, towel over his shoulder and walking gingerly towards the ablutions plucking at his rear going, “Oh my head – oh gee that hurts.” The real screams sounded when he reached the toilet. He walked around like a honeymooning bride on a horse ranch for the rest of the week.

Bull Ants.  Army sergeants are omniscient, they know it all. Even if they are wrong they know it all. Now that’s clear let’s move on. The first few weeks are spent exercising and drilling you into shape, moulding you into little chocolate soldiers. Knowing that by now you will do exactly as you are told. There are a few smells and sounds that bring those far away days clearly to mind, beside poor Jacko that is. One of them is the smell of eucalyptus trees on a hot day, the oil in the leaves leeches out and the air is redolent with it. Everywhere you went on the camp the trees stood tall. Next the sound of cicadas, millions of the buggers, chirruping away all day. The smell of a storm approaching when you’re in the middle of a navigation exercise, then the icy cold rain hitting your hot body, soaking you to the skin. Then there are Bull Ants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Myrmecia_nigrocincta_(Australian_Bull_Ant).jpg

Observe the Bull Ant, take a close look at his mandibles, they’re serrated, that’s never a good look. See his eyes? Evil, evil I say, no good will come of such a creature. Their venom is capable of bringing on anaphylactic shock in those with allergies. They’re probably all sergeants down in the nest.

Our Hero marching bravely off to do battle with the Bull Ants.

Bivouac brings up images of hundreds of troops under canvas, eating out of tins and looking rugged and ready. Nobody mentions ants, or spiders or snakes etc. We marched out to the bivouac area in the late afternoon with our packs and rifles, ready to repel some invading enemy. On arrival we were given a number and sent to look for the corresponding camp site, I think mine may have been 666, anyway I arrived at the steel picket sticking out of the middle of a Bull Ant’s nest. Thousands of the blighters streamed toward me, beating a hasty retreat I returned to the sergeant and told him of my predicament. Being the homespun, caring, loving bastard that he was he said, “Recruit does that picket have your number on it?” – “Yes Sergeant.” – “Well, that’s where you’re living tonight.” Gulp.

Returning to the still tumultuous nest I strung out my little tent, left my pack against a tree 20 metres away and returned to where we were being briefed. Our platoon sat around the sergeant listening to the orders for the night, I stood at the rear feeling a tad uncomfortable, and felt something crawling up my leg – inside my trousers. Fidget, itch scratch, then the pain hit. Yelling like an Apache I began dancing around and jumping up and down in a darn good imitation of a rain dance. ( stops and listens for the sound of distant thunder ) At the same time trying to get my pants off. The Sarge went to say something and stopped, seeing the obvious distress on my face. With the whole platoon and passers-by watching I dropped my daks and undies. Now one’s tackle is usually not flashed around in front of the blokes, I couldn’t have cared less, because there they were, three bull Ants. They’re about an inch long, you’ve seen the picture, evil incarnate. One had latched onto the head of my penis and two were doing their best to castrate me one bite at a time.

This could have been Karma for chuckling at the unfortunate toasting of Jacko’s nether regions, I don’t know. What I do know is it hurt. A lot. Now I don’t know if my audience were laughing at the sight of my genitalia, or the fact that I was in agony. Pulling at the ants only removed their bodies, their heads, mandibles intact remained in place. Still in the throes of my rain dance I continued to prance around, finally dislodging the last attacker. Then the swelling began, my very best little mate began to look angry and a severe itching took over. Trying to retain what little dignity I had left I dragged my trousers up and hobbled around. Somebody called for a medic and I had to show him my now hefty penis. He lifted it up with a tongue depressor ( no it didn’t go ahh ) and said, “You’ll be right, it’s only an ant bite.”

After dinner I attempted to engage in the activities, the swelling stopped and then I began to feel ill, really ill. It didn’t help my cause, nobody cared so I wrapped myself in a blanket and slept under a tree as far away as possible from the ants nest. I heard the tramp of feet as the ‘enemy’ approached, raising a quivering arm I pointed towards the camp and muttered, “They’re over there, now leave me alone.” Something of a Benedict Arnold I know but I was sick, I ignored the yelling and sounds of blank cartridges going off and came to the conclusion that, ‘War is Hell.’ You may or may not be happy to know that I recovered, with my savaged genitalia reasonably intact. Battle hardened now, he was ready for the rigours and dangerous situations that I would put him in over the years ahead.

I haven’t decided what next weeks Army blog will entail. There are many anecdotes floating around in my fevered brain, one that keeps popping up is bullying. I, like many people have first hand experience at being on the receiving end of these cowards who harass and drive their victims to the brink. School has always been the breeding ground of bullies, and I don’t think people realise that parents can also be the biggest bullies of them all. I had plenty of experience of the home grown variety. My only experience at school happened when I moved to Queensland, the school I attended didn’t have kids who spoke in a strong Lancashire accent. Game on. King hit the first day, then attacked by five at a time for the following week. Mother intervened, she became a tad ticked off after three good shirts ended up as rags. Under the watchful eye of the sports instructor ( a bully himself ) and in the centre of the playground I knuckled them one by one until the last two refused to fight. No more problems there. I must have had stars in my eyes as I didn’t think it would be like that in the forces. Wrong.

From the first week of being allowed in the wet canteen it started, two other recruits woke me nightly and verbally abused me. They would stand behind me in the mess line and whisper obscenities, give me a little dig, try and trip me up. I ignored them and continued to do so until the second last week of training and that will be a story in itself.

Cheers

Laurie.

A Mother’s Lament.

# I was going to post more Lorikeets today, seeing it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday I thought I would put this up instead. I will scatter the Lorikeet pictures throughout future writer’s room posts.

I had many discussions with my Mother, often it would come back to my birth. She went into labour on Christmas Eve while busily baking fruit mince tarts. When I came into the world half an hour into the 27th I was dead. The cord had wrapped around my neck and I was blue. After the doctor made some attempt to revive me he said to the nurse, ‘He’s dead, put him in the bucket.’ In delivery rooms there was always a bucket under the table for the afterbirth and the stillborn. In those days stillborn babies weren’t classed as a viable human being, they hadn’t taken a breath. After the doctor had left the nurse began resuscitation, half an hour later I breathed on my own. She had attended at the birth of my two older brothers who had died at a few months old.

In World War 2 mother worked as an army driver, and had sad recollections of ferrying hundreds of troops to the coast for D-Day. Then as the war progressed cleaning out the wrecked tanks returned to the UK, usually with a collection of body parts smeared inside. An abusive childhood and time in a mental institution ( for complaining about the abuse ) gave her a harsh worldview. My two brothers were interred with Grandfather, one laid in each of his arms. Apparently when I started breathing she told me her first thought was, that she’d brought another soldier into the world who would die young.

A Mother’s Lament.

I see you lying there.

Dead.

Covered in my blood.

My sacrifice for wars to come.

Another soldier, a killer, meat

for the butcher’s bill.

Stay dead, go, come back

but not as a lamb for the slaughter.

Breathe.

Stop.

You’ll be safe in the ground

with your brothers.

Christmas is ruined.

Go back to the world of choices.

Come back but not as you.

No, stay – I need you.

Breathe.

She’ll save you, she cares more than I.

I know what is coming,

I lost my purity, my mind, I can’t protect you

from that.

Your blue, wrinkled dead face annoys me.

Stop staring at me.

I feel your dead black eyes in my soul.

You see my weakness. I can’t protect you.

Go away.

You’re crying, breathing?

No.

Don’t.

Go back.

Find someone who wants a boy.

Who knows how to love.

Oh.

You’ve opened your mouth.

Come here, take this.

Suckle, feed, grow.

Oh God.

Why me?

Laurie Smith copyright 2013.

Yes that’s me and my mother. Once I was here what could she do but love me?

Rainbow Lorikeets a little way from The Writer’s Room.

The Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus) is without doubt a beautiful bird, they’re about 9-12 inches long, both sexes are the same colour and they love nectar, seeds and fruit. We had some at our place this morning and they stayed out of decent photo range. So we trekked into town where a friend has feeders out for them and this is the result. I took 70 pictures, a bit obsessive I know. I’ll post some today and tomorrow.

‘Hang on, where’s the food?’

Twins?

Nothing wrong with a little personal grooming.

‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’

‘Don’t look now but I think he’s taking your picture.’

‘I’m humbled Sir.’

‘Ignore them Roger, they’re freeloaders.’

There’ll be a few more tomorrow. if anyone wants a picture to print out contact me through the blog and I will email a ‘heavier copy.’

Laurie.

http://youtu.be/WjUHidz81dA  Link to you tube for a short but energetic look at the Lorikeets.

 http://youtu.be/Irq4cW2YYUU   Another short clip, they are in HD.

Where Were You?

Where Were You?
Where were you when the shooting began?
When we leapt to our guns.
Hearts pounding, eyes staring,
as we tried to see everything at once.
Our only thought – survival.

I see you now.
Where were you when the air
was humming with death?
A melody so easy to play.
A tapping giving way to the bass,
a crescendo, leading to a finish like no other.
The deep low notes of metal eating flesh.

That’s when I saw you.
You came to feast on the spoils,
your sustenance lay there.
Its life blood your bounty.
You were the only thing of beauty
hovering in the long grass
where an enemy lay.
A man, shattered and torn.
His face grotesque in death.
We were given a glimpse of our mortality                                                                                                  and hated him for showing it to us,

It didn’t bother you.
You couldn’t see the bloodied
picture of his wife and children.
Would they ever know? I doubt it.
He would always be a stranger,
a shadow to them.

We dug his bed in the rich,
jungle soil and laid him there.
A stone for a pillow,
the sod for a blanket.

You couldn’t leave him.
You danced your dance,
on his grave.
Your yellow wings,
the only flowers that showed.
A Soldier lay there.

Laurie Smith copyright 2013.

I used one of my pictures from Vietnam, it shows us test firing our weapons before heading out on patrol. I converted it into that grey steel look to show the cold, impersonal nature of war. Both men and machines are now blended into one. The poem is about my feelings after a contact when a North Vietnamese soldier walked into our laager. Naturally it hit the fan. I’d had the misfortune to see violent death while still a child, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw that day. My position in the vehicle was the gunner. When it was all over the butterflies came, hundreds of them drawn by the smell of blood and the salt it had to offer. When we drove away I looked back and saw that they’d covered the grave . Years later I spoke with a Mate, he had searched the body and found the photo of a woman and two children in a tattered wallet. I remember looking at it at the time, a creased black and white photo. No different to what any other soldier carried of his loved ones, I think that more than his death brought home to me that he was no different to me, a man, a human being. Now my Mate was a big rough and ready bloke, who died a couple of years ago, he came to visit in the late 90′s. After a couple of beers he took that picture out of his wallet and showed it to me. He’d carried it for 30 years and still felt guilt over the death.

Laurie.

YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW. Part 2. The First Week, The Zen of Dixie Bashing and Chicken Man.

The First Week. There is nothing more daunting than fitting in with a variety of people in a closed environment and like tiny gold nuggets in a pan we all fell to the bottom to congregate with others of our kind. People are drawn to each other whether it’s by personality, geography (where do you come from?) or just lucky enough to get the same room. The army doesn’t waste time, it utilises you for dozens of menial tasks. They have their schedules and while they sort out the course you fill in as storemen, cleaners, kitchen hands etc. Through all of this you are issued with your kit, boots AB, troops for the use of I pair, Trousers Jungle green, shirts the list goes on. “Excuse me Sergeant my boots are too big.” – “Don’t worry they’ll shrink.” – “Excuse me Corporal the shirts you gave me are too tight.” – “It’s okay they’ll stretch.” Believe me they didn’t. Then came, Hat khaki fur felt (KFF) the slouch hat, that iconic piece of kit that makes Australian soldiers stand out from the herd. Naturally they came with a high crown and had to be bashed into shape, this involved the use of hot and cold water. By the time we’d finished the barracks looked like a swim meet.

Yours truly in his slouch hat.

I didn’t realise how bloody stupid we looked marching back from the QM stores with our kit, until I saw the new platoon that marched in the following week. They reminded me of a movie where all of the Indians were trooping back from the trading post, wearing huge hats and carrying their trade goods. Most of the recruits hadn’t met the barber yet, of course being the sixties they all had long hair. The best piece of clothing I thought was the thermal undies that reached halfway down your thighs, very chic indeed. It’s okay being issued with this stuff, keeping it is the hard part. Mistake number one, don’t leave your washing unattended in the laundry, it will be stolen. I mean really, wearing someone else’s skiddy undies, or smelly socks? What happened to that tradition of Anzac mateship? I soon learned, stand guard on ‘em.

When the army trains you it does so by numbers, and you have to sound them out. Each drill move works on them and when you were taught to dismiss for instance it went like this: from the halt position, platoon dismiss, 1 you turned to the right and your left heel raised off the ground, 2-3 you paused, 1 you brought your left foot up and jammed it into the ground, pause 2-3, march off three paces. Every movement numbered to perfection. So, when the whole platoon was being taken along between two medics who were giving you your shots for rare, unknown and scary diseases I don’t know why didn’t they like my ; in 2-3 inject 2-3 remove 2-3. Note to self the army had no sense of humour. I must add there was the obligatory fainting by several Recruits who disliked injections. The dentist next, I think he went to the same school as Doc Holliday. Although I imagine looking down the throats of hundreds of strangers without the benefit of having a cute assistant would become a grind.

The barber came in from Wagga a couple of times a week and brought an assistant, he wasn’t cute. They set up shop in the ablutions and wrought havoc on the shining locks of their victims. You had to pay for the benefit of having them ply their trade and they, no pun intended, gave a cut of the profits to the corporal. When it was my turn I ran my hand over my skull, there was just enough hair to stop me being charged. The army didn’t care for baldness, apparently the Queen owned you and she didn’t like baldies, lot’s of luck now Phillip’s lost his. It was considered to be damaging the Queens headgear or some such nonsense. “You’re next recruit.” – “But there’s nothing there.” – “You have to have a haircut, give me your 25 cents.” Sigh. I’ll give credit where it’s due the barber’s offsider, obviously a gun-shearer down on his luck ( not the best sheep shearer in the shed but the quickest ) managed to find a few hairs, although I don’t think there was 25 cents worth. So it went on, the relentless madness that was the army.

I was used to being yelled at, so I fitted in quite well. I did as I was told, when they said jump you jumped. Everything had to be done, no questions asked, it’s the only way to ensure that you react immediately without question. The funny thing was I loved it. After a couple of days of running around like blue arsed flies we were given our duties, I had about three days in the QM stores and the rest of the time in the kitchen. One notable event stands out though, I managed to go off base for a few hours. In the first six weeks you were confined to camp and only got out if you were dead or it was part of your duties. This day I worked on the laundry truck, we had some washing machines that needed fixing and a load of blankets that required dry cleaning. Happy as Larry I sat in the back amongst the blankets as we motored in to Wagga. The corporal had to do some shopping and we left the laundry until last. A huge establishment somewhere off the main street it had a large delivery bay that ended where the workers took their meal break. You need to understand that the only females we saw were a couple of women who worked in the canteen, and they were impervious to the charms and pick up lines of the hundreds of horny Lotharios. Let us set the scene as I relayed it to my mates back in the barracks that night, and yes ladies young men gossip and swap yarns.

“Well, you’re not going to believe this I sat and watched as this cute Sheila got undressed right down to her undies. She was so tall and beautiful, look I wasn’t intentionally perving, it just happened.  No kidding, they didn’t see me sitting in the truck at first. There were three of them and one, the tall blonde had spilled something on her shorts. Her mates helped her get undressed and bloody hell wasn’t she nice. A real thin bra and those cottontail undies, then she saw me, you know what she smiled and turned towards me. I must’ve been blushing coz they all laughed and she took her time putting her clean shorts back on.” I went into some detail which is not for a family audience about the thin material of said underwear and its see through status. What you need to understand is, males, especially that age are in a constant state of hormonal turbulence. My only hope is that those in my audience don’t blame me now for their failing eyesight.

The Zen of Dixie Bashing. (Zen, a total state of focus that incorporates a total togetherness of body and mind. Zen is a way of being. It also is a state of mind.) For my readers in the U S of A the Dixie reference has nothing to do with below the Mason-Dixon line, it is a common term for pots and pans in the army. There were two good reasons for being on kitchen duty, one you missed out on roll call, two, plenty of food. The down side, you were up before sparrow fart and that’s early. Like everything the army did there was a method, stick to it and you were right. My job entailed the servery, then when that was over passing all the dirty plates back to the man on the dishwasher, no wimpy hand washing here. You could have run a small car through the thing. The amount of food that went through the place astounded me, we ate like kings. At least I thought we did. The trouble was some blokes ate like pigs, the tables were often littered with scraps or sauce from squeezing the plastic sauce bottles and sending the tops into somebody’s meal, or eye.

You can imagine the machismo going on here, every man and boy trying to find his place in the pecking order, it was no different in the kitchen. I worked one breakfast on the servery before the sergeant cook moved me to Dixie bashing. The dry cereal had to be emptied from their packets into the stainless steel servers, then doled out to the throng via a large ladle (or tongs for the Weetabix). The Kellogg’s corn flakes had a run of plastic toys, I collected them to send home to my little brother and one had fallen into the server amongst the flakes. Along comes Mister Machismo big noting himself to his mates, so being a jolly chap I ladled his cornflakes with the toy into his bowl, “There you go, something to play with.” Well, he wasn’t impressed at all, he flung the bowl at me and tried to climb over the servery. I tried to climb back over at him and began laying into him with my ladle. Well, they wanted fighters didn’t they?

So I graduated to the big sinks at the back of the kitchen and we’re talking big, big ass big. You could float a small fishing trawler in them and deep, if you dropped something in you had to call for Jacques Cousteau to retrieve it. There I stood in my jungle greens, huge rubber boots, a rubber apron that could’ve been used for a circus tent, oh yes and rubber gloves that reached your elbows. I felt like a walking VD prevention advert. I was then and am now, still of the opinion that the army trained cooks to burn food into pans. We’re not talking about a pan you put in your own oven with a little bit of pork crackling on the edges. We’re talking one the size of a landing barge with half a pig bonded to the metal by a nuclear blast. I suggested that this was the case to the sergeant cook, another man with a limited sense of humour. No amount of rubber protection stopped me getting soaked performing my duties, I ended up with a severe case of detergent navel. Back to the dixies. They breed somewhat like Tupperware left unattended in a dark cupboard. You would finish your labours, not unlike the twelve labours of Hercules, go outside and have a cuppa tea and a hat full of biscuits and then when you came back inside viola, another load. I would rather have cleaned the Stables of Augeas.

Of course your day ended after dinner and when the duty officer had made his rounds. He would inspect the kitchen to make sure it was clean and you would stand by your sink and wait. Now some of these Dixies were used in the Boer War and had built up a layer of old fat and residue on the outside, the stuff was jackhammer proof. The insides sparkled which was all that mattered, it went like this. Young Duty Officer, a 2nd Lieutenant who would rather be in the Officer’s Mess quaffing ale, peered at my name tag, “Hmm Recruit Smith, you haven’t done a very good job here, ( staring at bottom of baking pan like he knew what he was doing ) I think you should do it again, and this time put some elbow grease into it.” Me knowing enough to keep my bloody big mouth shut, nods sagely and mumbles, “Sir,” fills the sink, puts the wet rubber outfit back on, it feels kinda sexy by now, plunges pan into the depths and starts chipping away with spatula and steel wool. The cook, bless him comes over when the young Napoleon has left, “Go on, bugger off I’ll show him a newer one if he comes back.” There is justice. If there are any army cooks reading this I’d like to say g’day and thanks for the food. You did the best with what you had and except for a few you were great.

Chicken Man.  At 6 pm two things happened without fail: The Last Post was sounded over the loudspeaker and God help you if you didn’t stand if you were sitting, or stop and stand to attention if you were outside. When you click on the link it takes you to a veterans affairs page, you will see the Last Post under music. Click on it and you can open or save it.

http://www.dva.gov.au/commems_oawg/commemorations/commemorative_events/organise_events/Pages/audio%20files.aspx

This beautiful piece of bugle playing was followed by, ‘Baaaawk Baaaaawk Baaaawk Baaaaawk, Chicken Maaaaan, he’s everywhere, he’s everywhere.’ Yes, The White Winged Warrior, Chicken Man the most fantastic crime fighter the world has ever known.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=-3j7fjzJvnA

I’d never heard it before and it became a classic amongst the troops, after a few beers at the club there would always be a group trying out their own version or clever impersonations. It was radio at it’s looniest and you know I sometimes think I’d rather listen to, than watch some entertainment. It probably stems from listening to radio serials as a boy. This little anecdote came to me out of the blue and I thought I would share it for those who have never heard of The White Winged Warrior.

Photo shoot for River of Death

Let me introduce Delyce Lee, Mum, Hairdresser and now front cover model for my third book, River of Death. Delyce is a no nonsense, tell it like it is kind of girl. She’s read my first two books and is a fan, so when I asked if she would like to model for book three she was delighted. So follow us on our Sunday morning model shoot, a little way down from The Writer’s Room.

‘Let me get out of the car already.’

‘Okay, I can do cute and innocent.’

‘Is this better?’

‘No way am I going in there. There aren’t any snakes around – are there?’

‘C’mon Laurie, this is supposed to be serious.’

‘My wig’s slipping, I need a ciggy and by the way, what’s my motivation here?’

There’s always time for a drinks and snacks with my wife Lorelle: head caterer, advisor, drink lady and umbrella holder.

‘C’mon Delyce I was only joking about the snake and yes you can stop giving me the Exorcist girl look.’

‘Okay, I’ve darkened the eyes and I’m supposed to look like death but a girl needs her lip gloss.’

I’m not pulling a face I was standing on the edge of the bank, trying not fall in in, wondering whether or not my hand was in the right place. I tell you, it’s hard being a writer sometimes.

The end result is beautiful. I wanted it by the water to hopefully give it the right light. Naturally there is work to do before the cover will be ready, the imagery is based on The Lady of Shalott. The killer in the story has a classical bent to him along with a penchant for a certain red haired heroine. I will keep you up to date with the progress on the cover.

Cheers

Laurie.

It’s a little bare at The Writer’s Room.

I’m not scratching the bottom of the barrel, I have been busy writing and realised that the weekend is here. These pictures when opened in a new window will give you a better feel for them. The moon is to prove that I do get up early, sometimes. I like the way the clouds increase in length under the moon.

After I finished at the front of the house I nipped around the back and here it was, a golden sunrise bathing the trees in a soft light.

This is on the way back from Gunnedah, mirages have always fascinated me with their false promise of water, ‘just ahead.’

When you need a quick pic what better place to go than the garden, this flower stalk on a Bromeliaed is bursting out all over.

The ancestral graveyard of double-decker buses, in the New England Ranges.

Wood Ducks are an odd breed, they roost in tree branches and on top of fence posts. Actually they’re quite smart it keeps them away from foxes.

There we have it, I have a model lined up for Sunday for a cover shoot. I need a cover for my 3rd book River of Death so I will post a couple of shots through the week.

Cheers, Laurie.

LOVE NO MORE

I thought I would drop in a poem this week, I wrote it a couple of years ago and it’s about a murder I attended in 1982 over the Xmas period, on my birthday of all things. I wrote about it in my Policeman’s Lot series and it’s fully explained there, the plot is simple. She had no love from her husband and found it with someone else. Husband decided killing her was the only way out, obviously divorce seemed out of the question. While she sat at the kitchen table having her tea, a meat pie and a cuppa he shot her in the heart and face. She had several small dogs which when I arrived on the scene were terrified. I also assisted at the autopsy. So here it is,

http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k25/chrishh1908/woman/sad-1.jpg

LOVE NO MORE.

