We the born Unborn

Their torture was a comfort to the living (Puzo).

Authors Note: This is a semi-autobiographical account (an excerpt from the unpublished autobiography), of imprisonment as a 12-year-old in the West Australian State Government 'borstal' institution, "Hillston Farm for Boys" (1978 - 1980). With the exception of minor changes / memory lapses, this account is factual (though not an exhaustive and comprehensive account of the abuse etc.), including identities of the Wards and Staff. This narrative remains a work in progress.

Standard copyright licensing applies to this publication including selected images.

fpanaia@gmail.com for licensing information.

What proceeds is for posterity's sake only. For the dead lie forever unavenged, while the living die in wait.

Bridgewater Care & Assessment Centre West Australia

State 'welfare' began here for many Wards.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed (Henley).

CAMP CONCENTRATION 1978

SIX HUNDREDS METERS was the length of the driveway connecting Stoneville Road to the Hillston Farm School for Boys administration block. A private access road that snaked between dense scrub, bordered by blackboy stumps on both sides, its depth into the Australian bush increased the anxiety of the three arrivals, bringing them it seemed, to a point of no return. The bilious driver, whose one inch nicotine-stained incisors stank of decay, pulled up at the front of the Admin next to two waiting groupworkers. Brian Toohey alighted and tugged open the door of the Bedford van with an unsteady vigor, firing off a traditional taunt, in that sarcastic argot typical of the British, “welcome to your new home lads.” 

Hillston prisoner transport: similar Bedford van.

Six hundred metre driveway to the main complex.

Bored and stiff from the hour long journey from the Longmore Assessment Centre, located in metropolitan Perth, the prisoners poured out from the van to be promptly greeted with commands to stand in a line and shut up. One of the grim faced groupworkers herded the boys from behind, while the other led the way into the cellblock. Senior groupworker John Eric La Puma, a dwarfish five-foot Mediterranean migrant, with a Bonapartist ego, poked a matching swollen boofhead out from the staff dutyroom to welcome the new meat.

“Well what have we got here?” he sneered singling out Frankie, demanding, “what’s your name?”

“Frankie Panaia,” came the casual reply.

“Paaneeha what?” La Puma countered, typically butchering the bastard nomen.

“Frankie Panaia,” then after a provocative pause, appended “sir!”

"This isn't Longmore cock. No perfumed bleeding cunts here for you to go cry a groupworker slapped me. Your smartass reputation arrived here long before you did Paaneeha."

The "Paaneeha" shrugged his shoulders, agitating further the short-ass swine.

“I'm predicting you're going to be a problem Paaneeha, a real pain in the arse, yes;” the latter Cassandrian fragment containing a perverse parallel with his own clandestine attacks on anuses.

Frankie held his tongue, a self-restraint generally requiring enormous will-power, ludicrously attempting to return the stabbing stare from the diminutive despot, unsure the last communication was declarative or interrogative.

La Puma resolved the ambiguity, barking: “I asked you a question Paaneeha. Fucking answer me shithead!”

“No I won't,” said Frankie.

“No fucking what Paaneeha?”

“No I won't sir.”

“I'll be keeping a watch on you Paaneeha,” promised La Puma, shifting to the next boy.

Satisfied he had instilled a sufficient degree of fear into the new admissions, a welcoming ritual in most male prisons, La Puma dismissed the trio to their cells, with orders to make them up. La Puma, or as he was colloquially known among the prisoners, The Puma, was the shortest and ironically, the most feared Hillston groupworker. He had been known to drop boys twice his size, with a sharp left hook, or a smashing right backhand. Like a swine in shit, he was in his element, empowered to physically and mentally torment boys at will. Imprisoning naked boys in naked cells, starving them for days and teasing them hourly, by stuffing his maw outside their cell door viewing pane, with biscuits and cakes, afforded him great pleasure. His special modus operandi was to place a plate of hot food on the cell floor, teasing the pre-teen Tantalus, who had been confined for days, stripped of everything. Under these tantalizing conditions, the Puma would threaten the ravenous Ward, he would return in an hour, and if the bangers, peas and mash had been so much as whiffed, confinement would be extended for another three days, complemented with a swift backhand.

So pervasive was the collective fear of the Puma, inmates would try to forecast his shifts, steeling themselves against the height-challenged despot. Undeniably a repugnant brute, La Puma though, stood apart from the common anglicized sadist, who had wormed their way into turnkey careers, from the mitigating fact, he made no attempt to conceal his violence from colleagues and children alike. There was, although, one dirty crime predator Puma did manage to hide, the hideous nature of which, would not see the light of day for four decades. La Puma was, in between slugging and starving State Wards, sodomizing them.

