Her Majesty’s Prison Risdon, Dec 1994
It was on the Christmas break in 1994 in maximum security at Risdon Prison. At the time I was 30 years old. A full twenty years ago.
One of my best friends, Dennis Robert Carr, got hold of the 135 film camera that was being used to capture the prison sports carnival. He said I should try on his (current season) Giotto suit. The one his girlfriend, a sex worker, had bought in Melbourne for his trial. It couldn’t even be purchased off the rack in Tasmania. Those were heady days, indeed.
I was eleven and a half years into a sentence of the Term of my Natural Life and I looked like never being paroled. I was at war with the government. These photographs were made after nearly two years being sent back and forth from the hard yards to segregation to solitary confinement and then the psychiatric wing. After getting resentenced under Tasmania’s new truth in sentencing laws in the mid 1990s, I spent another four long years at medium and minimum security prisons working my way out of the system. Showing that I could cop shit.