Siren’s wailing, Xmas lights,

scared dog’s howling, domestic fights.

Tearful confessions, No love here.

Shotgun’s blast! Goodbye, My Dear,

A fatal ending. He took your heart.

No love from me, My heart’s unbending.

Shot to head. It’s time to part. The bitch is dead.

Runaway.

A coward-from the start.

I see her there, my heart’s racing.

Gore, blood running, tracing,

lines of red on face, defacing

lumps of lead-a life have taken.

Aim was true, a shotgun-no mistaking.

Frightened dogs, pies on floor,

Gun straight out, go through door,

To hell.

For her-Love no more.

Stainless bench-cold-uncaring,

Coroner’s knife-peeling-paring.

Laying open a heart destroyed,

count the pellets that did void.

Weigh the heart,

That loves-no more.

Face demolished-death’s head grin,

Tongue so pink-it lays on skin.

Pellet shining, in light’s harsh glare,

Like Oyster’s flesh, a pearl lays there.

Cut and carve, weigh it all,

Death is here, He casts his pall.

Justice?

There’s none for her in ground so cold,

Lying there-she grows not old.

Love did fail on that hot night,

A shotgun’s blast, can’t make it right.

Laurie Smith© 2010

YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW, Prelude and Day One.

PRELUDE. For those who have followed my blog from the first entry on A Policeman’s Lot will probably know that my life appeared to have been full of violence. I consider myself to be a quiet unassuming type of bloke who would rather do a good deed, who walks away from conflict only reacting when it is necessary. Yet lurking beneath the surface is this person, someone I don’t really know at all. The following will probably give some insight into why violence followed me, or, did I follow it?

Turning seventeen was indeed a milestone in my life. Leaving school at the primary level to start work when I was thirteen didn’t rate highly on my list of things to do. After being fired from the Woollen Mill for sustaining an injury I worked for twelve months in a service station as a sixteen year old. I had risen up the ladder indeed, of course the service station was a six mile walk away, definite training for what would be coming. I worked my bum off on that job, one young Lad on an eight pump driveway servicing a major highway and next to the biggest RAAF base in Australia, whew. I’m aching thinking about it. It taught me many things that would set me in good stead: customer service, working a till and some bookwork, dealing with a wide variety of people, learning early that some young women could be the biggest teases when sitting in a car. For those who have read Mountain of Death, Grace teases and flirts with a young attendant while he washes the windscreen, leaving him a hormone soaked wreck. Now you know where it came from. The one thing I did learn that no sixteen year old should have to, and that is how to fight for my life.

The man who owned the service station had his fingers in more pies than a baker. Being an interstate truck stop a huge variety of cargo came through the place. In my time there I was offered the opportunity to purchase amongst other things, .45 Colt pistols, tyres, rifles the list goes on. Naturally he didn’t particularly care about who he hired on as casuals. I started at 1pm and finished at 9pm. At 6pm a RAAF chap came on for a couple of hours to fill in for meals. The best part about this job was indeed the food. Truckers had huge appetites and the mixed grill could feed a small family: steak, sausage, bacon, tomato, eggs, a lamb chop and toast. I had that every night, hmm. Sitting down to this hearty repast I ignored the beeping coming from the driveway. A customer stood by his car waving, I pointed at the office and went back to my meal. Beep, Beep. Mouth full of steak I trotted out and filled the tank and returned to the office. My relief, let’s call him Boofhead sat out the back drinking beer with the mechanic. I gave him the forks, called him a lazy bastard and returned to my meal.

Back on duty I returned to the front office, the mechanic called me into the store room where I sat up on a counter with my back against the wall. He nodded out to the driveway, “What was that all about?” – “He’s here to fill in while we eat, not drink beer and leave me to do his work.” (I’ve always had a big mouth.) A little about Boofhead is needed here. His job in the RAAF was that of Air Defence Guard, basically Infantry who guarded airstrips in war zones. He’d served in Vietnam and now spent his time drinking himself to death. His party trick to impress the girls was to crush fruit juice cans in one hand, this was in the day when they were made of steel. My height and built like a tank he didn’t seem to like me. The next thing I know Boofhead appeared in front of me holding an 18inch screwdriver in his right fist above my head. His face was contorted in rage and I sat there shocked, grasping my throat in his left hand he brought the screwdriver down. Grabbing his left wrist with one hand to try and remove it from my throat I managed to get my left hand around what I thought to be the more dangerous mit. When someone says they hung on for dear life I understand where they are coming from.

I could see the mechanic standing behind him doing nothing, then things got a little hazy. Naturally, he was choking me to death. Not content with choking he bashed my skull against the shelf on the wall behind me. Boofhead made two of me, thank God for adrenalin. I couldn’t stop the choking but I managed to keep him from stabbing me. The mechanic finally grew a set of balls and began to pull him away and I woke up on the floor feeling a trifle ill. End result, the mechanic wouldn’t back me up when I reported it to the local police, “It didn’t happen officer.” They didn’t seem interested reckoning that I was big enough to look after myself. Boofhead found himself transferred and charged for working a second job after my old man got in someone’s ear at the base. There is some justice.

When life gives us murdering bastards, we learn how to kill. (That should have been about lemons and lemonade) My old man, for better or for worse had one thing going for him, he knew how to fight. I should know I found myself on the receiving end of his fists more often than I wanted. When other kids were learning how to play soccer and cricket he was teaching me the art of knife fighting and the rudiments of boxing, choker holds and where to disable your opponent. A week later I found myself at a local hall, two RAAF members with more black belts than you could count ran a Judo/Karate enterprise. For an extra couple of dollars they followed the old man’s request, “Teach him how to street fight.” Twice a week for six months I worked my arse off at the club and practised at home. I think my brothers were glad to see me go into the army.

DAY ONE. I still have the photo of the day I left to enlist, I will not show it here. The old man decided that I should turn up in long shorts, knee length socks, sandals and a shirt that looked good on elderly men and a pork pie hat. For those not familiar with this type of hat they are high crowned with a short brim, this one was made of straw. My idea of fashion in the late sixties and his obviously didn’t match, the younger brothers who would be accompanying me to the city on the start of this great adventure also wore them, the OM didn’t. You may have guessed that he liked to be in control. I had to have a crew-cut the day before, (it didn’t matter, they gave me another one when I go there) and I had been well versed in the art of bed making, how to set out your wardrobe and get up too bloody early. He meant well, I think.

After the waves, hugs and handshakes from the family (my younger brother seemed delighted, he’d be getting my room) I arrived at the recruiting centre, signed up and took the oath then they bussed us to the interstate railway station.  A motley crew indeed and I knew that I would be in for a hard time with the looks and comments about the hat. (Sorry Dad, it went out the window from the train). At this stage Australia was still involved in the Viet Nam war and that’s why I joined. I’d heard all the war stories from the old man and without doubt I wanted some action. Oh the ignorance of children. We were a mixture of National Servicemen (conscripts) and volunteers ranging from 17 to 21 years old so you can imagine the scene when we boarded the train for Sydney. Naturally the army thought highly of their soon to be expertly trained jungle killers and put us in third class. The carriages were OLD, no, ancient. Each carriage had upright seating, then the end had half a dozen six seater compartments that ran off the corridor. These were used by the general public on this trip. The overhead luggage racks were cast iron and the seats came from a factory run by the Marquis de Sade. You get my drift, third class.

It didn’t take long after the trip started for the group to find its footing, it was divided into the rank amateurs – me and another bloke – the more mature, i.e. those over 18 and Doc. He turned out to be a Uni student studying psychology, who decided to get his conscription out of the way and let the army pay for his course. Smart boy. He also turned out to be the only bloke who got laid on the trip. I hated him. There were several cuties in their late teens travelling together in a compartment. Of course Doc had the moves, the scotch and the glib tongue. He looked like Radar O’Reilly from MASH, and by the time we reached Sydney we all hated him. I always thought it something of a cliché in war movies, the smart guy who gets the girls. Doc could play cards as well. You can only sit up in a train seat for so long as it chuffs south through the night. One must sleep, the problem was, where? The carriage floor had been swept in late 1897 and then they missed a bit. The cracked leather upholstery found its way through my shorts and by the time I worked out what had happened, all the overhead luggage racks were full of sleeping recruits. I had a lot to learn.

Thankfully the train ride from somewhere near hell ended in Sydney’s Central station in the early morning. Like the cattle we had become, two Corporals herded us onto Greyhound coaches for the ride down to Wagga Wagga, where Kapooka, one of the Army’s recruit training battalions was located. Oh the bliss, the divine comfort of a coach, naturally Doc and his little gang of new cronies bolted for the back seat. I didn’t care, I had a window seat and a bag of Minties, more bliss. The ride dragged on and we motored into Kapooka after dark. We ambled and groaned off the buses and mingled together in a tangled group of tired wee lads. Then our tormentors for the next 12 weeks descended on us, like avenging angels in olive drab. Their uniforms were starched to the enth degree, boots glistened in the buses’ headlights and they roared. We tripped and fell, cursed and clamoured until they had us in a semblance of three ranks. Most of the soon to be bronzed ANZACS looked like the youths out of Henry Lawson’s poem, The Man from Ironbark – There were some gilded youths that sat along the barber’s wall.
Their eyes were dull, their heads were flat, they had no brains at all. At least they did in the gloom.

The army is efficient and we all trudged up the stairs of our barrack block, to 1 platoon, A Company on the second floor. We were given our room numbers, dropped our gear on the bare beds and back out into the hallway. At 9 pm after a long, tiring ride they taught us the rudiments of saluting and gave us our regimental numbers. I can still rattle mine off without a thought. A dummy envelope had been pinned to the notice board with a name, Recruit John Bloggs, number – 1234567 and the company address to show us the format for envelopes. (One bloke copied it verbatim with the name and number, then complained for weeks that he hadn’t received any mail from home.) Eventually they let us go to bed, thunk, my head hit the pillow of my hastily made bunk. No dreams only a long dark train ride until I heard a bugle over the loud speaker. If that wasn’t bad enough the duty corporal came down the hallway yelling and screaming at us to get out of bed, “Grab a sheet, hang onto it and get your arses out onto the parade ground, NOW!” We soon found out that by taking the sheet it prevented you from getting up early and making your bed. They didn’t want thinkers, that would be done for you. After roll call we were informed of what would be happening for the day. A set of jungle greens of varying sizes and a giggle hat had been left in our rooms. Naturally the Corporals had found the biggest and smallest uniforms, then left them in the rooms of the smallest and biggest recruits. I had trousers that ended below the knees and a shirt that Big Arnie could wear, and my giggle hat could have been used to net salmon. These were to be worn after showering and would be our uniform until the cheery and always helpful staff at the Quartermaster store attended to our every need.

I felt like I had fallen into an ant’s nest and scurried around with the rest of them. In our cupboards were a shaving kit and towel, “They’re yours, put your name on ‘em or they’ll get stolen.” Then the rush for the ablutions, most of us had never shaved and with the issue razors it appeared if you didn’t have a steady hand you wouldn’t live to learn. Of course Doc sauntered casually around using his Remington electric shaver, tutting at a scene reminiscent of a vampire movie. It also wasn’t the place to be if you were bashful, a tad unnerving being naked in a room full of swinging dicks. We had one recruit who had been back squadded after hurting himself, the man was a godsend and gave us the drum on what we had to do. Breakfast next, what a sight. Imagine a mess hall big enough to seat a thousand men. And as I stood plate in hand, stomach growling it felt like 999 of them were in front of me. Over time men have bitched and whined about army food, I couldn’t complain at all. Toast, coffee, tea, four different cereals, cooked food, usually bacon, sausages, eggs and tomatoes. Squeal. The trouble was, you had to bolt it down, you didn’t sit back and chat over a cuppa discussing the nuances of snags versus bacon. You had a barrack block to clean.

Next week we’ll look at the First Week and the Zen of Dixie Bashing.

To Gunnedah from the Writer’s Room.

A few pictures from our stay in Gunnedah.

An impressive monument to an Aboriginal chieftain of the Gunn e darr tribe. The below text is translated from the local dialect. The wiki link will give you a better look at his story.

In times past there was an Aboriginal man called Cumbo Gunnerah His people called him The Red Kangaroo. He was a clever chief and a mighty fighter(this man from Gunnedah) Later, the white people of this place called him The Red Chief. (Dr Margaret Sharpe, Lecturer in Aboriginal Languages, wrote the Kamilaroi text.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambu_Ganuurru

This is Gin’s Leap situated between Boggabri and Gunnedah. It is reputed that an Aboriginal maiden of the Kamilaroi tribe was to become the wife of a tribal elder. Not fancying life with an old man she jumped off this cliff to her death with her young lover from another tribe. (shades of Romeo and Juliet here?).  Open this picture in a new window and you will see a white mark in the rock face that looks suspiciously like someone leaping out of the rock.A view of Gunnedah from Porcupine Lookout. The morning was a tad hazy but it gives you an idea of the great location.Cotton is a major part of the local economy, this farm is located north of the town and the picture only shows part of it. Because cotton needs so much water these farms usually have huge dams. When I pulled over a large flock of pelicans took off and flew around in circles.Have you ever tried to pull up safely, find your telephoto lens, switch over, dodge large semi trailers and get a half decent picture? It can be daunting. If you open this in a new window you should get a closer view, although I was going for the overall, ‘bleeding heck look at all the pelicans’ type of effect.  The common pest pear, Opuntia stricta sp. Seemed to have arrived in Australia in the early 18oo’s as a pot plant. It was planted for hedgerows and as stockfeed. By 1920, 60 million acres in New South Wales and Queensland had been covered by the cactus. The introduction of the Cactoblastis Moth eventually destroyed most of the cacti, its larvae ate into the plant. We drove for twenty minutes past hundreds of cactus before I stopped to take a picture of this plant, thinking that they may run out, they didn’t for quite a while. The ground was littered with dead plants and I came to the conclusion – this is not a place to run naked.I had to lighten this picture slightly, taken at the base of Porcupine Lookout it shows a young Walleroo. His fur is quite dark and he blended into the background a little. He is quite a muscular chap and they always look as if they’ve been working out, I mean look at the guns on him. I have seen bigger specimens with arms like Arnie.

That’s it for this week viewers, maybe not as exciting as some that I’ve shown but they are quite a variety, until next week, cheers.

Early morning delights.

I couldn’t wait for the weekend to share these.

It will be delights for this young Red Deer stag. Don’t let the fence fool you these are in the wild they go through this paddock to get a drink in the nearby creek. His antlers have only just come out of velvet and being such a little bloke he normally wouldn’t have all these females. Bigger stags would have fought him off easily. These pictures were taken yesterday morning about a mile from the house.One of the females had a young one but it decided to hide in the grass. I like the way it goes from light to shade. The tear on the females ear would be most likely from going through fences. The clicking of the camera caused them to run after this shot, I was that close.I took this coming back up the track to the house this morning after the Anzac dawn service. This spider had obviously been busy all night making this remarkable web. The dew glistened perfectly.Every tree had webs covered in dew, I thought this one seemed to say it all.

Thanks for viewing. Cheers.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 22. All things must end.

All things must end. To say I was unhappy with my lot would be putting it mildly, in the weeks following the shooting incident life seemed to be spiralling downwards. My marriage, not rock solid for years had begun to unravel and the mere thought of going to work filled me with dread. No more bouncing out of bed to nip off to the job I loved, the thought of even having a shave and shower filled me with gloom. Once in my car I headed off at the speed of dark, slow, stodgy a nuisance on the road. At the car park I had to walk through that front gate, every day it became harder and harder. Dreams I hadn’t had since Vietnam came rushing back, my moods changed and I became depressed. A quick trip to the doctor and he prescribed some happy pills designed to ward off the glums. I would take one before leaving the house. They were GOOD! And for a couple of days I managed to drag myself out of bed and put in the hours before fleeing home at knock off time. Hmm, if one made me feel okay how would two go? Pretty bloody good actually. Arriving at work early I popped two of the big green jelly like pills before getting out of the car. By the time I’d finished my first cup of coffee life looked extremely – “Man is that a butterfly?” Sitting in the corner of the office I spent the day laughing and joking with some unseen chum. We joked and sang the hours away, lying back in my swivel chair I dispensed wit and wisdom to whoever came to the door, granting boons and pardons to those who needed them, in other words I was out of my effing tree. The mood came down by five and I left feeling a little strange, and vowing to throw the pills out. They disappeared after two flushes of the toilet and I became determined not to fill the next prescription.

Life hurts, your body hurts your brain hurts. The thought of living for another day hurts. Those who haven’t suffered depression don’t realise that the pain of living can far outweigh the pain of dying. Nights spent fighting unseen foes in your dreams isn’t a healthy way to live, besides the lack of rest the frustration builds up inside. Faceless enemies swarm out of the long grass towards you, raising your gun you try to fire it. The trigger doesn’t work, no matter how hard you pull it there is no bang. The throng swarm over you and you awake screaming. Wanting to avoid the horror you stay up and lose sleep. Panic attacks began to emerge, I had two trips to hospital before they said it’s not your heart. Okay, so what do I do? Pride can be a terrible thing, especially when your health is involved. It became easy to adapt to the new paradigm in my life just block the feelings, ignore the pain, keep going. It had worked in the past.

I needed to get a screwdriver from my garage which sat at the end of the driveway, the afternoon had grown warm and I thought of nothing in particular as I walked along whistling a little tune. Unlock the door, lift it up and go to the bench near the back wall, I’d done it a hundred times. I don’t remember anything until I found myself standing on a 25 litre drum with a rope fastened to the rafters. The other end tied around my neck. The tilt-a-door stood wide open and I could see up the driveway. It seemed a little misty past the door, one thing stood out though and that was my granddaughter. Two and a half years old, cute as a button with her jet black hair tied back she looked at me with a bemused expression on her face, “Grandpa what are you doing, what are you doing Grandpa?” Nothing unusual there you think? She lived in Canada thousands of kilometres away and there, in my time of need she stood large as life in front of me. I don’t know if it was an aberration of my tormented mind, or some force of the universe coming to my aid, a psychic connection maybe. All I know is it stopped me making a terrible mistake.

After removing the rope I stepped down off the drum and walked towards her, then she vanished. My heart sank and I sat back on the drum and wept. Putting everything back I found the screwdriver and returned to the house, saying nothing to my wife until days later. The incident scared me and I knew then how easy it could be to end a life. How many people who have taken their own lives left not knowing what they had done? Now I was scared. So the next day I went back to work. The following week I turned up for my shifts and muddled my way through until Friday. We were expecting four camps to come in from the far flung reaches of Queensland, Gary ( my dental victim ) ran the show that day and we were busy allocating rooms to incoming prisoners. I had instigated a routine where the camp officers would fax in the names of his prisoners and who they wanted to bunk with. One camp didn’t bother to detail who wanted to be with who and because of the need to write up the board I allocated them alphabetically.

The buses came in and disgorged their passengers, one officer stayed at the bedding store, Gary filled in the log and I gave out room keys. Camp A prisoners came in and were disappointed when they saw that they wouldn’t be with their mates. “Tough titty boys have a go at your officer, not me.” Most grumbled, some whined, Van Tranh stood outside looked up at the board and began screaming at me in Vietnamese. I’m sure my sexuality, heritage and the marital status of my parents was discussed. When the accused stands up in the dock and says, “I’m sorry your Honour, I just snapped,” I understand where they’re coming from. Working at the camp had given me the opportunity to get fit again, I went next door to a gym that had been set up in the old bowls club and had taken to walking long distances. I can still see the look of surprise on Tranh’s face as I launched myself over the small veranda rail and dived onto him. Luckily he had his bedding bundle and bag in his arms, they broke my fall.

Calm, collected, unflappable Laurie had gone to be replaced by a stranger fighting for his life. Tranh had morphed into everyone who had pissed me off over the years. He became the whipping boy for the horrors of my childhood, the bullying, grief, loss you name it Tranh was it. The effects of the wasp sting and NDE, the ambush at the gate, he opened a well spring of hatred I never knew existed in me. I punched him hard and often and don’t even know or care if he hit back. His eyes come to mind now and I know that perhaps I horrified him in some way. I apologise for that. At the time though it didn’t matter, nothing mattered. Gary, God bless him raced out and wisely stayed on the veranda, using his best parade ground voice he yelled out for me to stop. Amazingly enough I did. Good old army training shone through. Climbing slowly to my feet I gazed at Tranh, it was plain to see he carried my fear and demons now as he scurried along the ground backwards. Trudging up the stairs to the office I felt somehow lighter yet still something lurked inside. Gary grabbed my shoulder, “Mate, I think you’d better go home and not come back. Go on sick leave.” So I did.

After my report of the gate shooting went missing I had tried several times to contact the dog handler who attended. He always seemed to be busy or on days off, I became paranoid thinking that this whole episode would be swept away. After some stalking I managed to track him down and begged him for a report. He must have felt sorry for me and wrote one backing me all the way. The log book, huge as it was seemed to have gone missing then magically reappeared after I went on worker’s compensation leave. After doing the rounds of government  and insurance psychiatrists they finally admitted that the shooting had made me unable to continue working, and had resurrected Vietnam. The stress of attending appointments and awaiting results became harder to take than the event itself. Then my doctor referred me to a wonderful shrink, the man who saved my sanity and life. I was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. I saw him for ten years, ten long tear filled painful years. We worked on Viet Nam, my life in general, my marriage at the time, relationships. You name it we dragged it out kicking and screaming. There were times when I hid in the bathroom at home not wanting to go. He gave me the insights I needed in my life that helped me move out of my marriage of thirty years. I won’t bag anyone here, I wasn’t exactly the best person to live with either. So there we have it tribulations indeed, trib·u·la·tion (tr b y -l sh n). n. 1. Great affliction, trial, or distress; suffering: Their tribulation has finally passed, and so it has dear readers.

In the finest tradition of my ramblings I’m travelling back through the years next week to the late sixties. I’m seventeen and off into the Australian army as a volunteer, look out world here I come. Laurie Smith: You’re In The Army Now, part 1. Leaving Home and First Impressions.

Weekend in Gunnedah.

Let’s have a look on the other side of the door on a weekend in Gunnedah. I thought this looked great, it is someone’s front gate. Beautiful.

A statue of Dorethea  Mackellar, a famous Australian poet known for ‘A Sunburnt Country.’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Mackellar it was only after I put these pictures up that I realised her first poem was ‘The Closed Door,’

Senior Constable Petah Devine, youth case manager at Armidale Police, is preventing Ms Kristy Bain of the Commonwealth bank at Gunnedah from escaping custody. Town notables were ’rounded up’ and placed in the lockup to collect money for the Police Youth Citizens Club. Go Petah.

I know I posted this everywhere else but Kellie Hunt is such a great fan of my Death series that she deserves another viewing. Taken at the Gunnedah Shire Library.

I know, I know it’s a toilet block, so read the poem and you’ll find out why it’s featured today.

A POEM FROM GUNNEDAH.

by Laurie Smith.

Of all the toilets I have seen,

from London Town to Narrabeen

the most poetic yet by far,

you’ll find in downtown Gunnedah.

The Man from Snowy River on his heroic ride,

greats the weary traveller, when they pull up outside.

An epic piece by Patterson, who sowed my poetic seeds,

Enough, I thought I must go in and tend to my pressing needs.

The culture doesn’t stop, on the sparkling outside walls

you step inside and wonder at the verses in the stalls.

There’s one by Henry Lawson, on ‘Middleton’s Roustabout’

open the door and read, ‘he had the face of a country lout.’

Then we hear from Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant, a poet of notoriety,

bushman , stockman, soldier who led a life of great variety.

Upon the door the title, ‘When the country carried sheep’

(Australia grew off the Merino’s back,)

And we read of the trip ‘from Cunnamulla and on to the Eulo track.’

Now all the while you’re standing and attending to your needs,

Poetry is being read to you from hidden speaker feeds,

It’s something of a bother on when you first walk in,

“Now who the heck is speaking and what the heck’s this din?

It’s no different in the ladies’ loo, of that I have no doubt,

I didn’t wander in meself, I’m not a bleedin lout,

Instead I sent the missus in to do me task instead,

Taking the camera in her hand, ‘Oh this is doing in my head.’

I stood outside and waited, and explained it to the few

who tarried by the toilet block and said, ‘What do you do?’

“I’m a writer and a poet and this is my way of working,

Do you think I do this for a lark? Your leashes I’m not jerking.”

My wife returned with evidence, of further prose and verse.

Shoved the camera in my hand and said in a note so terse,

“Here you go my Darling, I hope you’re satisfied,

A woman came in and caught me. Oh God, I nearly died.”

There was verse by Louis Esson, who wrote, ‘The Shearer’s Wife,’

A tale of drudgery ‘n loneliness, a hardworking type of life,

‘Up North’ by Mary Hannay Foott, a tale of a woman’s fear,

Read it I beg and it will tell, of the loss of those so dear.

There’s ‘The Play’ by C J Dennis, read it all, it’s quite a hoot,

His quintessential Ockers, give old Shakespeare the boot.

The poem, ‘The women of the West, ‘by George Evans Essex,

Tells of the harsh unremitting life, of the colonial, fairer sex.

So there it is dear reader, I think you’ve heard it all,

of what you’ll find on the inside, of the hallowed toilet stall.

When next you stand and wash your hands in some toilet near

or far,

Remember the poets toilet, Down Under in Gunnedah.

Laurie Smith©2013

Roadside Rosellas, sorry Red Rumped Parrots.

We arrived in Gunnedah this afternoon and drove around looking for Koalas, sad to say they were elusive, though I will try tomorrow. I did find these Rosellas on the side of the road. They allowed me to come quite close as they were more interested in eating the grass seeds. He’s casting a wary eye though.

Obviously the seeds on the kerb are tastier.

The colours are delightful.

What can I say, they’re beautiful.

Until next time, Cheers.

Oddities from the Writer’s Room.

Trying something a little different here today. You can tell I haven’t done my weeding, this is a Dandelion seed head and thought I would play with some hue and saturation in the photo.

This fine looking specimen is the Big Merino situated at Goulburn in New South Wales. A symbol of the Australian sheep and wool industry. Sadly the heady days of high wool prices have long gone. Yes it is a selection of knitted pieces made into a scarf around his neck.

A display on the wall inside which I think is rather cute. There were some interesting facts on the displays, in World War one the British government purchased the whole wool clip that would be produced for the length of hostilities and a year beyond. So important was the industry that shearers weren’t allowed to enlist in the forces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Thunderbolt    This statue is of Frederick Wordsworth Ward (aka Captain Thunderbolt) (1835–25 May 1870) and is situated in the town of Uralla, in the New England Ranges. The Wiki blurb is worth a look and shows you that no amount of imprisonment stops someone following their trade.Large granite formations are all over the ranges, this is Thunderbolt’s Rock outside of town. He apparently used it to watch for stagecoaches, I wonder what he would think of the tagging? Uralla played a small role in my childhood, our family hit the road (for reasons that are still unclear) and travelled from Sydney to Brisbane in 1962. Our car, a 1939 Dodge blew a head gasket a hundred metres on the south side of the rock. A stockman who lived nearby took us in until the car was fixed. On the way back from Brisbane we broke down on the north side of the rock. Who helped us? You guessed it, we stayed with them over Christmas until the parents found work on a cattle and sheep property outside of nearby Walcha.

It may not be the best picture of Light Headed Rosellas but by crikey it was the only one I could get. They are without doubt the most easily startled bird that gets around the place. I saw them in the front yard and by the time I went out with the camera they’d flown into a nearby tree. Not wanting to miss a shot I put the camera on sports and shot a series through the telephoto lens as they flew away. To get an idea of their size think of a Budgerigar on steroids.

Seagulls always have that beady eyed look about them, I think they spend their lives waiting for someone to come along with hot chips (fries). This fellow was pondering his next meal at Bateman’s Bay in southern NSW.

The final pic in my eclectic mix, ordinary looking trees, yes. Look at it closely it’s been blown down, knocked around by the elements yet still it continues the struggle to survive.

That’s it for this week, we’re back to Gunnedah this weekend for a book launch (not mine) so I will have more pics to share with you next time. Cheers.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 21. The Ambush.

The Ambush.  When you have a camp that is made up of a large percentage of drug dealers/users you would think management would be happy if you found someone’s stash of drugs-utensils-needles. Not so, it was the head in the sand mentality. If you keep discovering these things, especially hard drugs you run the risk of undermining the system. The outback communities where these prisoners worked would then become apprehensive if they knew drug dealers were amongst them.  I found out early that there were no slaps on the back for these discoveries.

Sunday nights were hectic, the camp numbers swelled to maximum as those out on leave returned to be bussed out to their far flung camps the following morning. Three officers had to search, breath test and maybe urine test some or all of the prisoners, these were the nights when you earned your wage. Rob and I decided after everything had calmed down to take a quick walk around camp. One long time resident, a heroin addict who had been in and out of jail his whole adult life had left his door wide open and an array of utensils on his bed. There it was, a mirror with traces of white powder on it, a razor blade laying on it and under his pillow two syringes ready to go and three foils of heroin.  A prisoner who I had helped with some issues walked past and told us where our dealer was. We caught him in the act and hauled him to the office. The duty manager called in the police drug squad and a full investigation began. To say the camp manager was upset would be an understatement, he was shit faced. A couple of deals of marijuana he could handle, or a prisoner or two testing positive for cocaine or amphetamines he could brush aside. That happened when they were away from camp. No, this made the camp and therefore him look bad. Oh dear.

Naturally he took it out on me as I had located the drugs. He accused Rob and I of being negligent for not finding the heroin when the prisoner came in. ( I think the prisoner threw it over the fence behind his room before coming into camp ) Anything to divert the blame and make himself look better. Taking me aside he threatened me with dismissal if I didn’t give him the name of the prisoner who informed on the dealer. To my shame I told him, I knew the manager would make it happen and there would be a battle to return to work. The informant didn’t come off to badly he went to a prison farm closer to home. They charged the dealer with possession leaving out the evidence of dealing, he received more time and lost his remissions. I felt dirty somehow and life went on as before. I wasn’t totally deterred from searching for drugs though.

We always had at least two Vietnamese in on drug charges, sometimes half a dozen they kept to themselves and generally behaved. Migrant groups tend to live in the same suburbs and create their own enclaves, where they can keep their identity and heritage intact. It also means those of a criminal persuasion keep their roots intact and you have racial gangs. I didn’t care where you came from, in the police I was an equal opportunity copper. I also didn’t care what colour you were, you broke the law you got arrested. The same in jail, if a prisoner behaved himself I left him alone, play up and watch out. I spent seven months in Viet Nam in 1971 in armoured corps and did my bit as it were. I didn’t dislike the Vietnamese then, although I became wary of them. They were a symbol of my nightmares and their war a cause of my PTSD, still I treated them no differently.

It was a dark and stormy day ( again ) and the deputy manager’s son Vincent joined us for some on the job training. He had finished his officer’s course and wanted hands on experience. The intel officer brought down his list of rooms to be searched with Tran Nguyen’s ( not his real name ) room underlined in red. Subtle very subtle, so away we went and searched a few rooms before alighting on Nguyen like Starsky and Hutch, without the squeal of tyres. I loved ripping room doors open as they tended to offer you a wonderful set piece. Surprise surprise our victim stood there, rooted to the spot giving us a surly look, something like an Asian James Dean with a lip curling sneer. I looked at him, he looked at the carpet with a suspiciously large lump under it. I looked at the carpet he looked at me. Hello hello thought I, there’s more than fluff bunnies and dead spiders under that rug. Still feeling a little unloved from my last run in with management I told Vincent to search while I kept an eye on Nguyen. He leapt on the cupboard like a rapacious Rottweiler and began throwing clothes out, “Steady up old son, lift the rug and have a look there.”

Clang! You could hear Nguyen’s arse hit the ground. He glared at me then went to walk out, “Hang about sunshine, you’re not going anywhere.” In retrospect my fate was sealed in that moment, I nearly missed the look in his eyes. It was the same one I’d seen in the Viet Cong prisoner’s eyes I wrote about in an earlier blog. I disregarded it, nothing was going to spoil the moment as Vincent pulled the carpet back. A plastic mug stood there half full of a pink powder, pseudoephedrine, used in the manufacture of amphetamines. I thought Vincent was going to ejaculate with delight. Nguyen hung his head and looked at his jacket on the bed, Hmm, more? “Take him and your find to the office Vincent, I’ll keep searching.” Nguyen picked his jacket up and I took it off him, “Ta.” Standing at the window I watched until Vincent reached the office with his prize, I’m sure he stood a foot taller.

Shutting the window and door I sat on the bed and picked up the jacket, an ex RAAF flying jacket it had a silky lining. Nothing in the pockets but tobacco and papers, hmm what’s this? There it was a carefully folded piece of notepaper snuggling in the lining near the waist band and with trembling hands I opened it. Text speak isn’t my forte but OMG! A list of people, addresses, mobile phone numbers, amounts of drugs to be sold, where, when. A Eureka moment indeed. Acting nonchalantly I strolled back to the office, quite hard to do when it feels like Ferrets are fighting in your trousers. After checking on Vincent and Nguyen I continued my stroll to the main office. Ignoring the manager I leapt into the intel office and shut the door, “Have a gander at this.” He picked it up and read it with his lips moving, looked at me, the door then picked up the phone. Nobody would be hijacking this it was too big.

The following week the intel officer called me up, “Great find Smithy, the coppers in New South Wales and up here have done simultaneous raids. Two million dollars in cash, a shitload of drugs and twelve people arrested and two drug rings smashed.” Good stuff, I thought, so where’s the free lunch, bottle of bubbly and a little ceremony of gratitude? Not to be, I think he took the kudos for that one. Oh well it was a team sport, score one for the good guys. Mister Nguyen hadn’t let jail time stop his entrepreneurial empire at all, he ran it from inside and did the hard yards when he took leave. If only he had used his talents for good.

Let’s shuffle forward two months, another stormy afternoon – really. My shift started at 6pm and I parked opposite the front gate, gathered my stuff and made a run for it. On weekends and after 6pm at night through the week the gates were locked down. Not to keep them in but people out, you would be surprised at the odd sods that turned up. Our camp had been built in between a bowls club and an old prison psychiatric hospital on a ridge. If you stood at the main gate and looked back you would see Wacol Station Road a hundred metres away. Across the road a huge swathe of bushland covered several hundred acres, it had been used by the army over the years for driver training. We had a buzzer and speaker on the gate post and the conversation went like this, “I’m here, let me in.”-”No, it’s raining I’ll get wet.”-”I’m getting wet.”-”Tough.” Thanks a million, then ping, ping, ping. Hmm, that sounds awfully like ricocheting bullets. Another dozen pings. “Shit that is bullets ricocheting.”

I’m a big bloke, no, a big target and I couldn’t go anywhere. Crouching down into a squatting position I reached up and rang the buzzer again, “Oi, I’m getting shot at here, come up and let me in.”-”No then I’ll get shot at.” Sounds logical but it didn’t help me at the time. “Well ring for some bloody help.” I tried heading back to my car, the pinging started again. This time they were bouncing off the road near my feet. A large blue SUV coasted to a stop next to me driven by a Dog Handler, “What are you doing?” What does it look like didn’t seem the appropriate answer, instead, “Well, I’m being shot at and it’s coming from across the road.”-”You’re joking?” Ping, ping, “No.”

He took off and I watched with some anticipation from my crouching position, the shooting had stopped so I made it to my car. Once there I stood up and watched the proceedings, DH pulled up, bang, bang, bang, that was him shooting into the bush with his Glock. Then a return fire of bang, bang, bang, they’d taken the silencer off. More DH vehicles turned up, a loud revving of an engine came from the bush then, silence. The officer I was there to relieve strolled up to the gate, “Have you finished playing silly buggers?”-”Go and fuck yourself.” Shouldering my bag I took a look at the fresh gouges in the tarmac and streaks on the metal gatepost and wandered down to the office. The supervisor looked up at me, “What was that all about?” I told him and received a negative response, “So,” I asked, “are you going to log this event?” He didn’t seem interested so I grabbed the log book, a huge numbered page book and wrote my report in it, then typed out an incident report. (This later vanished).

The only person who believed me was the Dog Handler, he returned later and filled me in on what had happened, “I pulled up on the roadside and saw two men standing next to a white four wheel drive vehicle, about twenty metres into the bush. One of them raised a semi automatic rifle and began shooting at me. I returned fire and they took off when the other dog handlers turned up. Both men were Asian.”-”That’s great, so why didn’t you drive in and chase them, there are only a couple of places they can get out?”-”Sorry Mate, we’re not allowed to take the vehicles off road.” Charming, bloody charming, attempted murder of an officer is trumped by the necessity to stop vehicles from being scratched. Was the duty manager informed? Yes, did he turn up? No. Did the police turn up? Yes, two hours later. They sat in their car for the interview, the driver, “Are you hurt?”-”No.”-”Okay, see ya.”

The shift seemed somewhat surreal after that. It appeared obvious to me that Van Nguyen had reached out and organised a little surprise. It wouldn’t be hard, the prisoner who cleaned the offices could get his hands on the roster, the prisoner’s ‘hotline’ stretched everywhere. I’m glad that his choice of hit men were a tad undertrained though. Using a silencer on a rifle over that distance altered the ballistics. Shooting uphill people tend to aim higher and downhill, lower. If it had been a straight across the road affair, well this would all be done through a medium. Other than feeling like a clay pipe in a fairground shooting gallery I was pissed off at the lack of notice taken of the whole event. If a prisoner had hung himself or been injured or there had been an armed breakout, well the place would have been crawling with coppers and management. I certainly wasn’t feeling the LOVE.

Next week in the final Turnkey’s Tribulations we’ll follow my unravelling life and the lead up to the last straw.

More oddities from the Writer’s Room

It’s not a post without a sunset, pretty I know.

I spotted this handsome specimen on the side of our track when we were driving out this afternoon. It’s a Bearded Dragon and he’s trying so hard to look nonchalant.

So I picked him up to give you a closer look. He’s still doing the I’m cool nothing’s going on here thing.

This ornament lurks in our garden. I woke up one night and saw it through the window when the full moon shone down on it and nearly cacked myself, it glowed so strangely.

Speaking of strange heads, this white ant’s nest is exactly how I found it. No touch ups or carving here. It’s about 7 metres (22 feet) up an Iron Bark tree in the paddock down from the house. What happens is birds, mainly Kookaburras make their nests in them and that’s how it came to be.

It’s amazing what mothers put up with, the look on her face tells it all. Joey: ‘Mum, I can’t find my X-Box and where’s my lunch?’

Here’s a rose for you, I took it at Queanbeyan and didn’t see the bug until later. The small patch of white on the petal does nothing to detract from its beauty.

Last but by no means least, this is at the front of our property. The house is about 800metres further up. This is a big picture and would be ideal for printing out or as a wallpaper. Unless I specify otherwise on the photo all the pictures I put up are free to use. I only ask that you acknowledge where they come from.

That’s it for the Writer’s Room this week, who knows I may get bored in the meantime and put something up on the weekend. Until then, Cheers.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 20. That’s not how you cook a gas bottle & The Snack machine.

That’s not how you cook a gas bottle. Prison kitchens can be dangerous places at the best of times, well any kitchen can but your average household or restaurant isn’t full of men who don’t want to be there let alone work. The cook house was situated about six long steps from our office door, this made a quick dash for morning tea or to collect your meal very convenient. When it became the sight of a prisoner’s attempt to blow the place up then six hundred steps weren’t enough. In the months leading up to the wasp sting I had contended with a fire in the small laundry ( on my own ) when a prisoner took hot, wet clothes out of the drier and left them in a basket. Naturally spontaneous combustion took over and I found that a heap of wet undies can make a neat fire. It was a Sunday night, the camp had 160 prisoners in and could I get one of them to assist? No way, very frustrating. I had my radio and help was one prison away, it couldn’t do anything for my basket of burning clothes. Getting in to put the fire out was the hardest part, the laundry boy had his key and had let the idiot in to wash his clothes and locked it up again ( it prevented the theft of clothing, come on it is a jail ). I only carried the gate keys so it was a mad dash to the office, grab said key, hurtle back unlock, kick the basket out and use the extinguisher on it. The smell of burning jockey shorts attracted a small crowd and I received a round of applause for my fire fighting skills. The owner of the clothing was a bit miffed though. Where is this leading? Mobile phones. It is illegal to have a mobile phone in a jail. However management who worked in the compound carried them all the time. We couldn’t have one for work purposes, the rationale was we were just Supervisors who would let the prisoners have them, etc, etc, you get the drift. The prisoners had a public phone for their own use in the compound and it ran off phone cards. Having a mobile would have enabled me to raise the fire brigade if necessary or the day shift who were sleeping on site at the time.

It brings us back to the kitchen, a typical institution affair where every utensil is larger than life, big ovens, warmers, cook tops, serveries. For breakfast the cook would bring out a small portable grill plate, it was used to fry eggs on. It came with a 9kilo gas bottle attached by a long hose. This way the bottle could be kept at a safe distance from the flame. It’s not rocket science, anyone can use a BBQ. On this day I was the Boss Cocky (in charge) and had two other supervisors from out west working under me. A fine day if I remember rightly and we had finished our morning tea and scones. My lads had been whisked away by the Intel officer to search a prisoner who she suspected of carrying diamonds, ( they actually found one ) so they were all up in the interview room near the main admin office. There were two ways to the front fence, the roadway between my office and the kitchen led to the main gate. And a pathway between the accommodation huts led to a small pedestrian gate near the main gate. Both of my men had keys for these.

Brushing away the last crumbs of a pumpkin scone off my shirt I sat back and pondered the days activities. My job entailed a fair amount of minor prisoner admin and reports, occurrence books, security, the list goes on. Oh yes and thinking about it. We’ll call the cook Dante, after the inferno. He appeared at my door with a surprising turn of speed for A. A prisoner and B. A man of his age, “Boss, Boss you’ve got to come quick, bottle, gas, cooking hurry.” If any of my readers remember one of Bob Hope’s movies, “The Ghost Breakers” where Willie Best a Negro actor played a butler, well this man resembled him, except for the colour. In the movie he ran from the mansion and overtook the horse and carriage driven by Hope and said as he passed, “stand aside horse and let a man who can run, get past.’ Eyes bulging fit to burst, arms waving madly Dante looked like a Pelican choking on a Chihuahua. Grabbing my radio I followed him over to the kitchen. The prisoners who staffed it were racing out of the mess hall door at the other end as if Old Nick himself were after them. When I saw what they were running from I wanted to join them. I had seen the videos at the Police Academy with our fire training about BLEVE’s  ( an acronym for “boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion.” ) My jam laden scone bubbled up to the back of my throat and sat for a moment before sliding back down, “Oh,” said I, “Dante old son, piss off out of here now.”

The portable grill sat on its little table with the gas bottle on the hotplate, flames on full and vapour hissing out of the vent on the bottle. You know those moments when the feeling is, this is going to go bang, or bite me, or run me over. Well it was one of those feelings. I could only do one thing and that was turn the flame off at the front of the plate. The gas bottle had a glow about it and no way could I grab it, the blasted thing was white hot. Flame out I showed a clean pair of heels and hoofed it to my office, talking on the radio as I went. My men dragged the prisoner they were searching up to the assembly point, still pulling his trousers up. Intel lady raced to the office and alerted the deputy manager and I rang the fire brigade. Now there are always instructions and rules to evacuations and we had them. What we didn’t have were instructions for an officer on his own with only a landline and a tannoy system to evacuate 90 prisoners and a dozen office staff.

The deputy evacuated the civilians and took them away across the road. Good, that left the prisoners. Now the kitchen staff had fled to the far fence, still too close so standing in my office ( a place I didn’t want to be ) I gave instructions over the tannoy. Something to the effect, “Urgent, I repeat urgent this is not an exercise, everybody get out of your rooms and move up to the front fence via the path along the far fence.” 99% of them heard, “ooh, waah ,ooh waa waa fence.” Bloody hell, so I called up one of the prisoners, an older bloke who had some sense. He came to the centre of the little sports field and I gave instructions to round up some others and get them doing a door to door. I could still smell gas vapour, the fire brigade hadn’t turned up and there were still lollygaggers wandering around. ( NW stands for naughty word. ) Back on the tannoy, “For NW’s sake, move your lazy NWing arses and NWing get them up to the front fence.”

A quick check up the road and I could finally see them being let out by my blokes. Phew. One prisoner stayed behind, he was at level gazillion something or other on his X-Box and didn’t want to leave it. The fire brigade turned up, God bless ‘em and one of them went in dressed up with all the gear on, brought the bottle out then proceeded to hose it down. Didn’t it hiss from the heat. Then came the debrief.

The deputy manager seemed very happy with my handling of the proceedings, as we know he evacuated the civilian staff. My blokes did their job and using the master roll accounted for all but one prisoner. ( X-Box man ) The manager when he returned to the camp had a different outlook, it went something like this: you should have called the roll and paraded the prisoners on the sports field, ( in front of the kitchen, yeah right ) you should have brought your men back down to assist you, ( right, bring them past the area where the blast would come from ) you should have reported to the main office and accounted for the staff there, ( hmm, dep man had that covered ) you shouldn’t have stayed in the office, you could have coordinated from somewhere else, ( hmm, the telephone cord is only three metres long and the tannoy cord is a metre). I couldn’t win. Then the fireman had a go at me, “You should have moved somewhere safe.” I would have loved to but who coordinates then? So I brought up the subject of a mobile phone, “If I had one of them I could’ve coordinated it from a place that didn’t put me in danger.” “Oh no,” says the manager, “mobile phones are illegal in jail.” Prick.

To say it pissed me off was an understatement, I’d been next to large explosions in Viet Nam and well knew the effects of a blast. Inside something died a little, high on adrenalin I didn’t take much notice. What I did do is catch the bastard who set it up. Ignoring the brickbats from  my boss, the intel officer and I began our investigation. The police had been notified, they turned up,  deemed it a non-event and left, After some cracking interviews and a room search we found a letter one of the kitchen hands had written and left in his cell, declaring that someone in the kitchen had dogged on him and that they’d pay. After we’d done all the leg work and gathered the evidence then the local coppers came back and took him away. What thanks did we get? Nothing.

The Snack machine. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts the prisoners were allowed to carry money, they had a social club of sorts and a snack machine graced the veranda of the mess hall. It stood like a beacon to the hungry, especially the weed heads who would get a little peckish in the wee hours. Actually there were two machines, one for drinks, the other for chockies and chips. We were forever pestered for change, there was a set time after the knock off muster to get change but no,  ”Aw, c’mon Boss you must have some coin on you.” They also had a small kiosk run by one of the civilian office workers that opened on Friday afternoons. There they could buy items via their accounts and by 5pm the place looked like a Willy Wonka outlet.

Many a night when they were supposed to be in their rooms you would catch a glimpse of some dark shape on the veranda, a clink, clink, clink of change in a slot then, clang. “Oi, get off the bloody veranda and back to bed.” “Sorry Boss, I’m hungry.” It was usually the ones that had eaten about 10,000 calories for tea. They really thought we were stupid you know, especially on the night of the ‘big raid.’ They must have been waiting for me to start my rounds, this night I began them at the front entrance and worked back down the far side. So you can imagine my surprise when I found Mars Bars and Smiths Chips packets along the pathway, all leading to one room. A flash of the torch up the path highlighted a trail of packaging leading back to the snack machine. A quick trip to the machine and there it sat, the door jemmied open, change scattered on the floor and half eaten chocolates. I woke the day shift supervisor and we sneaked up to the offender’s room. He ripped the door open and I shone the torch in. There they sat with their chocolate smeared hands and faces dividing up the change from the machine between them by candle light. We locked them in the secure cell for the night. The feeling was that they may have been planning their escape and had stolen over $150 from the machine. Obviously the huge intake of calories was needed to give them an edge while on the run:-)

The system went out of their way to make sure those of different religions received their correct diet, despite the cost and inconvenience. Two prisoners, Lebanese  drug dealers graced us with their presence for a few months and what a pair or rat bags they were. Work was a four letter word and the world could kiss their bums. It seemed after being there for a week or two they decided that they needed Halal meat in their diet. An Imam came to visit on weekends. Then came Ramadan, they couldn’t eat between the hours of sunrise and sunset, so a cook had to be rostered on for them to eat in the evening. Didn’t he bitch and moan as he cooked their meat in bacon fat – true – they didn’t know it though.

It may be hard to believe but after working in jail for a while you do know every name and face. Where they should be and what they should be doing and our devout followers of Mohammed were hanging around the snack machine, in the daylight when usually they were praying on the oval. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce what they were up to. I sauntered over to their room after lunch. The camp always had the feel of a retirement home at that time of day. Warm sunshine, the buzz of bees around the little flower gardens by the huts, the gentle snores of the inhabitants ruminating on life and their place in it. Opening the door I called out, “Surprise, oh did I disturb your lunch?” There they sat chomping away on big sandwiches, slurping from 2 litre bottles of milk, and their faces slowly sliding into despair as the realisation hit, the party was over. Needless to say the cook was happy, the Halal meat supply stopped and our lads went back to good old prison tucker.

I’m bored, here are some pics from the weekend.

We went to the pub for lunch on Sunday and there were several Galahs in the car park, in contrast to some Galahs (idiots) that go there on Saturday nights. Camera at the ready I took a few snaps. He absolutely loved this leaf.

He found one to suit his tastes and strutted around with it.

Of course after every snack we need to pick our beak.

I took this tonight, I didn’t see him grab the bug. A Gecko outside on the veranda ceiling.

Here’s a better pic of him, they get almost translucent sometimes. We have a couple lurking inside the house and they can make the most appalling clicking noises.

There we go, I’m not bored now.

Cheers.

More views from the Writer’s Room

Okay, so it’s a different type of sunset. I had made some sun catchers to hang from the solar shed out of old cd’s and naturally they blew down. One cd managed to hide amongst the bushes, I was out taking a few snap shots when I found it. Hmm I thought, lets try this. I turned my back to the sunset and took a picture of its reflection in the cd.Here is the sunset I took it from, I love the way the sunbeams filter through the trees and onto the grass.

I took this front on shot of a Grevillia flower in the garden and didn’t realise until it was on the computer how delicate the unfolding buds are.

This was taken as we drove past on the return trip to Canberra. The bales look as if they’re in a race, I’m always reminded of shredded wheat breakfast cereal when I see them.

This reminds me of two things: I. I need to weed the garden. 2. Butterflies are hard to photograph.

Rush hour on the way to Mudgee. This was the last of the mob that we navigated through. It seemed obvious that they wanted to be in the paddock further up the road and they would go at their own pace. We shall not be mooooved.

We have a few families of Butcher Birds ( related to the Magpie in the genus Cracticus ) around the property, this young fellow was perched on the back fence. He has a hook on the end of his beak and they store excess prey on things like barbed wire fences, thorns, holes, anywhere they can actually. Hence the name Butcher Bird. When I go out on the tractor they follow, knowing I’m going to stir something up. It gets crowded when I’m doing any chainsaw work as they sit a few feet away waiting for grubs and such. They’re a friendly little bird.

Some people like decorating their houses and lawns, in northern New South Wales.

So there we have it for this week, a mixed bag of shots with the new camera ( I love it ) I hope that you enjoy them and we’ll be back next week.

Cheers.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 19. I didn’t know I was going to Die today and Be careful where you give yourself a haircut.

I don’t think anyone wakes up of a morning and thinks, Hmm, I’m going to die today. Unless you are on death row somewhere that is. Actually I remember very little of that day, we had gone from living in the camp for a week to performing 12 hour shifts 3 days a week. So I woke up at 5 am that day at home, showered, shaved and dressed leaving in time to start at 6 am. It was a Thursday, one of those sunny summer days we have in Queensland, the sky was bright and the temperature hovered around 30 degrees Celsius, a perfect day indeed. What more could you ask for in life? I had found my niche in the workforce, a well paying job one that I had experience in and very little pressure from above. My duties for the day were that of number 3 officer, it involved doing the searches, any medical escorts – basically the odd job boy. Dying hadn’t crossed my mind at all.

Happiness lurked on the horizon like a rising sun, ready to beam down and release me from the depression that has plagued my life on and off over the years. It still amazes me that we can compartmentalise our lives and store the crap well away from the day to day living. It reminds me of the origins of the word shit. I read that when fertiliser was shipped in the days of sail, the containers were marked Store High In Transit. Because if they were allowed to get wet a gas would form and when some poor soul went below with a lantern, BOOM, another ship goes down. So I had stored high in transit the happenings over the years that caused me some mental/emotional concern. They were stored that high I believe they weren’t even on the manifest. So happiness reigned and I actually smiled sometimes. My marriage ( first ) couldn’t be called a good one but hey, I stored that somewhere in the hold.

A quiet camp with few prisoners in it was the signal for a late afternoon cuppa and a chat. The Manager had gone somewhere and a siesta like feeling hung over the office, time flies and I had to perform a handover security check. Between our office and the main gate a row of wooden buildings stood near the fence. These structures housed store rooms, interview rooms, nurses station and a holding cell. A basic walk along the veranda and do a pull check on the padlocks and a visual of the doors, nothing arduous here. I had checked the first door on the first building when it felt like a hot dart had been stuck into the base of my skull, the pain – I had felt nothing like it, then again and again. Landing on my knees I fell forward and stuck my hands out, then I felt something crawling on my neck, wasps. Grabbing hold of the rail I pulled myself up and staggered to the next building, stopped and looked back. There, stuck high in the veranda rafters, a paper wasp nest the size of a cereal bowl. Being an idiot I continued with my security check, no problems I’d been stung a couple of dozen times over the years.

Back at the office I began to feel a little unwell and sat down at my desk, my neck stung  and I rubbed it. Tom one of the officers looked over and said, “You don’t look well at all.” I told them what happened and Tom grabbed the fly spray and out he went. He returned hurriedly, “Bloody hell, there’s dozens of them.” So they all stormed out for a look see and I hobbled after them, we had a 16 seater bus parked next to the office and I leaned against it before sliding to the ground. Tom sprayed them again, this time flame thrower style after lighting the spray. By now I didn’t care about the wasps, all I wanted to do was breathe. Tom had another look at me and raced inside to call for an ambulance. Another officer sat me up against the front of the bus, big mistake, my head fell forward and my world view changed completely.

The transition was gentle, I could see myself sitting there head down and one of the other officers standing off to one side staring at me. His aura glowed a deep blue and spread out for what seemed a hundred metres. I stared past him at the camp, it began to disappear and took on the appearance of a wide expanse of light woodland. I knew when the ambulance turned up and could see the paramedic squatting down next to me, her voice seemed a long way away, “Let’s get him in the back, he has no blood pressure.” Who cares? I didn’t, the being standing in front of me seemed more important. Yes it was angelic, in as much as it had long black hair and wore a white shift. No, there weren’t any wings and it wasn’t clear as to its gender. The voice seemed musical though when it said, “Come on Laurence, it’s time to go.” What could I do, I followed. My next memory is of me standing alone in front of some barrier, or chasm, on the far side stood a throng of people I knew who had passed. The feelings of love overwhelmed me, nothing else mattered, no one else mattered. I was definitely going home this time.

Then a bump, I came to in the ambulance as it drove out through the gate, smiled at the paramedic ( who looked nothing like the being ) then nodded at my mother who sat behind her, she’d been dead for 6 years. I went away again and apparently stabilised going over the railway crossing. They gave me a quick check up at the hospital and sent me home, anaphylactic shock. I took another day off and returned to work on the Saturday. Going through that gate to start my shift seemed a little different somehow : the sun didn’t shine as brightly, the air didn’t feel the same and the colours around me had dulled somewhat. My neck hurt, a festering lump had formed wasps have dirty stingers and to this day there is still a small pimple where the stings went in. My belief is part of me still lurked on this side of the chasm, wanting to go home.

I have a stash of anecdotes about this job, however they are of a superficial nature and really offer nothing much to the world. I’ve come to the same point that I did in the Policeman’s Lot series, it would be repetition. In the next few weeks I will present the major events that almost sent me to where I wanted to be. But for those who need a ‘My God are people that stupid’ story I’ll finish each segment with one of them. So here’s the first one,

Be Careful where you give yourself a haircut.  In the old jail a prisoner, usually of doubtful talent would be appointed prison barber. He would have a tiny room next to the officer’s toilet and perform haircuts at set hours. We would check his scissors daily and make sure he wasn’t involved in any dubious activities. At my new job we held a barber set in the office, it consisted of the basics: trimmers, scissors, comb and cleaning kit all packed in a wooden box. If a prisoner needed a haircut he would come and sign it out and get one of his mates to give him a trim. Some used it for beard and moustache trims. We used it for ourselves when we lived in, mainly moustache trims and me having a total Uncle Fester haircut on a dare. I felt naked and the following morning one of the crims said, “Are you after a free trip to Disneyland from the cancer council Boss?” Smart arse.

We’ll call our victim Figaro ( the Barber of Seville ), he turned up at the office and signed out the kit, “When you’ve finished lad, clean it and bring it back.” “No worries Boss.” He returned it an hour later looking a little sick and hobbled away, I didn’t take any notice. The following day he seemed a little tardy in turning up for musters and hung around on the veranda outside the mess at meal times. The day after he could hardly walk and another officer brought him to the office, Figaro opened his trousers and the officer looked inside. OMG. The nurse was called and whisked Figaro away. You guessed it, he had decided to do a little Brazilian on his nether regions and with shaking hands had zoomed across his scrotum and chopped a huge chunk out of it. I still cringe when thinking about it, he needed seven stitches in his scrotum. The joke went around, ‘Where’s Figaro? He doesn’t cut hair anymore he slipped and got the sac.’ Ho, Ho. What was worse I had trimmed my moustache after he brought the clippers back. We had a tannoy system to call prisoners to the office and make announcements, something akin to an episode of MASH. The word came down from the Boss, ‘No cutting of hair below the neckline.’ I passed on the edict via the tannoy, of course the cry went up, ‘Why not?’ So I announced, ‘Because Figaro used it on his knackers.’ A loud ‘Aargh’ the only reply. Life can be funny.

Back at the Writer’s Room.

We arrived home late Tuesday night and the following morning this mob of Kangaroos were all waiting in front of the house. What a welcome, there’s a link at the end of the post for a quick you tube video.

The Ebor River Falls in Northern New South Wales.

High in the New England Ranges between Grafton and Armidale. The road is quite narrow, wet and a great drive.

There is nothing quite like having a friend clean your ear out. This pair of Cockatoos were in Queanbeyan, NSW.

This Black Swan swam by after I took the picture of the Cockatoos.

Taken from the lookout in the Moombi ranges, NSW.

Another mix from our travels, we clocked up 3,000 kilometres or 1,875 miles. I’m happy to be home. We took a lot of photos from the car and they aren’t the best however I’ll put a few good ones together in the coming weeks. The below links will take you to the movies I put on you tube. The mother and joey were two metres from the front door, I thought it was delightful when the joey’s head popped into view. I hope you enjoy them. I’m posting this today so you can enjoy them before the Easter break.

http://youtu.be/Mm5SB4YDylE      Mother and Joey on veranda

http://youtu.be/bcgXD2cXyII   The mob

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 18. Prelude, The Dentist and Visitor Hijinks.

PRELUDE. I am a little late this week, my wife Lorelle and I have been interstate for a week attending a family birthday. A couple of thousand kilometres later and we are back at home. I put some of the photos up on my Writer’s room blog, there are more to come for the weekend. For those who didn’t pop along and look at the article I reblogged on the 17th March here’s the link.  http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=974bf90801a64817efb434a66&id=45f44435ab

In it I discuss my emergence and work as a psychic/medium, it was a huge part of my life for ten years. It still plays a part now, albeit a smaller one and I use an element of it in my novels. The story in my blog on the 14th March, Death in the River is something of a ‘things to come’ in future posts when this present group of stories peter out. I will probably bring up a few stories from my army days and observations on life in general. So without further ado here is;

THE DENTIST. Prisoners can be notorious malingerers and try all kinds of things to keep out of work or angling for time out of jail at hospital. There are those who genuinely need medical treatment and receive it as promptly as possible. Dental treatment on the outside is expensive and in the public sector it has a long waiting list. Heavy drug users don’t have their physical health in mind while they’re using their chemical of choice. Diet, vitamins and exercise are irrelevant so their general well being diminishes leaving them open to illness and disease. Gum disease is prevalent due to poor health and the effects of drugs. Amphetamine users go to extremes when they can’t get their fix and consume large amounts of over the counter cough mixture. The end result of years of drinking this syrup is, rotten teeth nearly down to the gums leaving yellow/black stumps. Not a pretty sight and by this time the nerves are exposed leaving them in considerable pain. Once in jail the owner of these ravaged teeth finds himself even further down the long waiting list. Let’s meet  Jacko, he had a set of stumps that would make a plaque infested Hillbilly with a chronic fear of dental floss look like an A list Hollywood face model.

Every four hours Jacko would appear at the office door begging for pain killers. We would send him to the nurse when she was on duty and he would come back with two panadol. Naturally he wanted codeine based drugs and whined constantly when he didn’t get them. He would turn up at all hours of the day and night with a drink of water, hold his hand out and receive his pills swallow them down, sigh heavily and walk dejectedly back to his room. I’m not heartless, I know what tooth pain is and Jacko like everyone else on the public dental waiting list had to wait. Let’s meet an officer who I worked with often, ex Special Forces he was built and looked like a smaller version of Superman I’ll call him Gary. Energetic and hard working he was respected by staff and prisoners alike. He had one failing – dentists – he didn’t like them.

Gary came to work one morning moaning and groaning, you guessed it toothache. He spent the morning grumping around the office, consuming as many panadol as he could find. Nothing helped: me, “Why don’t you make an appointment with your dentist?” him, “I don’t have one.” By lunch time he sat at his desk in agony: him, “Come on Laurie do us a favour, grab the pliers out of the toolbox and pull the tooth.” me, “You have got to be kidding, no way.” Five minutes later: him, “Do I have to beg?” What could I do the man was in pain, of sound mind and had given me permission to remove the offending tooth. Making sure my patient was comfortably settled back in his office chair I took the toolbox out of the cupboard. It contained enough tools for odd jobs around the camp, including a lovely pair of multigrips. I poured boiling water over the pliers, took a deep breath and stood next to Gary.

“Are you ready?” he nodded his head and opened his mouth wide. A scene reminiscent of gazing down a gargoyle’s throat came to mind. There were five teeth in there of various hues and condition. The offending tooth, a pre molar in the bottom jaw which appeared greener than the others stood out. I’ve had a few teeth removed and the main thing is to loosen the tooth in the jaw by gripping the tooth and pushing it in, then pulling it out. Gary didn’t flinch as I put my right knee on his chest to hold him down, placing my left hand on his forehead I pushed it back and he opened his mouth wide. There and then I felt happy that I hadn’t become a dentist, I know there are delicate sweet smelling mouths out there. They belong to people who look after their teeth, Gary’s had that well lived in look. Taking a deep breath I put the multigrips into this dark chasm and latched onto the tooth, praying that it wouldn’t crumble under the pressure. Gary’s eyes bulged a little as I pushed the tooth into the jaw, his nostrils flared then I swiftly extracted the tooth.

Holding aloft the offending bloody molar like some latter day Doc Holliday I felt someone watching me, looking over my shoulder I saw Jacko standing open mouthed in the doorway: me, “Yeah Jacko what’s up?” him, “I, I was going to ask about getting an appointment to see the jail dentist – but – I think I’ll pay to see one when I go out on leave.” He fled from view and never bothered us again. Gary gargled with mouthwash, spat it out and went about his duties, happy as Larry. Not a whimper a grunt or a grimace, true Special Forces material. I’ve probably contravened some Act or Dental Association rule just don’t tell anyone eh?

VISITOR HIJINKS. Visiting days were a little different in this establishment, Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings meant the staff were quite busy. The usual security protocols were in place for the searching of items coming into the centre and if necessary the searching of visitors and their bags etc. As usual drugs were the main problem, excess money for the prisoners and other contraband. Chop Chop tobacco posed a problem too, a visitor turned up one day and complained bitterly when he couldn’t hand over two kilos of the excise free home cut tobacco, we would have had Customs crawling all over us. They also tried to bring in wads of cash, prisoners could have a certain amount of cash money under a hundred dollars I think. This could be used when they were working out in the community or to buy items from the small shop run by the centre. All of this went a little way to integrating them back into the community and having some normality in their lives. Of course there were those who abused the system. Now and then we would surprise everybody and have the drug dogs come in and check each visitor. It would be interesting to see who didn’t turn up for their booked in visit when word got out about the dogs being there. Of course there were always those visitors who thought the dog wouldn’t react to them, HA! many a woman found herself being handed over to the police for trying to smuggle drugs. Yes they always tried to bring them in stuck THERE. Or in their baby’s nappy, toys etc. Sad and pathetic actually that men would put the freedom of their wives/girlfriends in jeopardy.

In the old jail days there were two types of visits, contact and non contact. The contact went as far as a kiss and a cuddle, in this establishment it seemed that many an inmate wanted to go the Full Monty. There were several areas they could conduct a visit, the dining room, outside at the designated area by the side fence and on the small oval for picnics. Whole families would turn up and at times the place looked like an orphanage there were that many children there. Supervising visits became a game of catch me if you can, mixed with tag and hide and seek. Up to fifty visitors could be on site at any given day, after they were processed the game was on. Two of us would make the rounds spending more time herding people away from where they shouldn’t be and rescuing small children from under the kitchen.

The outside visiting area had a few tables and chairs, a bench and a BBQ. Joe had been waiting anxiously for his first visit from Mary and the two children, they turned up on time Sunday morning. Joe sat at the BBQ area while his children ran over to play, he gave them a hug, had a chat and walked over to greet his wife. Mary, dressed in a huge black dress looked like an escapee from a religious sect. They had a kiss and a cuddle then sat down behind the BBQ. A Reverend and his family sat at a nearby table conducting a prayer meeting. After returning to the office from the dining room where I stopped a few budding romances I made myself a coffee and gazed out of the window towards the BBQ. I could see Joe from behind and Mary sat astride him bobbing up and down. You didn’t have to be Einstein to know that something looked odd. The Reverend and his tiny flock kept glancing at them and looking away. Putting my cup down reluctantly I wandered outside and strolled across the small sports oval. Joe sat with his head thrown back, Mary kept bobbing up and down and the children aged about four and six stood on each side of her holding onto the dress.

The sounds of sex are unmistakeable and Mary never missed a beat as I stopped next to her. The dress, looking like a hiker’s tent covered both her and Joe, I shooed the children away and said, “I think you ought to stop and disengage.” Mary, still bouncing up and down, “I’m not doing anything, besides were not engaged we’re married.” Joe found himself in a place where if a pipe band marched through he wouldn’t have cared and continued doing it. The Reverend coughed and spluttered, I stood there trying to look professional and Joe finally finished his ‘visit.’ The tent dress actually served a purpose, nobody had to see the after effects. I’m definitely not a prude but let’s face it tearing off a quickie with a church meeting and two kids next to you is not on. I terminated the visit and Joe found himself going back to the big house on Monday morning. I can only hope that his five minutes of bliss was worth it.

Far, Far, Far away from the Writer’s Room Part Two. Birds.

The first three pictures are of Corellas.

No he’s not caught in the fishing line, although it could be a danger.

He was trying to get the twig above his head, they’re regular showoffs.

I love the subdued colours in this one and how the pink blends in the breast feathers.

On the left is a Galah, all pink and grey and on the right is a Sulphur Crested Cockatoo.

A Sulphur Crested Cockatoo with his crest visible behind his head.

This reminds me of delicate petals.

I took these this afternoon a five minute walk from our motel in Queanbeyan. The pictures were taken with my new camera, I love it. I hope you enjoy them to.

Far, Far, Far Away from the Writer’s Room. Part One.

No, it’s not that far really, we are in New South Wales. I know it is early but I will be extremely busy over the weekend, so I thought I might treat you all to some of the scenes between home and Queanbeyan. This is Castle Rock, south of Tamworth.

Taken from the car as we zoomed along. A typical style of sheep farm in the New England ranges.

A shearing shed and farm that has seen better days.

There’s nothing like a lonely windmill.

Maybe it’s had a little too much water.

I don’t want to overload you but I have some bird pictures in part two.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 17. What a great job, no hard labour here and drug users.

A purpose in life is a wonderful thing, whether you are working or not. I don’t think we are wired for sloth and inactivity, there must be something in us that wants to move forward and accomplish. I know there are many people out there who have had their wiring disconnected or rewired and they spend their lives doing sweet bugger all. I’m not referring to those with disabilities or who are restricted in some way. No, it’s the young healthy individuals who choose a life of lethargy over purpose. You meet many of them in jail, it’s a wonder they had the energy and resolve to commit the crime that landed them there.

Let me fill you in on the old way of sentencing. Say for instance you were sentenced to five years for robbery. The judge would weigh up what type of jolly fellow you were and maybe add on ‘with hard labour.’ In days of old this meant the rock pile and performing meaningless repetitive tasks designed to piss you off. In my time it meant the prisoner had to work at whatever job he was assigned. That job would earn them a meagre wage which would allow them to buy essentials, like coffee, better tobacco and toiletries. If they weren’t sentenced to hard labour then they didn’t have to work in prison industries or workshops. Most did and even the slackers would line up to do a little sweeping and cleaning.

Imagine my surprise when on my first day after muster I had the task of giving out jobs, some were saying, “Sorry Boss but I don’t have to work.” Hang on, “This is a work camp.” My supervisor took me aside, “He’s right, they don’t have to do a thing.” I shook my head ruefully. Those who wanted to put the time in did it well, knowing that boredom makes a stint inside drag. After the prisoners had attended to their tasks they could return to their rooms and relax. It took a little time for me to adapt to the new ways, I shook off the old and sort of embraced the new. Oh the joy of it all.

Supervisors on the other hand, were extremely well paid for our work. After our administration duties were completed the searching would commence, or a check of smoke alarms, or spot checks to make sure they weren’t in other prisoner’s rooms. Supervising by its very nature means there’s not a lot you have to do, you watch and direct, follow up, check it out.  It all becomes a game in the end. I must admit in my time there were a few prisoners who you could give a job to and know that it would be done and the rest? Well it was like herding pre-schoolers after they’d been drinking red softdrink (soda). “Here you go Jones, you’re out front sweeping up leaves.” Ten minutes later he’s: lying on the grass verge smoking, wandering down the road to see what’s happening, back in his room playing his X-box. You get the drift. Some needed explicit instructions; you could spend fifteen minutes telling them how to pick up rubbish around a hut. When you go back it would be stacked in a pile by the steps, “Well you didn’t tell me what to do with it.”

A co-worker who I’ll call Harry had an acerbic wit and a great talent for mock outrage. He had many a crim ducking for cover out of the office. We would go for a walk and see who we could annoy, open a room and there would be one snuggled up, air conditioner on and snoring softly. Harry would shake their shoulder gently and put on a soft voice, “Room service, we stopped by to see if you needed anything and to turn you over. We don’t want you getting bed sores.” “Huh?” Harry at the top of his voice, “Get your lazy arse out of that festering pit, you can sleep at night.” None of them would answer back, Harry was a big man.

I wondered at the process used to pick prisoners for the camp, I’ve mentioned previously that those sentenced for violence or sexual offences were not accepted. Yet I remembered quite a few ‘bad boys’ from the old days. There must have been some criteria or time limit that they used to vet them but I don’t think it was fool proof. There were however some interesting ones: an extremely wealthy man who took over a relatives brothel and ended up inside on tax evasion. A polite and cultured man he found that money didn’t always work your way. Feeling piqued at his original sentence of two years he decided to appeal, and spent heavily on a Barrister, silly boy, he lost and they doubled it. The veneer cracked a little after that. Then there was the man with a huge gambling habit who stole two million dollars off his government employer, and blew it all in a Hong Kong casino. Another who decided that all the weapons in the government buyback scheme didn’t have to be melted down and made quite a bundle in selling them onwards. Some were your average traffic fine defaulters, dangerous drivers, thieves, ne’er do wells and drug dealers/addicts.

An American drug smuggler graced our splendid establishment for quite a while. In cahoots with two Australians and a Canadian he conspired to import a yacht laden with about a ton of high quality marijuana. What they didn’t know was, the Feds knew all about it and they sailed into a trap. He unloaded his cargo and ended up with an eight year berth. Then there was the farmer whose life took a turn for the worse when his ‘get out of debt’ quick scheme flopped. He agreed to let criminals grow marijuana – lots of it on his failing farm. Yes he got caught. Drug dealers/users were a royal pain in the arse and we would do spot urine checks for drug use. Whatever your drug of choice it could make its way inside, our security level was very low which meant that the prisoners were being relied upon to go some way to helping themselves rehabilitate. It didn’t work; addictions of any kind are hard to kick. The game went on; we would search them when they came in, when they went out. Their visitor’s belongings would be searched, the drug dogs would come in, and there would be early morning raids. Yet in it came.

Back to the urine tests, now weren’t they an eye opener. Users would flush themselves the night before leaving the camp, this involved drinking copious amounts of water and Bi carb of soda if they could get it. Naturally it meant either: many trips to the toilet block or urinating in an empty plastic milk bottle. Of course they didn’t think we knew about this, I mean how hard is it on night shift not to see the same bloke scurrying for a pee, or when you did the rounds you spotted someone peeing out of their window. After one drug user failed a test, his room-mate an old crim I knew early in my career took me aside, “Bloody idiot, I watched him last night he had two bottles, one to drink from and one to pee in. The silly bastard nearly choked through the night, he picked up the wrong bottle and took a big swig. Bloody hell Boss I had to put my head under the pillow to stop laughing.”

Our Intel officer would give us a sheet with about ten names on it when he knocked off for the evening of those requiring testing the following morning. So before wake up time we would go and escort them from bed to our office, where they would wait until they needed to go. If you didn’t watch them they would pee their pants and then you would have to wait an hour for them to have another go. Plastic test cup in hand two officers would escort them to the toilet block, stand on each side of them and wait for that golden flow to arrive. Some would do it immediately; others would wait until their eyeballs backed up. If they failed to supply they would be sent back to the big jail. We would turn taps on and whistle anything to get them going. With a sample in the cup back to the office, shake it up and wait. There would be a few nervous nellies anxiously waiting on a result. The test could detect marijuana, heroin, cocaine and amphetamines. Some drug users would feign injuries to have codeine prescribed, that way it would mask heroin use. No blue line and away they went, the slightest hint and they would be gone within two hours. The excuses were pitiful, especially with marijuana users. “It’s not fair Boss, the last time I had a smoke was before I came inside.” Tough, it takes about a month for all traces of tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive ingredient to leave your system. One inmate a heroin addict for years had a clever little device he used to try and fake the tests. We eventually found out he always had a plastic bag of apple juice taped to his belly, with a tube running from it to the underside of his penis. Test time and he would happily supply a sample, of healthy juice.  Let’s face it people, standing waiting for someone to pee is bad enough, no way were we going to crouch down and look at dicks. After I left the establishment a proper facility was built so suspect drug users could be stripped down and placed in a dry room under observation.

Some people never learn when they are jailed for their indiscretions and stupidity, let’s look at this fellow, we’ll call him Dingbat (an Aussie slang term for ‘bloody idiot.’). Dingbat was twenty going on twelve, something of a disruption and a real bludger. (Didn’t believe in working). In one of my many sojourns through the old barrack building I found him playing a game on X-box, with two of his mates. Nothing wrong with that, it was the content of the game that bothered me. I have car racing games for my X-box, however I don’t like the ones that give you points for running people over. Dingbat was in his element, the game had been turned up to full volume. You could hear the screams of dying pedestrians and when I looked over his shoulder at the gore splatting the screen he didn’t notice me. They didn’t realise that we had some access to their files and knew what they were in for, Dingbat had been sentenced to four years for running a person down on a pedestrian crossing and fleeing the scene.

Now here he sat laughing his head off as he raced through the electronic streets, killing make believe people. I’m an understanding man and believe in certain rights, this went beyond the pale. Naturally he got his knickers in a twist when I ripped the power lead from the wall and threw the case for the X-box at him. I strongly suggested that he pack it up, take it to the store and have it put in his property before I stomped on it. He may have seen where I was coming from and realised how it would look on his progress report. Dingbat certainly wasn’t a poster boy for rehabilitation.

The prisoners who worked out west in the country camps usually received leave of absence for five days and went home. They would come back to camp on the Sunday afternoon or the Monday morning, and then the searching would be on. Going through the belongings of fifty or sixty prisoners can be hectic. Let’s call our next fellow Richie Rich, a university student who thought he would pay his student loans by becoming a small time drug dealer. He had wealthy and influential parents and had made a few complaints about the officers over time that went nowhere but they rankled, the lad hadn’t grown up. On this morning I searched his bag, no drugs but when I opened the bag containing his game console all I could see was a large, dark semi auto pistol. When I picked it up then the realisation came, hmm it’s for his game.

“Put it into your property, you can have it back when you leave jail.” The whining went on and on, I took him to see the manager and had the pistol in my back pocket. Richie stated his case, the manager hummed and aahed then I pulled out the pistol. Holy crap he says get it out of here. My argument seemed simple, how bad would it have looked for a prisoner to be out west with something like that. They were allowed to go into the town on Saturday mornings, what if he had taken it with him? Yes he complained to his parents and they had their solicitor write to the manager. It didn’t do Richie any good at all.

I liked this job: it entertained me, gave me a reason to get out of bed, provided an excellent wage, the other supervisors were a great bunch of blokes, management were okay. What more could I want?

Next week, the three ring circus called weekend visits.

Trying out a new camera away from the Writer’s Room.

All the photos this week were taken with a borrowed Canon SLR camera, an 18 megapixel one at that. I have no sunset today, however here is the front yard as the sun rises.

Naturally the Roos came out last night and this morning. Mum and Joey looked delightful especially with where joey has his legs.

I thought he looked handsome with the sunlight on his face, he is about 80 metres from the house.

 This pair was creeping through the end of the bottom shed, I love the shadow.

 Real men play with real trains.

A two story building in town, built in 1905. The ferns have found themselves a place to stay.

This kookaburra sits in a tree about 100 metres from the house every morning, catching the early sun.

I snapped this old house on the way to town, nature takes over and tries to reclaim a once vibrant home.

 I went out and bought a new camera this afternoon and hope to bring some better quality shots for your viewing.  It will of course be hit and miss and I’ve seen some exquisite photos around the net. I hope to get better at it. Until next week.

Oddities e-Club Newsletter - March Edition

Reblogged from The Crystal Channelers:

Greetings fellow Oddologists,

CLICK HERE to access is the March Edition of the Oddities e-Club Newsletter.

Highlights in this months issue:

• Interview...with a Psychic
• New Science...The Widom-Larsen Low Energy Nuclear Reactions Theory
• Famous Abduction...The Kelly Cahill Encounter
• Metaphysical Musings...Negative Entity Attachment
• Herbology...Thyme
• Teach Me Tarot...Temperance
• Crystal Healing...Cerussite
• diy...Homemade Bath Salts...Rosy Stationery...Make a Bay Leaf Poultice
• Favourite Meme of the Month...

Read more… 51 more words

I was going to wait a few weeks to bring my other talent into the mix. I follow Sharon's blog and commented on what I do, she asked me if I would do an interview. So here it is, Interview with a Psychic.

Death in the River

Before I continue on with the Turnkey blogs I thought that this experience needed to be revealed. It will set the scene for events that happened in my new job and funnily enough it occurred in 1978 while I was still working at the first jail. The death in the title was mine in the upper reaches of the Brisbane river. A little background is needed, I used to be a hunter using both rifle and the longbow, my hunting days are long gone as I would rather take photos now. Canoeing happened to be a pastime I began in the army and enjoyed on occasion. At that time the movie Deliverance had been released and some members of the bow-hunting club thought a four man trip by Canadian canoe would be a great adventure. Camaraderie, camping, canoeing, hunting for feral pigs, what more could you want? I can assure you we didn’t get perverted Hillbillys looking for city boys with purty mouths or banjo players.

The plan went like this: all our camping gear, food, clothing and necessities would be packed in bin liner bags and placed in lock top plastic bins. These were then stored amidships and lashed in, archery gear stacked and packed alongside you. On the Saturday morning the four of us were dropped off at a place called Twin Bridges near Fernvale, myself, Ted, Darryl and I forget the last bloke, we’ll call him Bruce. We would paddle to Mt Crosby Weir, not a long way as the crow flies though the bends in the river made up some distance. Then camp halfway along the route that night and continue on the next morning. Off course we would keep an eagle eye out for game. The river was having none of that, there had been a drop in water levels and the promised ride of our lives through several sets of rapids turned into portages. Carrying fully laden fibreglass canoes through rocky riverbeds and uneven ground is not a jolly pastime at all. However it is part of the adventure, when we hit the wider sections of water well, it all felt worth it.

We had stopped for lunch on the bank, there is nothing like billy tea on an open fire and sandwiches after a long haul. Relaxation over we paddled on, Darryl and Bruce took the lead, Ted and I followed along behind. I can still feel the sun beaming down on my bare knees, the strain of unfamiliar movements on arm and shoulder muscles. Where the river widened we would keep a little closer to shore and look for sign, nothing. The river itself transfixed me, pollen dancing on the warm air, insects flying around, landing on the surface and dancing along the slow current. The whitened skeletons of dead Eucalyptus trees lay under water, their limbs reaching up to the surface ready to grasp the unwary. We saw a Platypus for a brief moment as he surfaced, his black duckbill sticking out of the water, a splash then a glimpse of his flat tail. Wonderful to see. The water birds, mainly shags perching on dead tree limbs hanging out over the water, holding their wings out to dry. Then the sudden dive into the water, surfacing with a silvery Perch in their long beaks. Light seems different when it glides across water, its myriad reflections dazzle you as your paddle bites deep. The sense of being so close to nature, watching it from a different perspective that of one of its denizens and being a part of the river was – magical.

I have inserted this link to Google maps,  http://goo.gl/maps/5u7wl it will take you to the section of the river where the accident happened. You will see that the river narrows abruptly, there is what appears to be a tiny island and you can see the fast water running through the narrows. At the start of the fast water is the faint outline of a huge tree stump. Its base stuck out of the water with gnarled dead roots sticking in all directions. The river blasted on each side of it, as you can see an awful lot of water wanted to get through that narrow gap. Darryl and Bruce made their run and took the left side of the stump, we back paddled and let them go to see how they fared. They bounced a little and shot out past the stump and down the rapids, great stuff. Now I’ve had a hearing problem in my left ear since Vietnam and the sound of water rushing nearby caused some confusion with the directions from Ted, apparently he said, ‘Row to the right.’ Which would have taken us down the same course the others had gone. I heard, ‘Go right,’ which meant paddling from the left. Of course both our paddles were in the same side and we spun sideways.

I can still see the base of the stump heading towards us and hear Ted yelling something about my intelligence, ancestry and whether or not my parents were married. Then – nothing. Darkness, a sensation of being then I could see the river again. Only I was now viewing it from a different perspective, hovering above the stump I could see Darryl and Bruce trying to turn their canoe around against the current. Looking down from what I estimated to be about 20 feet I watched as Ted scrambled amongst the flotsam looking for something. Then I heard, ‘Where’s the repair kit for the canoe?’ I could also see the canoe lying on the gravel bank, on its side with a gaping hole in it. I couldn’t see my hands or for that matter, me. I felt light and free and the clarity of my surroundings seemed incredible. I floated down and became level with Ted standing in the river hands on hips, yelling out, ‘Where’s that bloody Laurie?’ Coming up close to his right ear I yelled, ‘I’m here, behind you.” He shook his head as if a gnat had flown into his ear. I yelled again and he turned around, looking back up the river. Darkness and then I found myself sitting on the embankment above the stump.(on the map it’s right of the narrowed part as you look at it) At that time there were no trees there, only tall grass, it would have been about 15 feet above the water. I felt like I knew everything and at the same time nothing, the world stretched out beyond me. The air had become crystal clear and felt electric. I sat waving at Bruce, they’d managed to get back and he stood pointing at me, ‘Laurie’s up there Ted, the bastard’s bludging on us up on the embankment.’ They all stared for a moment and then went back to picking equipment and bows out of the water.

A man appeared and I recognised him from old photographs, it was my grandfather Sam Smith. He had died in 1945 so I’d never met him. He stood in mid air, that’s odd I thought and then a small dog appeared it ran around and yapped. Sam came closer and held out his hand I took it and it felt warm, alive, solid. No words were spoken yet I heard him, ‘Come on Laurence, it’s time to go lad,’ even in that state I could be a bit thick, ‘Where?’ He smiled and gripped my hand, “Where else lad, home.’ His dog, a whippet called Lady still yipped, barked and carried on, ‘What about all this?’ ‘It’ll be fine, come on.’ I went, I could feel myself again yet I walked across the air above the river. The sky turned a strange colour and Sam disappeared. The light had changed, it became thicker, darker, then began to swirl in a myriad of colours. It vanished and I was looking at me underwater wedged beneath the stump. My face looked pale and waxen. My shoulder length hair, jet black at the time swirled back and forth across my face. Little eddies of water were pushing tiny shells and bits of gravel against my open mouth. A hand appeared, spearing though the water and grabbed my hair.

Whump! My body hit the butt end of the stump on the part above water chest first. Pain, then a burning, stinging feeling as water shot out of my mouth and nose in a jet of snot and weed. Heavy, I’d never felt so heavy in my life. I think I cried though it was hard to tell if it were tears or river water coming out of my eyes. Ted had found me, apparently over five minutes had elapsed and they began to worry. Bruce’s comment about me sitting on the embankment must have had them thinking. It came down to a process of elimination, I hadn’t floated past them therefore I must by default be beyond the stump. I couldn’t be seen from above the water, Ted stuck his arm underneath the stump and could feel my hair, taking a handful he dragged me out one handed and dropped me over the stump. The impact on my chest acted like a huge compression on my heart and lungs. Now this is where it gets serious, nobody wanted to get help. Instead they decided to strip me off, wrap me in blankets and make camp for the evening. Have a look at the map, even then there were several residences within a mile from the river. When someone says they feel like death warmed up, well I know what it’s like. I really couldn’t give a shit lying there, the fire felt okay though. Me? Oh didn’t it hurt, I asked them how long it took before they realised I wasn’t there. The general consensus was over five minutes, I figured that the period between impact, I must have been knocked unconscious on one of the roots and floating would have been a couple of minutes, though I can’t be certain. Bruce maintained he saw me though, waving at them. I felt too sorry for myself to point out the obvious, like how the bloody hell did I go from the embankment to under the stump. He had a few issues on that. Never mind, he can say he sees dead people.

Was I dead? I think so. Some will say that the swirling light was my brain starving of oxygen and that the colours showed it to be shutting down. So how do they explain my overall view of the scene, repeating their conversations, actually being able to tell them who picked what out of the river when I was underneath it? I honestly believe that I journeyed to the other side of life, another minute and I would have been beyond saving. The following morning we moved on, I felt so ill that even if bands of scantily clad hillbilly girls descended on us I would have ignored them. We didn’t know then that you could drown hours after you had been removed from the water, because of water in your system. The headaches were brutal and my disposition was downright testy. I recovered without benefit of medical intervention and went on with life. The question most people ask is, ‘Did you see God, Jesus or angels?’ No, though someone who obviously cared turned up to help me move on to somewhere else. Did it change my life at the time? Yes, in fact for a while it became worse. So what is the point of this story? To let you know that passing over is very easy to do, that life can change in an instant and the transition isn’t painful. Also there is always someone there for you, how do I know? Because of the next event in a future blog.

Dying and death is a subject I find quite easy to write about in my novels, for something every living thing does it amazes me how much of a taboo subject it seems to be. I know the majority of us aren’t rushing to do it anytime soon, so I’ll note down my close scrapes: born dead, resuscitated over a half hour period. By the time I turned 17 I’d been electrocuted to unconsciousness twice, struck by lightning once, had an angry man try to strangle and stab me, bitten by a brown snake. Between 17 and now, two lightning strikes where it came through an object I was holding and once sitting on a tractor.  I’m not even going to count being shot at, coming off horses and motorbikes. One thing that I still get angry at is being called a malingerer in the army. I had been sent with four other troopers to an officer’s training unit to play enemy soldiers. On the second day I fell ill, Hong Kong flu had hit Australia and I thought I had it. No ladies it wasn’t ‘man flu.’ The quack said no you’re malingering, my corporal took me back to the barracks and I spent four days lying on a mattress on the floor, semi conscious. He cleaned and watered me for all that time, I couldn’t eat, lost 30lb in weight and they had to carry me out to the truck when we returned to base. In those days the doctors were never questioned. Up until the drowning I didn’t think you could get that ill and not be dead. So there we have it, make your own judgement on the events on the river. We will return to normal programming next week.

Laurie.

A mixed view from The Writer’s Room.

I took this last week a few hours after I posted my blog with the Gazania in lieu of a sunset. Nature excelled herself, for a little while, the rain came back the following morning.

A view of the ruins at Furness Abbey, Cumbria UK taken in 2002. They are situated a couple of miles from where I lived as a child and were a great place to play. The Abbey was destroyed in the reign of King Henry the VIII in the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Read all about it here,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furness_Abbey

A view from inside through the arches.

A beautiful example of an English country garden, on Abbey Road.

I apologise for the condition of the photograph, I took it on an old 126 Kodak camera. What I wanted to show was how prolific nature can be. this is an Ivory Curl tree that grew in the garden of a house I lived in. The flowers are the size of bananas and were always covered in bees.

More ruins, this time a settler’s cottage near Quorn in South Australia.

I can only describe it as a Mack truck threesome in the car-park at Wal-Mart, San Antonio, Texas, 2002.

Bottle Brush shrub in the back yard, the rain certainly gave it a welcome boost.

That’s it for this week, I still have a limited internet connection and hope to be up and running next week. Thanks for dropping by and looking at my pictures. Laurie.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 16. Child Labour – Nightshift glorious Nightshift – The Honeymoon Night.

CHILD LABOUR. You don’t realise how important a job is until you don’t have one. I started work at the tender age of 13 ½ years old. Here in Queensland at the time (1965) you needed the permission of the Minister for Education to leave school at that age. It was granted only under conditions of great hardship in the family. Actually it was so I could help in saving up money so the family could return to England. No thought had been given to the fact that I loved school and was doing quite well, or that I would be starting High School the following year. No, out to work with you. I already had Saturday morning casual jobs, cutting up potatoes for chips in a takeaway shop, the only lurk a burger with the lot and five shillings (50 cents) pay. Cleaning the driveway of the service station at the end of the street, at least home was three houses away. No, I needed a real job in an Abattoir. Oh the bliss the joy, the smell, the blood. I can only say it toughened me for the real world. I was the ‘offal boy.’ It involved collecting buckets of livers, kidneys, brains and hearts etc. take them to the packing room, wash the buckets and take them back up to the kill floor. A job I did with skill and speed. The wages were better, however my mother decided she didn’t like me coming home covered in blood every day. Besides I now had to take on the job of carer for my father. He had decided that life looked better from the bottom of a glass and took to heavy drinking with a vengeance. Mother went out to work, mainly to support his habit and I had three younger siblings, one still a baby to look after, a house to clean and meals to prepare. I can honestly say I know how young mother’s feel. The child rearing wasn’t a problem. I’d spent all my ‘free’ time keeping them away from the house after school and on weekends. We were something of a fixture in the nearby park: leave home after breakfast, take sandwiches and fruit, and come home about 4.30 for dinner. My eldest sister was smart, she ran away from home.

Being Mister Mom lasted about six months and we moved house again, to the caretaker’s residence at a Woollen Mill. This suited my parents, father could keep drinking but they made sure I had a full time job which I actually enjoyed. Although I had to hand over my weekly pay, out of the $15.00 I earned I saw $2.00. My weekends weren’t my own even though I was now a working man. You guessed it, babysitting. Someone must have been watching over me though, they decided after a while that the next brother down should take on the mantle. Freedom – sort of, I then had to take on the job of Milkman’s off-sider. So after a full working week, hard work at that I had a little sleep on Friday evening then start work at 11pm until 7am. My first taste of night work felt good, being out and about while most people were sleeping has a certain feel about it. The Milkman, I forget his name must have come out of the same mould as my parents. The man only needed a whip and he would have been a slave driver. He did however let me have a pint carton of iced coffee a shift, his treat. The night I fell six feet down an uncovered drain and broke a dozen empty milk bottles has never left me. There I lay, stunned, confused looking up to see him peering down the hole, “Stupid bastard you broke twelve bottles, they’re profit you know.” Go figure. After being injured moving wool bales on a barrow and taking two days off work the Mill boss fired me. I soon found myself working the late shift at a service station, six miles away. There were no buses for my start time so I walked into work and took a lift home. Three weeks after my seventeenth birthday I joined the army, and had never felt so free in all my life. The point of this preamble is I had a job from 1965 until retirement in 2001. I know people in their late sixties and seventies are still working and I would be too, if not for my new job.

NIGHTSHIFT GLORIOUS NIGHTSHIFT. If you have read part 15 you can appreciate why I grabbed hold of the offer to work as night supervisor and what a job it was. Patrol the camp, perform three headcounts during the shift, stay awake and be there to answer the phone. The prisoners were an assorted bunch, the majority being in for drug offences ranging from possession to importation. The rest were made up of those serving time for a variety of reasons not including sex offences or violence. This didn’t make them boy scouts by any stretch of the imagination, the drug users were without doubt the most devious, troublesome prisoners I had ever worked with. The compound would have been about an acre and a bit in size, and the supervisor’s office had been situated so that you could only see half of the camp. This was the accommodation for the transient prisoners who would spend a weekend in camp and go out on leave of absence for five to seven days. The old army barrack room housed prisoners who came in the weekend before going out on the western rotation again. It usually ran smoothly, most of them wanted to bed down at night, a small number of them were sleeping off their drugs. Prisoners could leave their rooms after the first headcount but only for the toilet, or to get medical assistance. I’m happy to say I never had an escape on my watch, or an overdose.

The centre sat between two closed jails, there was nothing but farmland between the back fence and the river, and the frontage looked down over a paddock, a road then into more bushland. Ahh, the serenity of it all. A possum lived in a tall tree behind the office and would come and sit out on the veranda waiting for fruit. An old man kangaroo, who had seen better days lurked around the fence most nights eating bread scraps that prisoners threw out for him. He actually kept you awake, if you didn’t see him as you patrolled the fence line he would jump at you and hit the fence, a real heart starter. Large red Meat ants had set up a nest in the corner of the camp behind the gym, now I didn’t know that they had sentries waiting inside the holes. I’d shine my torch down and there they were, night shift workers just like me.

Headcount one would be done within the first hour after lights out. Bad boys being what they are didn’t want to go to bed, they had their mates to visit, cards to play and the stupid had dope to smoke. Not all the time though, it depended if they were leaving camp in the next day or so. Those suspected of using were urine tested and that will be another story. You felt like a Den mother going around and chuffing them off to their rooms, the whingeing and whining reminded me of kids on sleepovers. My favourite saying became, “Don’t make me come back here.” Let’s face it if you are going to act like kids expect to be treated like them. It felt like rounding up ducks. Back to the office, put the kettle on, settle down and have a read of the paper, Knock! Knock! at the door, “Boss, I’ve got a headache, Boss I’ve got a toothache, Boss I’ve got a…….” The list was endless, though understandable, being in a confined environment anything going around hit hard. In my first week a prisoner sneezed in my face when I walked past him, the following morning the flu hit – more than the man flu let me tell you. The camp would settle down and the hardest part of the shift became trying to stay awake. The following morning hand over to the day shift and head home, ahh the bliss.

THE HONEYMOON NIGHT. For those who have followed this blog you know I don’t pull the punches when it comes to sex. It is a wonderful thing to have in one’s life; I could go on – back to the story. People living in jail have needs too, now those who went out on leave obviously had these needs attended to and were the happier for it. When prisoners returned to the camp they were allocated a room, most had a preference for who they wanted to bunk with. At any given time we had several Vietnamese drug dealers in the camp and they always wanted to share with each other. Who were we to stand in the way of friendship? One safety aspect that we always cracked down on was fire safety, they weren’t allowed to smoke in their rooms, or have lit candles. The demountable cabins were old, made of timber and six rooms long. the barrack room had been built in 1940, imagine a fire sweeping through one of them? They had smoke detectors but the prisoners kept disabling them, or hid their drugs in them. So once again you would be the bad egg, “Smoke outside, put the scented candle out, blah, blah, blah.” I think after a few weeks I could have qualified for a degree in kindergarten supervision. Back to the story, I had a full camp of about 180 and was performing the first headcount of the night, of course I wore my tennis shoes. Silent, Ninja like I made my way around the accommodation, open the door check for heads – no bundle under the blankets for me. If I couldn’t see a face I would go inside and pull the blanket back. I had a worksheet that showed me who lived where and I would tick it off after checking each room, “Hmm, here we go the Vietnamese who insisted on a double suite.” Let’s call them Minh and Vinh, I have no idea what the names mean so don’t quote me on them.

Homosexuality has been a contentious issue in prisons for centuries, when it was still a crime prisoners caught in the act were charged. I’m heterosexual and I don’t judge people by their sexuality, my view is if they are consenting adults they can do as they please. The sight that greeted me kind of tarnished my view of a honeymoon night forever. The first thing I noticed were the reflections from purple scented candles flickering on the walls, a lot of candles. They highlighted the tableau before me: the double bunk had been decorated with coloured ribbons and paper lanterns, two cans of cola sat on the bedside cupboard with two glasses, a mosquito net hung from the wall giving a feel of some Asian bedchamber. Minh stood there naked in all his glory, like any other groom through the centuries, ready to take his bride. Although I think it knocked the edge off when he saw me. Vinh the blushing bride that he was laid on the bunk naked with a bridal veil made from some gossamer fabric on his head. Heavy makeup covered his face, reminding me of a temple dancer. Soft mood music came from a cassette player under the bunk. I won’t go into detail here, suffice to say I intruded on a beautiful and tender moment. I nodded at the candles and Minh fell over himself to put them out. Smiling broadly I looked from one to the other, congratulated them on their nuptials and softly closed the door. I have a warped sense of humour, and the whole scenario tickled my funny bone. The day shift supervisor reckoned I should have charged them. If it wasn’t consenting it would have been a different matter. I’m also a romantic and besides it was Valentine’s Day.

Next week I’m taken on board and become a fully-fledged supervisor.

A wet view from the Writer’s Room.

I cannot provide a fantastic, beautiful sunset today, why? Because it is still raining, so on my travels around the garden I thought this Gazania would make a reasonable stand-in.

Too wet to mow grass, the track looks as if it’s heading into the Amazon and the kangaroos are depressed.

We braved the wet and minor flooding and went to town, heading down the track these big fellows stopped and took a look, I like the one in the middle playing peek-a-boo. He’d been looking around the other side first, it’s not a great picture but the phone camera comes in handy.

Before the rain began I had a small problem with fungus, I think it’s taken a turn for the worse.

You are all aware we’ve been having troubles with our internet satellite dish, (it died) well I found this on eBay and the man said he’d install it for only $500.00. Do you reckon it’s a bargain? Seriously it’s at the NASA facility outside of Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory. Still I reckon you’d be able to download from Alpha Centauri.

The bottom of this photo is where the house is now. We had been clearing deadfalls and rubbish for weeks, it does show what it looks like DRY.

Now this is what DRY looks like in the wine growing areas of South Australia.

That’s enough whining from me. I tried to connect to other blogs this morning they come up but because of the connection I can’t hit like. Sigh. So I’m going to add three more links to blogs that I follow. I hope you liked my selection today, crazy I know but hey, we’re getting cabin fever up here in the hills. See you next week.

http://russelrayphotos2.com/author/russelrayphotos/    A great site for pics of all types around San Diego, California.

http://crystalchannelers.wordpress.com/author/roweaton/    For all things metaphysical, Sharon is based in Brisbane.

http://jimzshortstories.wordpress.com/author/runninguphillbackwards/    Jim’s site is full of short stories that draw you in, well worth a visit.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 15. A word from the author and Transition

It has been a frustrating week or two, our satellite dish as you may know died an untimely death. I could say it has gone to that graveyard in the sky where worn out dishes go but it hasn’t. It sits on the roof pointing to the heavens, mocking me with its sturdiness. In the great age of communications it is mute, silent, awaiting the technician who cannot get here. Why? Because Mother Nature in her bounty has lavished us with rain – again, yes flooding rain. Do we need the rain? No, am I cursing its presence as it rushes down our road to the front gate, no? Why? Because we have times when it doesn’t rain for months, the grass dies, our dams dry up. The kangaroos knock on the front door in the heat of the day, begging for a cold can of drink, maybe not that bad though you get my drift. I feel if one curses the rain it sulks and stays away, you can see the dark clouds hanging on the horizon and they sit there aloof, taunting us. Which brings me back to the dish, a bit like the space shuttle really, a part costing a few dollars failed and brought it down. The technician, Dwayne rang this morning he lives up on the range in Toowoomba. It would be clouded in there, cool and wet, he says,

“G’day, raining down there?”

“Yeah mate, yeah bit wet, the creeks are up, paddocks are running like billyo,”

“So, is the roof wet?”

“Yeah mate, every ten minutes it’s pouring down,”

“Can’t work on a wet roof mate, I’m off on holidays, see ya in a fortnight,”

“Thanks mate, see ya then.”

That’s Australia for you, laid back, relaxed. What could I say you can’t change the weather; I don’t like getting on the roof when it’s dry. So I can’t blame a bloke for not wanting to be up there in the rain. Besides I don’t want him slipping off and breaking his neck, we’ve had new concrete laid around the back of the house. So I’m back to operating via my mobile phone. Technology is marvellous, when it works. Who would have dreamt that you could attach a phone to a computer, using it as a modem? I remember getting excited about having a solar powered calculator. I even had a solar powered watch when I worked at the jail in the late seventies, probably not a great invention for night shift workers, coal miners or submariners. Being the clown I’d often stand out in the midday sun and hold my wrist up, give it a little charge you know. Back to the rain and one other class of creatures who hate it, ants. We aren’t connected to the electricity grid, our whole house runs off solar power, (there’s a pattern here). When the voltage drops to a certain level in the batteries, especially in wet weather they have to be charged up by the generator. Waiting until the rain eased so I could go and start the generator I went out onto the veranda and picked up the large orange umbrella from where I’d left it, point down in one of my work boots. Being focused, i.e. not watching what I was doing, I raised the umbrella above my head and opened it.

Ants can move a whole nest of eggs overnight, how do I know? Because they were living in my boot and using the umbrella as some sort of mezzanine floor, probably for well off ants that didn’t have to carry eggs. Where did they end up? Yes on my head, the little blighters boiled out of the boot and swarmed over my feet. Go on laugh, I am, kind of. There are still a couple in my shirt I think, which brings me to the point of this preamble: To all my followers and blogs that I follow, it is difficult to load your pages via the phone. Why? Because we have terrible reception where we live, we have to go into the nearest big town to get four bars on the phone. You ought to hear the girly squeals when I’m able to get 4G (for those overseas that’s a bloody good reception). I can download mail and bring my page up, get on FB but find it difficult to operate because of time outs. So, I’m going to put the blog addresses up of the people I follow and you can check each other out. You may even know each other. I haven’t forgotten you all; I can answer your remarks through my blog page. Imagine what it would be like if the internet were taken down? It doesn’t bear thinking about, though there are governments that hate it, even in the free world. I love it; it has brought the world to my door and lovely people who I never would have met.

TRANSITION. For those who came in late, (if you are a Phantom comic fan you would recognise that opening line) some background is needed here. I haven’t placed the series in a, as it happened time frame, that’s too easy. I’m drawing you in to my last job before retirement was forced onto me. We’ll peel back the years and look at when I left the police in 1987. I felt like my life had ended, so much of who I was, me, my deep inner self had been dedicated to being a copper. Leaving was like having my heart ripped out, naturally I did nothing about it from a psychological standpoint. ‘I can do it, I don’t need any help.’ You know how it goes. I did however suffer from severe seizures, not epileptic, what the neurologist called pseudo seizures. He left it that, no further treatment, no advice, nothing. They came on mainly at night or when I lay down through the day to try and relax, the body would stiffen and I would thrash around like a landed salmon. It twisted my bowel, tore muscles, strained tendons. The Doc gave me injections of Valium, they helped a little but who wants to be addicted to it. The only good part, I had a six pack like you wouldn’t believe from the contortions. The sad part, I was conscious the whole time. They settled down to once or twice a day and I found a new interest, horses.

We bought a small acreage farm, with the original farmhouse on it dating back to the late 1800’s, there were stables and some yards. What enchanted me was the huge Moreton Bay fig tree in the front yard, a haven on a hot day for us and a roost for about every flying creature in the neighbourhood. Back to the horses, my ex-wife had a Connemara pony and I had time on my hands, so I bought a horse and another, then we bought a stallion, naturally. I cannot complain, it gave me purpose, exercise and a reason to get out of bed. I can bore you with tales of horsemanship (snigger) breeding, breaking in although there are some funny stories in there, another day perhaps. After twelve months I felt better and wanted to get back to work and this is where serendipity came to the fore. A friend I had worked with in jail bumped into me in town, after the usual chit chat he told me about a defence security job on offer. He had walked past the sign out front of the employment bureau minutes before. Long story cut short I got the job, a simple task – stand at a gate; check ID’s open the gate. I was definitely over qualified for it. At that time an investigation into police corruption was in progress, the officer doing the interviews asked,

“Did you leave the police because of the corruption investigation?”

“No but I was worried if they decided to investigate free hamburgers.”

Luckily he had a sense of humour. The job lasted for ten years and in that time I found out I had a new talent, hmm, we’ll leave that for another blog. Ten long years and our gallant group of men were made redundant, an international security/catering provider took over. Of course there were promises of everyone will keep their job, and then the offers of retraining came in. We had to reapply for our jobs and I think I lost mine before the interview. She stood 6ft 2 inches tall without high heels, a figure that would not look out of place in Playboy magazine, lustrous, thick, honey blonde long hair and a face you could only call – classically beautiful. My interview had been booked for 1pm, I turned up five minutes early and waited in my car. She walked up the path from the officer’s mess. No not walked, she glided sinuously, her body barely contained by the red sheath mini dress straining to accommodate her charms. Stopping by the passenger window she leant in, brushed her hair off her face and said in a Russian accent,

“My name is Olga, please walk this way.”

In my defence I have to say that I am a victim of British comedy, Benny Hill being one of my favourites, Carry On movies, Are You Being Served, shows of that ilk. Scrambling out of my car I hurried around and followed. Her bottom reminded me of two possums trying to fight their way out of a pillow case, I replied,

“If I could walk that way I’d be arrested.”

Needless to say I didn’t get to keep my old job. I took on a security officer’s course and when the final payday came in November 98, I started three new jobs. All part time, shop security, hospital security (a couple of good stories there) and back working in jail, sorry, Corrections. Somebody must have thought jail too hard a term and changed it. Guess how I managed to get that one? I bumped into the same old friend in town one day and he told me they were hiring new officers where he worked. Oh bliss, a real job. He took me in for a look around, something of a meet and greet. This was no ordinary jail, oops correction centre. It came into being after disastrous floods in western Queensland in 1990. Prisoners of all descriptions were taken from Boggo Road jail out to the area and put to work helping with the recovery process. The organisation received good press and after the work had been done a new department was born. Situated a hundred metres from my old jail it looked like an oil riggers camp: demountable portable cabins with two inmates to a room, (not cells anymore Laurie) a series of about fifteen single rooms, an old WW2 barrack room hut which could hold thirty inmates, several buildings for the office workers, management, an office for us and our accommodation. You heard it right, the officers lived in the compound to. The roster ran basically the same as the western camps, a week on a week off. In the week on you were on call 24 hours a day. The week off was great.

They gave me a day’s work to see how I handled the environment on a Monday morning when three camps, consisting of about fifty inmates were being bussed out. Naturally this involved searching them and their belongings. Old bloodhound here sniffed out a lump of compressed marijuana that would have kept its owner happy for a fortnight. The bosses were impressed. I started the week before Christmas 1998, under the proviso that I had taken over from an officer who had retired. After I’d worked two rotations they told me thanks for coming, he’s decided not to retire. Hang on, what’s the go? I had fallen into the modern day way of running government jobs. Back to being Mall Cop and hospital guard for a month, then a call,

“Err, we would like it very much if you could be our night officer. It’s 10pm-6am and your pay will be the same.”

I thought about it for a Nano second,

“You’re on, when do I start.”

Now I knew how they operated I felt comfortable, no loyalty here just give me the money and wasn’t it good money. I would come into work, do a headcount with the shift supervisor, they would chuff off to bed and I would have the camp and usually a 180 inmates to myself. If I had an emergency I would wake up whoever was on call. Bliss – I had a purpose again, a real job where I could make a difference – continued next week.

Here are three of my friends whose blogs I’d like you to drop in on. If I put more links up WordPress treats it as spam. Cheers, Laurie. http://raaniyork.wordpress.com/

http://patgarciabookreviews.com/author/patgarcia/

http://kelihasablog.wordpress.com/author/kelihasablog/

The Writer’s Room is back.

I have enough megabytes left to do this post today, I’m running the laptop from my phone. My Turnkey post will be up on Wednesday next week. I took the sunset this afternoon. Basic, simple, a glimpse of nature and her richness.

A view you haven’t seen before, the moon from the back of the house while the sun is setting out front.

Houseboat on the Murray River, Mildura Victoria.

Yes, more frogs. I thought you would like to see how messy they can get, yes that’s frog pee on the walls. I think they are heading for a few unfortunate bugs on the ceiling.

Another tree growing in a precarious place, this is on the road that runs through the Flinders Ranges National Park. 

The usual view when we reach our front gate.

Slab seats on a Pub veranda, Esk, Queensland.

Sunset from the barge at West Ballina, northern New South Wales. 2012.

Thanks for dropping by, I hope you’ve enjoyed a view into my world from the Writer’s Room. Laurie.

THE SATELLITE IS DOWN!

Well at least the dish is. I wanted to let my readers and followers know that I am not ignoring your blogs. I have been having trouble with my internet provider for a while, it seems there is a problem with our dish. So I have been struggling along with the iPhone – connected to my laptop – which is limited in data and expensive. I’ve been told the part should be here next week, hmm, heard that before. I might be able to get my blog out this week, if not you know I haven’t skipped town.

Cheers

Laurie.

Way out from the Writer’s Room

I like the contrasts, besides the sunsets haven’t been all that exciting lately.

An abandoned church near Burra in South Australia.

A Dendrobium Orchid on a tree in our garden.

Dundullimal Homestead near Dubbo, New South Wales. Built around 1847 the oldest bungalow of it’s style surviving in Australia.

Taken in 2007, if you look way back up the fence line you can see where I started. I split all the posts, dug the holes, drilled the holes in the posts, strung the wire and there was still another hundred posts to go. The dog is a blue cattle dog from up the road. The fence is actually straight, then I did the same on the other side of the property.

I took this photo in South Viet Nam in 1971, when you got bogged there you really got bogged.

Kangaroos are smart, she’s sitting in the shade from the fire pot, I like to think she’s waiting for her vegetarian pizza.

I think it is a lovely study of mother and baby, that is her tail hanging out next to her head. taken behind the house.

A bit late this week due to problems with our internet satellite dish, having too use the mobile phone attached to the laptop. I hope you enjoy looking at the pictures.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 14. A Revelation.

I had occasion to be able to visit a new prison recently and it was something of an eye opener. The security is state of the art, on par with any modern jail. Visitors are fingerprinted and photographed, there are still the airport style searches of your person and belongings and drug detection wands. The buildings may be called accommodation and isolation sections, at the end of the day they are still cells. The cinder block look is reminiscent of any other medieval structure, with some modernist approaches in the areas of gymnasiums and recreation centres. The prisoners haven’t changed. On a tour of the education centre I noticed the same looks, felt the old tensions and emotions coming from them. They checked me out too; perhaps they felt a sense of knowing coming from my direction, or a self-assuredness uncommon in normal civilian visitors as I eyed them, checking their body language and movements, setting myself in dominant positions wherever I stood.

When I talked to them and not down to them they stared harder, “Who’s this bloke?” the question hung there. I spoke with some of them about their hobbies and the overwhelming feeling came to me, absolutely nothing has changed over the years. After speaking with an officer I learned that the majority of prisoners still avoided work, education, help and therapy. I could pick out the heavies and standover men and spot all the little hidey holes around the place. No matter how much you wash it, blow dry it and dress it in a suit, a Gorilla is still a Gorilla.

It didn’t fill me with any sense of wonder or amazement; those working there now have no concept of how jails used to be run. In retrospect I think it makes little difference. It isn’t the building, be it a hollowed out tree, a 44gallon drum or a granite castle in some far off alpine area. It’s the people and people are resilient, hard headed and resistant to change. Those going into jail are not happy campers and as we have discussed in earlier blogs, for many it is a way of life. Some, because of addictions to drugs, alcohol and antisocial sexual behaviour will never change until the addiction is dealt with. The carrot and stick approach only works until they get out, then with the threat of loss of remissions and privileges not hanging over them they easily reoffend.

Bigger brains than mine have given thought to the tangled web which is crime and punishment. As we’ve seen, new buildings and politically correct speech doesn’t change attitudes. Horrendous conditions and physical punishment changes attitudes, for the worse. Breaking the human spirit, besides flying in the face of humanity is cruel and beyond the pale. I’d like to share an event I witnessed in Viet Nam when I served there in 1971. Our armoured section was tasked with patrolling an area north of Nui Dat, our main base. Through the day we would work our way through the bush until late afternoon, split up and half would stay out and the other half would spend the night in a US controlled encampment at Ap Suoi Ngai. There were local force soldiers there and a few American servicemen. The bliss of spending the night there involved a hot shower and a cold beer at the small club the Americans had.

I decided to go for a wander and around the back of the club I noticed a small cage. This cage would have held a big dog at a push and seeing something dark crammed in there I went for a look. A human being crouched inside of it, no room to stand, sit properly or lay down. It was a Viet Cong POW. I don’t know how long he’d been there, nobody would say, other than, “He’s a Goddamn Gook.” Yes he was indeed an enemy combatant, and I might add an extremely pissed off one. There was however something about his eyes, a fierce determination that said, “If I could get out of here I’d chew your throat out.” No matter who or what he was the man had a mindset that wouldn’t change. I imagine he would only be more determined to stay the same. This brings me to a true story I read in the early eighties, about two South Vietnamese army officers in a re-education camp after the fall of Saigon. They were both kept together in a 44 gallon drum for a year, only allowed out to defecate. The drum sat in the middle of a parade ground with the lid kept on. I couldn’t begin to imagine how torturous that would be, the only upside, they had each other’s company. They survived relatively mentally intact, were they re-educated? Did they follow the doctrines of the new regime? I could only imagine the least they would do was to pay lip service to it.

This brings us back to the question, do the majority of inmates actually rehabilitate or do they pay lip service to the system to get out earlier. The rate of recidivism, those who re-offend and return to jail is about 75%, which tells us that something isn’t working. The system itself has been analysed, turned upside down and had a cavity search. This leaves the other side of the equation, the offender/society. You can’t separate one from the other; an offender can be anyone, a relative, friend, wife, husband, and child. Jail can be an easy enough of a place to get into, even without having a criminal nature or background and a small percentage of offenders are one time crims.

The childhood home is where criminals are made, not the streets and the gangs, they are places the child is drawn to when they aren’t nurtured. Naturally there are exceptions to the rule, criminals coming from good homes where there is love and attention, and exceptional people come from homes where criminality is rife. Through my time in the prison system and the police I have seen the children who became criminals and the homes they came from: no love, abuse in all forms-mental, physical and sexual, lack of education and inspiration, no moral compass, parents not holding down jobs, or on generational welfare and poorly educated, no respect for themselves, addicted to drugs and alcohol – the list goes on. Keep these children mired in this existence where they know nothing better and they are destined for the same life as their parents.

Hope is a small word with a big meaning, without it there is no reason to go on. Put aside for a moment the thought of a Deity or an omnipotent being coming into the equation and immerse yourself in the life of this six year old child. Let’s call him David, he’s in a state of awareness having an idea of what goes on in his home. He’s had six years to soak up the yelling and screaming from his parents, (he’s lucky both are still together) he’s witnessed his mother being beaten over twenty times, heard the derogatory words between his parents. Most of the words involve a sexual slant, i.e. she’s a slut, useless, good for one thing only. She retaliates and screams about lack of money etc. His father has belittled him constantly and because he has become his mother’s shield, he’s probably been beaten at least a dozen times, for no good reason. His mother drinks openly and leaves half empty bottles of wine lying around, David likes the sweet taste. He soaks up their ideologies and thoughts on society, police, government, work, money or the lack thereof.

Parties are a frequent event, mainly on weekends. They involve alcohol and drug abuse and if David is lucky he might avoid the clutches of the occasional paedophile that will be in the mix, not so his younger sister who is being abused by the father. As time goes on he will notice the influx of goods and money at odd times and realise that father is a thief, not a good one because he now goes along to jail on weekends with his mother. Naturally their relations and friends are of the same mind set, so David falls in with children from a similar background. Due to a lack of early nurturing and proper care David finds life at school boring. When he attends he’s disruptive, then he is labelled. Life goes on and he finds it easy to follow in his father’s footsteps. By twenty he’s already been to jail twice, has two children by different girlfriends and when he gets out this time is more than likely heading for another stint inside within the year. I knew David and followed his life from when he first visited his father in jail, until I arrested him for assault when he turned seventeen. He didn’t stand a chance because he had no HOPE.

By no means am I labelling underprivileged people here, I mentioned earlier there are exceptions. Children from ‘good’ homes who turn to criminality usually fall into the upper echelons of crime: fraud, passing bad cheques, major drug supplying, high end thefts. As to murder, there are no social boundaries; anyone from any background can commit that crime. This brings us to nature and even bigger brains strain at this one. Can a person be born bad? Bad in the sense that human life means nothing to them, bad in a way that from an early age and a ‘normal’ home they exhibit signs of extreme cruelty. I know that a lot of children go through a stage of cruelty, stomping on bugs and ants, pulling wings off flies etc. It is when they start torturing and killing small animals that something is definitely wrong. I’ve spoken to the parents of young prisoners who were in for rape and murder, and they were good people. Yet their child, who once lay in a cot and gurgled and gooed now sat in a cell for a heinous crime. What happened in between when they had love, nurture, education the best of everything? I’ve had this argument over the years and many people don’t like the nature aspect of it, yet ordinary everyday people go SNAP, without the benefit of a tortuous upbringing.

In next week’s instalment I finish at old Wacol jail, that is where my Policeman’s Lot series starts. For now I’ll skip the intervening years, 1988-1999 and we’ll find ourselves back in a totally different correctional facility. With a bevy of strange, funny and downright rude stories, I die for a short while here and come face to face with my mortality a second time. The experience changes my life completely, so tune in next week, same Bat time same Bat channel.

 

It’s a mailbox not a restaurant.

Looking through my photos and I came across these. For those who have trouble collecting their mail here’s another reason to leave the bills where they are. These frogs were the usual inhabitants of our mail box.

 

We pulled up at the gate one afternoon and saw this hanging out of the mail slot. “Hmmm, I don’t remember asking anyone to send that.”

There he was, five feet long, hungry and didn’t want to come out. I had to lighten the photo so you could see him properly, his head was down the back and he had a large frog halfway down his throat. Three other frogs were in the corner in a state of shock, I managed to rescue them, well as soon as I dragged the snake out they catapulted out of there. He spat the one out of his mouth, reluctantly. The snake was a green tree snake, albeit an angry snake. I used a rake I had in the truck to drag him out and let him go across the road. For some unknown reason my wife refuses to check the mailbox.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS part 13. The Superintendent’s Dog, Love Dolls and the Mini Soccer Riot.

The Superintendent’s Dog. About a dozen houses were provided for Superintendents, Chiefs and some Senior prison officers. These houses were situated outside the wire and ran parallel to the side and bottom of the prison. The jail still stands but is no longer in use and the houses have been used as living accommodation for release to work prisoners, then sex offenders. If you drive past today you will see them decaying and overgrown, a testament to the waste and negligence of government. Not many jails had family’s right next door and yet the people went about their lives, living to the rhythm of a working institution. Naturally there were children and pets in these homes. I can imagine the conversation in the school yard, 1^st child, “Where do you live?” 2^nd child from the jail, “Oh, next door to the big house.” 1^st child, “How big?”2^nd child, “Oh there’s about 250 people in it.”  You get the drift. There could have been this conversation, child, “Dad, I‘ve got show and tell today, can I take a murderer?” Not likely but I could never come to grips with the idea of ‘living on the job’ like that. The sirens going off, having prisoners mow your yard and do the gardening. The only saving grace would have been the one minute walk to work. One of the Superintendents had a dog, not unusual but this dog was a Dingo cross breed and he loved to go walkabout. You would be forever chasing him away from the main gate, and then he would wander down to the dairy and get chased from there.

On this day I had to supervise a tradesman while he fixed the perimeter fence, someone had sneaked up the previous night and cut through it. I heard a pitiful howling and screeching and noticed the dog coming down the road between the jail and the houses. It had its bum on the ground and was dragging itself along with its front legs. A prisoner pushing a wheelbarrow followed behind, he had rubbish to be burnt in the diesel powered incinerator situated about 50 metres from where I stood. We’ll call this fine example of humanity Bruce, amongst his many failings he must have been blind. He didn’t see me standing there as he bludgeoned the poor animal on the head, then throw it kicking and howling into the incinerator. A flick of the switch and whoosh the animal was burnt alive.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing at first, nothing I said or did would have stopped Bruce it happened that quickly. Deciding to let him think he had got away with his low act I waited until he went back to his work place and let the incinerator run through its cycle before checking it out. Pulling the lever on the side I opened the firebox, not a nice sight, using a small rake I managed to remove a skull, luckily with teeth intact and some bigger bones and placed them in a cardboard box. I took the remains back to the office and showed the Chief who wasn’t interested until I told him whose dog it was. Then the excreta hit the air-conditioning. Statements were written; I interviewed Bruce who denied everything until I showed him the skull. Bruce went to the pound and waited for the police to come out and interview him.

After some artful deduction and questioning of other inmates I managed to find out what happened. Bruce worked at the Bowls Club as a kitchen hand and had been feeding scraps to the dog when he and other inmates were having their smoko. The dog had nipped his hand so he decided to, ‘show it who was in charge.’ The prisoners usually sat at the front of the equipment shed under the veranda of the club. The greenkeeper had been servicing a mower and cleaned his hands with turpentine, Bruce soaked a rag in turps and while another prisoner held the dog’s jaws shut he rubbed a liberal amount of the liquid into its anus. Naturally the dog howled and screamed, then began running around in circles. Bruce decided that the time had come to make himself scarce and take the rubbish away, and the dog ran ahead of him.

Local Detectives arrived and I presented the case to them, it was obvious they thought the event beneath their talents. After checking Bruce’s record, he had other offences for cruelty to animals and assault they took him away, charged him and put him before a magistrate and the end result? Bruce received an extra six months on his sentence, lost his remission on his original sentence of twelve months and found himself transferred to Townsville jail in far north Queensland. An excellent result, the Super thought I did a good job and the nasty, unwarranted death of a helpless animal was avenged. I have had, over the year’s occasion to put a couple of dogs down. Far from a Vet surgery a bullet has to do, quick and humane. What Bruce did to that poor animal showed a lack of amongst other things, soul. Helpless, trusting, man’s best friend deserved a far better ending.

 Love Dolls. Contraband comes in various forms: weapons, drugs, money, home-made booze and porn. They were the main varieties in my day, now you can add mobile phones to the list and it doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to realise where the offending phone would be put. Thankfully I didn’t work in a jail where the carrying of weapons was commonplace; I think I only ever found two knives. Newspapers were banned along with radios; you would find the odd ‘crystal radio’ set now and then. The rationale behind the ban was a leftover from the early days; authorities didn’t want prisoners to have access to the names and addresses of victims of crime, or witnesses against them. It seemed a little ludicrous when they were able to watch the news on television and the press had long stopped putting the addresses of victims in their publications. I believe it had to do with horse racing, if they had the weekend form and a radio then the jailhouse bookies would flourish.

Officers today have access to latex gloves, Kevlar gloves to protect against needle sticks and specialized drug detection equipment. Then it was all rather hit and miss. One thing I learned early was to use a biro or pencil to poke around in places you couldn’t see. Each cell had an outside locker where the prisoner could leave things out that he may need throughout the day: towel, toiletries, a book or a change of clothing, sports shoes. These lockers were made of pressed metal, with two shelves and a rolled lip underneath the top which had a gap capable of hiding contraband. The locker in question stood outside the cell of a mature prisoner, in for some serious fraud he thought himself above the pack. His cell had been searched two days in a row and he’d complained bitterly.  I stopped at his locker, took everything out, checked it and put it back. Then without thinking I ran my fingertips underneath the lip –OUCH! – Yep ten razor blades inserted right up into the lip with their corners facing down on an angle. It hurt, four fingertips sliced open and I bled all over his clean underwear on the top shelf. He denied any knowledge of the blades and in all fairness we couldn’t prove that he put them there, any inmate could have.

Everything in a cell had to be searched and if you did it properly it could take half an hour. Prisoners were allowed hobby materials and these were kept under their beds in cardboard boxes. There were mainly leatherworkers and matchstick aficionados. Some prisoners had been making belts, handbags and wallets for years and were quite artistic. The matchstick art could be of a high standard, although some I think were done by those who wanted to sniff the glue. The character of ‘Hopalong’ Cassidy, an inmate in my book, Mountain of Death was based on a prisoner in Wacol. He made intricate jewellery boxes, photos frames and chess pieces from matchsticks. They didn’t bother me, those who made love dolls out of their mattresses did. Once you found a mattress with a rip or a hole in it then you had to investigate. By now one had a stick to make inroads into strange places.

We are all adults here and sexual urges are a part of human nature, people incarcerated without a sexual partner have to take matters to hand. That didn’t bother me, do it and clean up after yourself. The mattress brigade were different, a hole slashed in the fabric and through to the foam, fill it with Brylcreem (a little dab’ll do ya) then love the night away – just please clean up. The sad thing about it was the next inmate would use the same mattress. It died off a little after a couple were charged with wilful damage. As an aside, “Would a memory foam mattress never forget your special night?”

The Soccer Riot. I liked the weekends, it meant soccer on the Saturday afternoon. I have mentioned in earlier posts about outside teams coming in to play against the inmate team. I think they all dreamed about getting out and playing an away game. The teams came from the local league and were in the lower divisions, never mind, it gave them a distraction for an afternoon. They trained hard and had uniforms supplied by outside soccer teams, some were that keen they had all of their own gear. Officers would go out first and check around the perimeter in case contraband had been left there overnight, or the fence had been cut. We were taken aback this day to find dozens of cars parked by the back gate and more coming. A local Serbian team had turned up with all of their supporters. On a good day we would normally have a team come along squashed in a few cars and the goalies Mum and Dad following in a station wagon with the oranges and cold sponges. Not today, a large crowd of raucous supporters were trying to push through the back gate to get to the sidelines.

It took the threat of cancelling the game before those who could speak English understood enough to realise we were serious. In the end we let the team, the manager and two sponge boys in. The team had five reserve players, and they were all hyped up and ready to play. The linesmen were picked, one prisoner and one sponge boy. Let the games begin. I have never seen a dirtier game of soccer in my life. The prison team weren’t pansies by any means and they began complaining to the referee. I felt sorry for the Ref, a mob of over eighty supporters at the fence, an increasingly angry prison crowd and two teams who wanted blood. There were more yellow cards than you’d find in a Hallmark shop. The Ref, fearing for his life kept somewhere in the middle of the pack and every time he sent a Serbian player off he didn’t notice them walk around the pitch and come back on. At one stage they had fifteen players on the pitch.

In the end our Senior went onto the pitch and informed the Ref, who stopped the game. The heckling and swearing from outside caused the Superintendent (on his day off) to come down and mediate. The Senior pointed out the now agitated group of prisoners on the bleachers, the supporters pulling on the fence and the battered teams eager to keep going. The Ref, with a sore wrist from flashing cards and no spittle left from blowing on his whistle resumed the game. THUD, it was back on and a couple of minutes before full time the score was one all, quickly becoming two-one with the prison team scoring on a penalty kick.

The crowd went berserk, they jumped on the bonnets of their cars, honked horns, tried to climb the fence – chaos reigned. The Senior took two officers and herded the now volatile prisoners back inside, that left myself and three others to let the visiting team out and escort the Referee to his car. The crowd didn’t know which one was his, yet. If you haven’t been confronted by an angry, hate filled, testosterone fuelled soccer crowd then you haven’t known fear. We had to form a small wall and push the team out through the gate with the Ref crouching behind us. Once outside I locked the gate, we didn’t want them getting back in. The crowd took on an energy of its own; I can still see the faces: sneering, wild, angry. By now we were half way to the Ref’s car when the knives came out. Several young men, some of them players pushed to the front and pulled out flick knives, long thin blades, with the late afternoon sunlight flashing on them as they were waved in the air.

You may have seen the newsreel footage of mobs in the Serbian/ Bosnia conflict, men in suit coats with thick moustaches chanting angrily. For goodness sake this was a game of football, not a national emergency, not a display of religious intolerance, or genocide – football. Yet – it’s a game that fuels their fervour and obviously flies in the face of their manhood. We weren’t passive throughout this; we had formed a shield around the now terrified Ref. One in front, one each side holding an arm each and one behind and the crowd pressed in. It felt quite satisfying to be able to punch, dig and kick at these louts as we forced our way through. They were that close they couldn’t use the knives without sticking their own.

The Ref had parked far enough away from the others that once behind the wheel he sped off, gravel flying and half a dozen supporters chasing him on foot. That left our fearless foursome with a still restive crowd. Pushing our way back to the gate we felt a huge rush of relief when we spotted reinforcements coming. The Senior had rushed to the armoury and issued four officers with riot gear and ran them back down to the oval. The crowd – cowards that they were shuffled back to their cars, shaking their fists – the sweet outcome? The police waiting for them down on the only road out, even sweeter when the Super put a report in to the Soccer Federation and had them banned from the League. There is some justice in the world.

Way beyond The Writer’s Room

Yes another sunset but the damaging rains and floods have receded, and somehow the sunbeams speak of a promise of fine weather to come.

31st January 2013

I don’t know about you but I like my apples a little warmer, not like these frozen apples in Edmonton, Canada. Taken in December 2003.

The formation is called the Three Sisters, at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales. 2005.

Taken in Terowie, South Australia in 2004. The town is sparsely populated and derelict buildings are common. The old cars are decaying with silent decorum.

This Kookaburra sat on a branch above my head eyeballing the camera, obviously waiting for a tidbit.

Brolga, Darwin Zoo 2009.

For those who love to ride here is an Australian style stock saddle made of crocodile skin, at Darwin Northern Territory.

Thank you for dropping by and looking at my photos. Every picture can tell a story, imagine what stories are lurking in those abandoned cars. Who rode in that saddle? I tend to get into a few flights of fancy but the sunset lifts me once again to somewhere magical.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 12. You have to watch what you eat and Mr T.

This post may not be everybody’s cup of tea but it is a large part of jail life, everyone has to eat, staff included. I’ve mentioned in earlier posts about the mess and kitchen, staffed by prisoners and overseen by Officers, known as Trade Instructors. Prisoners were able to become accredited for some aspects of cooking and believe me many of them were excellent. Like their counterparts in restaurants and institutions they were proud of their work. Not so some of the kitchen hands and stewards. An officer can’t be everywhere at once and the security officer was always busy keeping an eye on what the staff were up to. I didn’t mind the occasional shift in the kitchen, one always managed to have a nice cut of steak for their meal. Counting 250 sets of cutlery a shift became a little irksome though. Then you had to search the kitchen workers as they finished their shift in case they were taking knives or rations out with them. It’s surprising where items can be secreted.

Doing my rounds one day I came across a kitchen hand with his arm stuck in a huge pot of warm rice pudding, plunging it slowly up and down right up to his hairy armpit. Me, “What are you doing?” Him, “Getting off Boss, this is better than sex.” Needless to say his erotic rice pudding fantasy came to an abrupt end. One of the officer’s tasks was to check meals being sent out to prisoners locked in detention. They were served up on a plate by one of the cooks, a stainless steel lid placed over it then a steward would deliver it under the watchful eye of an officer. I checked a lunch going out to a prisoner on protection (he had Dogged on another prisoner) the steward looked a little nervous as I lifted the lid. A lovely sweet and sour chicken on a bed of fluffy white rice, with a large side order of fresh faeces. The steward had nipped into the large walk-in fridge to deposit his message to the errant prisoner. I used this event in my book ‘Mountain of Death’ where our hero receives a similar message in his porridge, not for being a dog but as payback for a beating he dishes out.

In the officer’s mess an abundance of stainless steel teapots, milk jugs and such had to be cleaned and the quickest way was to use dairy chloride bleach. Used extensively in the prison dairy it cleaned cutlery and crockery beautifully. Jails are a hot bed of germs, it doesn’t take much for a dose of gastroenteritis or similar to do the rounds so the use of the chloride was encouraged. A stewards job involved taking officer’s morning and afternoon teas around and the cleaning of the pots and such. I waited patiently for my morning tea on this particular day, it was late and I wasn’t happy. The steward (who later escaped) hurried across from the mess to where I stood in my guard box, a basic structure with a table and a chair you couldn’t sit on. Huffing and puffing he plonked my teapot down and I poured my long awaited cup of tea. Being thirsty I guzzled the first cup down, not tasting the chloride in it. I poured another cup and it hit me. We all know the effects of Drano and other blocked sink cleaners. A churning gurgling sensation followed by a need for the blocked U bend to disgorge its contents. That dear readers was my stomach and bowel. The burning in my gullet from the chloride paled into insignificance when I felt what was happening inside.

A phone hung on the wall, a direct line to the senior’s office, Me, “I need a relief now!” Senior, “You’ll have to wait, we’re having our tea break.” Me, “Can’t wait!” Running towards the mess undoing my belt I yelled out to the gate guard and was met by another officer, he took over and I barrelled into the toilets. Ten minutes later I staggered out, a haggard, wan shadow of my former self. I found the steward hiding in the kitchen behind the huge cook, Him, “I, we, him – they put it in there, I thought the pots were ready.” Not being in the mood for excuses and wondering about the after effects of being poisoned with chloride I grabbed his shirt front. Calmer heads prevailed and a couple of officers separated us. It appeared that another steward had half filled the teapots with dairy chloride, left them for a while and rinsed them all out except one, mine – hmmm? They were all filled up with hot water and tea bags dropped in, then sent out to the posts. I thought it all quite suspicious.

The main gate was looked upon as a good place to spend a shift, you worked it on your own and were responsible for all pedestrian and vehicular transport, in and out. You also had a gate sweeper to supervise, a trusty who was responsible for cleaning inside and the immediate area outside the gate. You had your own office, a glass and steel affair that allowed you to keep an eye out on the perimeter as well as inside the gate complex. Except for the inside visitor’s waiting room, where the sweeper had his sink and cleaning gear. In the gate office you had an electric kettle so you could make a cuppa anytime you wanted. A selection of tea bags and a tin of coffee from the mess was kept in the cupboard. If your sweeper did the right thing and didn’t have to be pushed to work you would let him sneak a cuppa next to his sink. They had an old tea mug there and were usually quite appreciative of the gesture. I had a new sweeper, I informed him of his duties and he seemed quite okay with what he had to do. He came in and cleaned my office and asked if he could take the kettle to give it a rinse out. Things had become busy and I let him take it, when I returned to my office the kettle sat there all sparkly clean and full of water. I boiled it up and made a cuppa, a strong coffee for a change and noticed a strange taste. Business picked up and I went about my duties. I told the sweeper to rinse the kettle out again and he returned to his sink.

After about ten minutes he still hadn’t returned, I went to the waiting room entrance and stood at the door. The sweeper, down on his hands and knees under a bench didn’t notice me, so I watched him. He scampered along and began grabbing at something on the floor, he stopped and gave a satisfied grunt stood up and went to the kettle. Lifting the lid he dropped something inside, he didn’t see me coming up behind him and I grabbed the kettle. Lifting the lid I looked inside, a seething mass of cockroaches covered the waterlogged ones on the bottom for about an eighth of the way up. We had words, extremely long words in which I informed him that I was going to hurt him, even giving him permission to fight back. After which I sent him and the kettle back to the senior under escort. I never ate another meal in that jail, except for a serve of plum pudding and custard on Sundays, which I served myself. Every time I see a cockroach that scene comes bounding back – yuck!

MR T.  Prisons are full of characters, inmates and officers who leave a lasting impression you, one of them was a Chief Officer who I’ll call Mr T. Imagine a man about six foot five, built like a power lifter and looking like a huge teddy bear. Apparently his body was covered in a thick pelt of hair, he had to shave from the base of his throat and right over his head and the backs of his hands. He always wore a long sleeved shirt and the hair stuck out from the cuffs in huge tufts. When he spoke, which was slowly it came out in a deep baritone, in the years that I knew him I only heard him raise his voice once. The prisoner on the receiving end of his anger burst into tears. When seniors or above came into the jail, as a gate officer you would stand to attention, salute and state the number of prisoners in at the time. Mr T would come in and return the salute, humph and harrumph and say, “Ahh, hmm, are you sure Mister Smith, nobody ahh, slipping over the walls today?”  His eyes would twinkle a little and he always looked as if he were about to share a joke with you and would then back off.   I always enjoyed his company, on night shifts he would loosen up a little and talk about jail and prisoners he knew back in his early days.

Mr T was as strong as an Ox and after some coaxing would perform his party trick, lifting up the office safe, turning around and putting it on another desk. This safe had to be placed there by four men with a trolley. The prisoners respected him and it was only the newbies who back chatted him. Which brings me to a story that highlights the respect he was held in. The dairy officer came in at 4.30 a.m. and picked up half a dozen of his workers and took them down to begin feeding the cows. Ten minutes later we received a call from him, he’d been assaulted by one of the prisoners. The senior sent myself and another officer down to attend the incident. We found him slumped at the desk in his office, semi conscious holding his face. I sat him up and moved his hand away, the left side of his face looked different, his cheekbone had been shattered and his nose broken. The culprit was an Aboriginal prisoner in for assault who also happened to be a Golden Gloves boxer, a light heavyweight. He didn’t like the job he had been given, cleaning out the silos which held the cattle fodder. Yes an onerous job but he wanted an easier milking job and when he didn’t get his way thumped his Boss.

Imagine yourself in a complex of wooden buildings, cattle sheds, small undercover feedlots, and sprawling concrete aprons where the cattle mooch around waiting to go in and feed. It’s dark, a little unfamiliar, hot, fresh cow patties litter the ground and there’s a man hiding – waiting for you to come and get him. We found him hiding behind one of the silage pits, the concrete edge sticks out of the ground about waist high. He leapt out at us with a long handled shovel. Stripped to the waist, muscles rippling he waved that shovel like some berserker. All we were armed with were our whistles, fat lot of good they were going to do when Conan the Dairyman decided to make his move. Sometimes you get an insight into a situation, I stood at one side of the pit, say three o’clock, my mate at the other, nine o’clock and our upset friend at the twelve o’clock position. It occurred to me that this man was frightened, of us. He had the shovel, boxing experience and as fit as any man I’d seen and there he stood, crying. Him, “Keep away, I won’t come with you. You’ll beat me up and throw me in the pound.” Me, thinking, That might be the other way around matey. Him, “I want Mr T down here, I’ll go with him, he won’t hurt me.”

I sent my mate off to the office to ring the senior and engaged my weepy friend in some desultory conversation, Me, “Why won’t you walk back up with me, I won’t hurt you?” Him, “I’ve heard about you, you’ll fight.” Ooh, I have a reputation. Mr T at this stage had been promoted to Deputy Superintendent and was on call, so he resided in one of the houses on site. An agonizingly long ten minutes later Mr T drove his car through the yard and up to the pit. Him, “Hmmm, who have you upset now Mister Smith? Never mind I’ll sort it.” He walks straight up to him and holds his hand out, the prisoner gives him the shovel and shoulders slumped he staggers to the car and climbs in the front seat, still crying. Mr T wanders over to me, “What did you do to the poor lad Mister Smith?” Eyes twinkling, something resembling a grin crosses his face. Me, “Nothing, I didn’t do a thing.” I can still here his rumbling laugh.

Kevin the Dairy officer didn’t come back to work for a year, when he did he wasn’t the same happy go lucky type. Mister Weepy was charged with assault occasioning bodily harm and received two years extra on his sentence and a transfer back to Boggo Road Gaol. I left the following year and joined the police. I never saw Mr T again and regret not keeping in touch, I heard he died several years ago. Some people have an impact on your life and your thoughts, he was one of them. A single man, he lived with his aged mother, some people thought it odd. Nature had made him stand out from the crowd, some officers mocked him – behind his back – they didn’t have the guts to do it to his face. I think he knew this, yet he held himself with a certain quiet dignity.  R I P MR T, it was a privilege to have known you.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 11. The Great and not so Great Escapes.

There aren’t many people over forty who haven’t seen that great World War Two classic movie, The Great Escape, based on the escape from the German POW camp Stalag Luft 111. The iconic picture of Steve McQueen jumping his motorbike over the border between Germany and Switzerland is easily recognisable. There is much more to the story than that, Google The Great Escape and you will be amply rewarded with a story of perseverance, indomitable spirit, bravery and overcoming the odds.

I well remember my father’s stories as a young lad when he told of his escape from a German POW camp 17A. In his first attempt he was recaptured after a day, on his second he hid in a barn on a farm, miles away from the camp. You can imagine a small boy sitting listening to this story, cross-legged on the carpet by the fire. Eyes wide as the story unfolds: how he ate raw potatoes and smashed ice on the water barrels to have a drink, hiding under the hay while the farmer and his family fed the stock. The cold that extreme, that after three days he finally gave himself up to the postman, who armed himself with a pitchfork. The man was so terrified that Dad strolled alongside of him to within sight of the camp. Then the postman began beating him with the pitchfork handle, strutting and posturing he herded him to the front gate. I was horrified though when he told me about how he was beaten and tortured by the Gestapo, as they attempted to find out if anyone else had been involved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_literature   It brings us to prison escapes, literature is full of books where imprisonment and escape are part of the story. Prisoners have unlimited time to think about escaping and with the right contacts inside and out sometimes have the opportunity to do so. Australia’s ‘Postcard Bandit’ Brenden Abbott was involved in a spectacular escape from the Sir David Longland jail in November 1997. Not so spectacular for the officers who came under semi-automatic weapon fire from Abbott’s accomplices though.

During my time at the old Wacol jail there were several escapes worth noting, however I won’t bore you with them all. They can be categorised though into the, ‘bugger it I’m going’ where it’s down tools and they walk away from the farm and swim across the Brisbane River. The ‘bloody hell my Missus is playing up” and they head for the wall, via the balcony, roof and a spirited leap onto the barbed wire perimeter fence in the evening. Then we have the ones who plan it down to the last detail, I’ll save him until last because his escape was worthy of being labelled a Great Escape.

Let’s call our next con on the run, Trevor. A big, strapping red headed lad who worked in the kitchen on the evening shift. I never had much to do with him, until the night he escaped. It appeared that he sneaked up behind the Prison Officer on kitchen security and out the door while he was observing the kitchen hands putting the garbage out. The rear of the kitchen faced the front gate and Trevor had to evade the Officer posted in the guard box near the far perimeter fence and the Officer on the gate. Sneaky little blighter was our Trevor. The kitchen officer noticed him missing and the call went out, the gate officer noticed movement along the fence and it was on.

Myself and another officer Kevin were sent up to assist in the hunt. The shift Senior, Stan didn’t like me, why? I don’t know, one of those things I guess. A heavy dew had fallen early that evening. When I arrived at the hole in the cyclone wire fence, the set of footprints leading away from it and down towards the road were glaringly obvious.

Stan, pointing towards the other end of the front fence ordered, “Get down that way and check out the dairy.”

Me, pointing at tracks on the grass, ‘What about these, he’s headed across the road he’s probably down on Station Road by now?’

Stan, “Do as you’re bloody told, you’re not paid to think.’

I shrugged and Kevin and I went down into the gloom of the dairy outbuildings, unarmed. We spent ten minutes banging and clanging around in the dark, to no avail. We returned and I put forward my proposal to Stan again. Seeing nothing else had been found and the Superintendent had given him a reaming, he sent us off in Kevin’s car to go and check along Wacol Station Road. I’ve mentioned before about the absolute tight fistedness of the department at the time. Now there are dedicated vehicles for this very thing, with dog handlers. Then it was two keen young blokes with more drive than brains.

I’ll never forget driving slowly along that road, thick bushland on one side and dark paddocks on the other. As we approached the intersection with Grindle Road a Holden Sandman panel van, parked on the roadside started up. The back door had been lifted up and the tailgate was in position. Nothing visible as we passed it, although I noticed the driver looked a little nervous. We went past and the van pulled out behind us. Kevin pulled up and we let it go past and there was Trevor large as life, his big red head sticking up over a bundle in the back.

Naturally we had no radio, so we followed the van down onto Ipswich Road which in the 70’s had no traffic lights at the intersection. A busy section of road, we managed to cut through some traffic and follow the Trevor. I took down the registration number, a full description of the van and we followed. It began to speed up and Kevin drove right up behind it, high beams glaring into the van and staying about a metre away from the rear. Trevor clambered to his knees, a young woman by his side and pointed something at us. Double barrel twelve gauge shotguns are impressive on a gun rack. When they are being pointed at you from a few metres away well, they take on a whole new dimension. They are reminiscent of railway tunnels, extremely large railway tunnels.

Kevin slammed on the brakes and the van sailed off into the night, with Trevor still pointing the shotgun. We stopped at a service station and I dialled 000, the officer who answered didn’t believe us at all. Gobsmacked is a mild observation for how I felt, we sped back to the jail and a police car was there. I tried to tell the police, they didn’t want to know, ‘Oh they’ll be too far away by now’ and Stan told us to bugger off back inside. There aren’t enough words to describe how we felt, especially after looking into those barrels. Trevor stayed on the run for six months and only when he was recaptured in New South Wales did Stan believe what we had told him. He fessed up to all of his indiscretions, thinking it quite funny about bailing us up with the shotgun. Bastard.

Now to the main event, we’ll call him Steve. A man in his mid-twenties he worked as a green-keeper in the inside compound. It took a little specialist care to look after the bowling greens between the cell blocks. He’d been sentenced to five years for drug offences and kept to himself. A fitness freak, he would spend the allotted time on the sports oval running. He also played soccer and had an expensive pair of soccer boots sent in. For those who don’t play soccer, the boots have studs on the bottom and the boots come with a couple of thin, metal spanners. These are used for removing the studs on the soles of the boots.

Over a period of a few months, Steve began to lose weight. Not that you cared about the physiques of the inmates, though he stood out a little. He hadn’t complained about being ill, so if someone wanted to shed the kilos who were we to stop them? In retrospect I remember the day that I think he brought in the one thing he needed to get out of his cell with, a bar spreader. Being the greenkeeper he had to look after the motor mower and was responsible for getting it serviced at the metal shop. I had been assigned to do something this day and I went past the vestibule as the officer let Steve and his mower into the compound. I wondered if the mower had been searched and made the assumption that if it were inside it must have been.

A few nights later Steve escaped from his second storey cell between checks. It faced the sports oval which had an easy fence to scale. The rear wall of the cell had four heavy glass, steel framed windows which only opened out about six inches. A wall made up of bricks with one missing every four bricks acted as another barrier on the outside. How did he do it?

The bar spreader, made in the metal shop by another inmate consisted of two long bolts set into each end of a long nut. The whole thing had been made specifically to open the window further. The nut matched the size of the stud spanners which had been welded together; it went from a ring type spanner to an open-ender. He placed the spreader between the window frame and window, turning the nut extended the bolts, which in turn forced the window open further. He then ripped his bedding into strips, tied it off at the window and let it drop down the wall. Now this is the good part, Steve would’ve had to strip naked for the next stage. I imagine he dropped his clothing down onto the field, then taking handfuls of margarine he’d pilfered from the dining room he smeared his now waif thin body.

I can only imagine that he had other prisoners on the same landing warn him of any approaching officers, a low whistle or a rattle of something, a dropped boot. Steve, the slippery little bugger would have grunted and groaned before popping out of that window like a seven kilo breach baby. If he had any sense he would have put his pants on before scaling the boundary fence, barbed wire has a tendency to latch onto anything that dangles. Steve never came back to us; the police located him a year later in South Australia. Was it something we said Steve? Didn’t you like the cosiness or the quality of entertainment?

One thing changed and that was every prisoner who had soccer boots lost their stud spanners, the whining went on for days. Unless a prisoner is in a cell under constant surveillance there is always the chance that one will escape. Steve’s escape opened many eyes in the system and upped the level of awareness for quite a while. The only good thing, nobody got themselves hurt or had a few moments staring at a shotgun.

It’s Sunday – so it must be cute Roo Day, oh and a flower.

“Hey you, yeah you a couple of hints. Clean your window then get out and fix the spa, it’s hot out here.”

(They’re legs and a tail sticking out of the pouch.)

“Excuse me, the big guy over there said if I asked nicely you’d give me a treat.”

Big guy with long tail, “Well, will he fall for it? Do you reckon he’ll get us some treats, do ya, do ya?”

Took this earlier today, a crucifix orchid surviving against the odds.

As you can see I’ve got nothing better to do this morning.

Out and about from the Writer’s Room.

I think this is better than the previous pink one. Surreal.

Even behind a glass screen at Sydney’s Taronga Park Zoo, the King of the Beasts still looks noble.

Some people use pots others recycle old cars at Rosewood, Queensland.

Next time you pop the cork on your favourite tipple, well this is what they come from. A cork tree in Tenterfield, New South Wales.

A rose in the Botanical gardens in Adelaide, South Australia.

One of the many small bays in Sydney Harbour.

Rush hour in Eulo, Western Queensland.

Finally, some pictures speak for themselves, at Cockburn South Australia.

I hope you have enjoyed the trip out and about from the Writer’s Room, there will be more to see next week. Yes that is me in the above photo, there are times when I just can’t help myself.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 10. The Serial Rapist

The subject of this story is Arthur James Murdock nicknamed the ‘Black Stallion’ by his fellow inmates. He was born on Palm Island, Queensland in about 1935. Most of what I’m writing is based on readily available sources in the print media and online. If you follow the links you will see that a beautiful tropical island isn’t always a recipe for a happy lifestyle.

Murdock has spent over 54 years in jail for violent sexual behaviour and I believe is now living back in his community. Not content with raping and dehumanising his victims he would bite chunks out of them. Being inside didn’t deter him as he would attack any prisoner given the slightest opportunity. He gave evidence against the two men charged with the Whiskey Au Go Go firebombing in 1973 in which 15 people died, claiming that John Stuart confided in him. An unlikely claim given that Murdock was a well known Dog to start with. Stuart and Finch went down and Murdock, amazingly enough received parole. While on parole in 1977 he savagely raped two women, one who he’d followed home from a picture theatre – back inside for our Arthur.

When he came to Wacol prison he went straight to the cages, or the pound as we termed it. There was only a single layer of mesh between the small yards in our pound and the shower nozzles were located on the roof of the cage. One wall of mesh had a nozzle on each side. Arthur showered often and I believe he liked showing off his body, extremely fit he would stand under the cold spray and soap his genitals for what seemed like forever. One morning he had a distraction, a young prisoner was sentenced to three days in the pound and for some strange reason was housed next to Murdock. The officer on that morning nipped over to the side of the officer’s mess to collect his morning tea and heard the screams for help. The young lad had decided to shower and Murdock stripped off and switched his on, grabbed his soap and dropped it through the mesh. In a classic newbie mistake the new inmate bent over to pick up the soap.

Quick as a flash Murdock reached through the mesh, grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up against the cage. The mesh was large enough for him to drag his victim back and attempt the rape. Pressing his face against the wire he tried to bite him. A valuable lesson learned for the young fellow and the officer, some prisoners cannot be left unsupervised. A few months later after intense lobbying by a couple of chaplains, prisoner’s rights groups and civil libertarians Murdock was returned to the general prison population. In retrospect I have often wondered what goes through the minds of some people, albeit well meaning ones. They didn’t seem to care about Murdock’s victims, or how he savaged them like a rabid dog, the mental-physical-emotional scars that he left on them. There were no marches through the streets for the support and rehabilitation of his victims, or for monetary assistance to help them cope with their upturned lives. All they cared about was that he was an Aboriginal and in custody. Therefore he was a victim of the system and being horribly treated by the said system. End of story. There had been a spate of deaths in custody involving Aboriginals which fuelled controversy. I probably sound racist here but nobody cared when an 18 year old Caucasian man hung himself after being gang raped in Boggo Road Gaol, by several Aboriginal men. Sadly it will always come down to colour and not the person.

So Murdock had his freedom to wander at large, under certain conditions. He was given the job of office block cleaner in the compound, this involved the Chief’s and Senior’s office, interview room, medics dispensary and open air cinema. All of his cleaning utensils were stored in the small tower above the dispensary, reached by a staircase resembling that of a lighthouse. Murdock was supposed to be kept under strict observation by the officers who worked in that area. Naturally familiarity breeds contempt and Murdock, being the shifty character that he was soon ingratiated himself into the ‘good books.’ He became part of the furniture and did a splendid job of cleaning. When he’d completed his work he would spend time sitting under the staircase which allowed access to the small dispensary, or sit in his little tower room. At times he would stand by the fence that segregated the compound from the offices and talk to other prisoners. This was actively discouraged and he would go back to his duties.

Chloral Hydrate in liquid form was dispensed to prisoners who had been prescribed it at night. It is an effective sedative and hypnotic agent and was kept in a large bottle on the desk of the dispensary, next to the senior’s office door. You don’t spend most of your adult life in jail and not learn anything, Murdock was no exception. Over a period of a week prisoners began complaining that their medication wasn’t working and demanded a higher dose. The prison officer medic checked the level of chloral hydrate in the bottle against the dosages given out and concluded that nothing was amiss. The complaints continued and the bottle was changed over with a fresh one, problem solved, must be a dud batch.

I came into work one morning for a six o’clock start and had to wait while an ambulance came in between gates. I was posted onto C wing and went to my post, guess where the ambos were going? I took over from the night shift and was given the story. We’ll call the unfortunate prisoner Billy, he was still a kid of about 18. When he went past on the gurney he looked half dead. We went down to his cell and stood at the door, I worked in an abattoir as a young teen and had seen copious amounts of blood. I’d also seen sudden death in Vietnam but this left me speechless. Billy had taped his issue of four razor blades together and in the early morning hours had sliced through his left bicep, clean to the bone. The wall by the bed streamed with blood, he’d rolled over and bled into the foam mattress and the blood had seeped through where it filled up his rubbish bucket, a half gallon one. That’s right, half of the blood in his system and the rest in his room, well except for about a pint. The amount doctors said he still had in him when he arrived at hospital. Just another prisoner taking the easy way out? A depressed man not able to cope? No, a man suffering from an overdose of chloral hydrate administered by Murdoch. One of the symptoms of such an overdose is deep depression.

A quick investigation that morning came to the following conclusions. Murdoch had been syphoning off the drug. It appeared that on the previous afternoon Murdoch lured Billy to his love nest under the stairs, with promises of a drink of home brew. After guzzling a small shampoo bottle of chloral hydrate Billy became doped out and Murdoch raped him in his imitable style. I have no idea how he managed to do this, right next door to the senior’s office. Or why Billy wasn’t noticed acting strangely throughout the rest of the day.  It appears that Murdoch also gave his victim another bottle of the drug to keep him quiet about the rape. The empty bottle was found in Billy’s cell. A search was made of the tower and secreted in a door panel were six shampoo bottles of chloral hydrate. Murdoch must have known what was going on as he tried to make himself scarce. There was a passageway between both sides of the compound that ran between the two Rec rooms and the offices. A gate led into the small office compound from each side of the main compounds, these could be locked in case of riots. At the end of the offices a heavy glass fronted, sporting trophy display cabinet had been bolted to the wall. I’d been directed to man one gate and another officer the opposite one. Murdoch came out of his little hideaway and saw us blocking the exits, doing his best to keep his cool he walked around to the trophy cabinet and stopped. We approached him from each side and stopped a few feet away,

Me, ‘Okay Arthur, you’re coming out to the pound. Going to be any trouble?

Him, ‘Not me Mr Smith.’

He raised his right fist and I thought, Oh shit, here we go. Instead he turned and punched his fist through the toughened glass, it shattered leaving a long shard sticking up. He looked at me, smiled, rammed the inside of his arm onto the shard near his elbow and ripped his arm open to the wrist. It went deep and he stood there still smiling, flesh and tendon hanging, blood spurting out and said,

‘Won’t be going out to the pound now Mr Smith.’

That was the last I saw of Arthur James Murdock. Billy? Well he survived to end up in a vegetative state. Murdoch went to Stuart gaol in Townsville, then Rockhampton and if you take a look at the links you will have an idea of where he is now. If you read the link about Palm Island you will see a story unfold about racism, a patriarchal government and a way of handling a native people that is abhorrent today. Murdock came out of this society and I dare say it would have been a hard existence, fuelled by brutality from both white and black. No doubt he was either subject to abuse or learned abusive practices as a child. That doesn’t give a person license to debase and ruin other people’s lives. It was blatantly obvious to me that he had no trouble receiving or doling out pain, he didn’t flinch when he slashed his arm. Gaining sexual pleasure and release from biting hunks of flesh out of your helpless victim is certainly not the sign of a healthy mind. What is he like in his seventies? I don’t know, have his sexual urges gone – dried up leaving him a shell of a man? I honestly don’t care. I only hope that he isn’t able to hurt anybody else in this life.

Because a person grows old it doesn’t mean that they have grown as a human-being or repented their crimes and changed. It usually means that they’re physically unable to continue doing what they loved to do. Klaus barbie, the Nazi ‘Butcher of Lyon’ a rather despicable human being was unrepentant until the end, dying in jail at 77. (An interesting story in itself).

One day society may be able to look beyond a person’s skin and see them as people and not as a colour. Then make whatever legal judgement necessary for the right reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Island,_Queensland

http://www.care2.com/news/member/945613875/484188 Murdock in cage.

Had to share this, too cute.

 

Yes it is another wallaby with a little joey head sticking out, I know. Follow the you tube link below the picture and have a live look at him. It isn’t often that one gets to see a joey so young close up. His tail is hairless, you won’t see it in this video but what gets me is that these wild creatures feel so safe a few feet away from me.

Joey Link……    http://youtu.be/yGLybkyFLmw

A magic view from The Writer’s Room.

A rain squall on sunset makes for an interesting study.

      I took this on Wednesday evening; smoke had been blowing in all day from a bushfire behind the hills.

A family of crows used to live in a nearby tree for awhile. They would bring their babies out on the lawn and wait for food, okay so I gave them a few tid-bits, they are scavengers. It was worth it for the antics, those babies gave their parents hell.

For those who love handbags and shoes, this 13’ 11” salt water crocodile will stir your shopping juices.  Darwin N.T. 2009.

 ‘If I stay still nobody will know I’m here.’ I know they’re cute, at Dubbo’s Japanese gardens.

I usually look at dead trees in terms of how much firewood I can harvest but these have a sense of dignity, even as they are dying. Near Quorn in South Australia.

It’s amazing what you can snap doing 60 klm an hour. A little roadside waterfall in Kosciusko National park.

Stop twisting my arm, here’s a Roo pic.

 “Hey Sweetie, who’s your Daddy?”

“Get lost, I’ve got my eyes on the hunk behind you.”

Thanks for stopping by. A note for followers of my blog, if you haven’t received this weeks Turnkey’s tribulations, part 9 it could be in your spam folder. I have a few links on it and wordpress may look at it as spam. Ta.

A TURNKEY’S TRIBULATIONS, part 9. A couple of old jails.

I thought for a change I would get away from my old jail and introduce you to a couple we visited in our travels. This picture below is of the gallows at Fanny Bay Gaol in Darwin N.T. As you can see no expense was spared in its construction, a simple expedient structure for a quick death. Oddly enough the gallows were built in the infirmary. The jail itself was built in 1883 and was in use until September 1979. The last hangings were performed in 1952, when two Romanian immigrants were executed for the shooting murder of a taxi driver. As you can see the trapdoor opens into a pit, the hangman would operate it from the lever located out of sight of the condemned.

A typical layout for many small jails built in that period, definitely not created to entice you back for another stay. Hmm, the condemned cell was definitely a one stay occupancy. Can you imagine how hot it would be in that block during a Darwin wet season?

Well, they fixed that problem with these enticing suites situated in the middle of the yard.

The next gallows of interest are situated in Old Dubbo Gaol, in New South Wales and like Fanny Bay it is now a museum. That’s me looking suitably grim for the photo, hang on that’s how I look in all of them.

I won’t go into detail about the history of the jail except to say seven executions took place here between 1871 and 1905. Follow the below links.

http://www.olddubbogaol.com.au/history.html  Dubbo Gaol history.

 http://tinyurl.com/afkx57q   The story of hangman,  Robert ‘Nosey Bob’ Howard, the NSW state hangman it’s an interesting read I might add.

Lancaster Castle. I returned to England in 2002 for the first time since I’d left in 1960. I made the most of it and did all the touristy things and the one place I wanted to see was the castle. Up until 2011 it was still operating as a jail and what a varied history it has had. I made the tour with my late Uncle Jim and we had a great time, well as much of a good time as you can in an old castle. The below link takes you to the official Lancaster web site and it covers the history beautifully. We stood in the court house and the age and beauty of it transfixed me. The crests of every High Sherriff of Lancaster are hung on the walls of the circular room. The furnishings are magnificent giving it an air of solemnity and power. I stood in the dock and found out where the term, ‘taken down’ comes from. There is a trapdoor in the floor where, after the convicted had their hand branded they were taken down to the cells underneath the court room. Yes, branded. You’ll see in the picture on the website where the prisoner’s arm was locked into a brace and the gaoler would then put the hot brand on it. This happened up until the early 1800′s and gave the judge an idea as to the type of person in the dock, whether the accused or a witness. Having to raise your right hand to swear an oath meant showing the world you had previous.

We stood for a while in the original dungeon built in the 13th century, the guide shut the door and the air vent, plunging us into total darkness. What an experience, I’ve been down a silver mine with the lights off and it wasn’t as dark as this. The execution chamber is something else, set in a tower on one side of the castle the gallows were erected on execution day outside one of the huge casement windows. This overlooked the wall between the castle and the church next door. Apparently the clergy would rent out space on top of the wall for those wanting a better view. The gruesome aspect of all of this was those waiting to be hung ( the executions took place on a certain day, I imagine when they had enough ) were brought in as the previous victim was being dragged back into the room by an assistant using a butcher’s hook under the chin. There is a chair on display in the room that was used to hang a young woman, Jane Scott, who was too weak to walk to the gallows. I felt a little chagrined at first, until I read the whole story. Her parents believed she had killed her infant and were going to put her in. She was charged with murdering her father and acquitted, then she murdered her mother and was sentenced to death. If at first you don’t succeed, keep trying. I recommend that you have a read through some of the stories on the Lancaster site, they go into great detail in many cases and are illuminating if nothing else about the ‘old days.’ You notice I didn’t say good.

http://www.lancastercastle.com/html/tour/language.php?c=1

I bailed out of doing my original post about a serial bi-sexual rapist this week, I need more time to give a balanced view on it. So that will be coming next week. Until then stay out of trouble.