Hillston veranda and parade ground - post closure.

Concrete bars partially removed from cell exterior.

Intersecting the panoptic dutyroom, the three cellblocks or "wings," were obscenely named Falcon, Eagle and Raven; avians commonly associated with freedom. Each cellblock, or in welfare newspeak, "cabin corridor," contained twenty cells. Housed in Raven House, Frankie tailed the groupworker down the corridor to his "new home" for 18 months. Along the way to the cell, Frankie heard the familiar cellblock din of clanging and cursing. In a voice immediately recognizable to Frankie’s ears, the words, “fuck fuck fuck you fucking maggots fuck you,” echoed from the end of the corridor. The groupworker ahead of Frankie snapped, “shut ya cake ole Birnie!”

“Fuck you ya poxy dog,” came the reply, and the drone like banging continued.

Groupworker Wigmore muttered what a turd Jamie Birnie is, unbolted Frankie’s cell door, and instructed him to make up the bed. Apart from the bed, the cell contained a writing bench and a unbreakable back wall window, reinforced with concrete bars crisscrossing the outside. There being no toilets in the cells, inmates were forced to discipline their bladders for the ten hours each night they were locked down. Children who insisted on demanding toilet access, usually in the 'wee' hours of the morning, did so at their peril, and had to silently slide their towel under the cell door, to servilely wait unto one of the two night-shift groupworkers spotted the signal. A days "loss of privileges," commonly known by its acronym L.O.P., was the standard for inconveniencing the night-shift for the privilege of a piddle. Discharging one's underserving bladder was just one of many biological compulsions possessing a special dispensation quality. Naturally, nourishment and gruel were the most meritorious of all 'workhouse' privileges. This Dickensian joy in vital pabulum was a sybaritic classification especially intrinsic to the vitiated Benthamite mindset; that coldest and blackest of brazen minerals, who, as late as the early 20th century, were oscillating malnourished ten-year-old vagrants for pilfering victuals from London bakeries. The emaciated corpora of these High Street waifs, were so diaphanous thin, sacks of noisome stony turnips had to be tethered to their bruised ankles.

The three corridors were spotless. Their timber floorboards shimmering from the countless backbreaking and knee-scraping stripping, sealing and polishing they had enjoyed over the years. Falcon house corridor continued on to the ablution block, a perverse construction, where toilets and showers afforded no privacy whatsoever. Against the back wall, five commodes were lined up alongside the other, all facing the entrance of the ablutions, and as with the shower cubicles, were without privacy panels. Consequently, boys from ages of nine to eighteen would shower and shit in front of everyone, including Hillston’s two "sheila" groupworkers. Evacuating his bowels in front of people would take some getting used to for Frankie, who cherished his privacy above all else.

Adjacent to the ablution block was the dining room and kitchen where many acts of violence took place perpetrated by kids and staff alike. These three areas faced the parade courtyard where the eight musters took place daily. A spotless green veranda stretched around the trilateral shape of the main block. Running on this veranda incurred a days L.O.P.

Spread out across the ten hectares of terra, was the dairy and cow paddock, horse stable, vegetable garden, two school mobiles, wood and metal workshops, swimming pool, gymnasium, sports oval, staff housing, chapel and a semi-independent corrugated iron housing unit, known by its appellation, "Silver City." This glorified sheet metal lean-to was hastily erected to accommodate a small cohort of older and obedient inmates, who also enjoyed a daily ration of smokes. At the centre of these peripheral installations, were the cellblock compound, ablutions, kitchen and dining hall, administration and bitumen parade ground, which doubled as the recreation space.

Erected stone by stone, the Anglican chapel was completed by inmates in the early sixties. This foundation of callous protestant zeal remains standing, along with the gymnasium, in testament to the untold toil and abuse endured by many. Fifteen years before Frankie’s arrival, when the original commission of the institution was the Anglican Farm School, the Victorian workhouse prided itself from helot-like conditions, on being largely self-sufficient. In those "good ol days," boys were tasked to maintain, sustain and fortify their own prison, as convicts had in the Roundhouse and Fremantle Prisons. This peculiar British custom of compelling prisoners to bind their own bonds and forge their fetters, shares a moral equivalence with condemned captives forced to dig their graves. Alas those were the good old days, when shackled children could be beaten senseless and worked till they collapsed.

Combined recreation and parade ground. 

Boys young as 9, regimentally paraded up to 8 times daily.

"Good old days," how many times Frankie heard and would hear yet another shakespearean slug waxing poetic for those good times, relishing the sanctioned cruelties against confined and concealed children. “Years ago,” the British boors fondly began their reminiscence, “boys who absconded would have their feet and hands tied for a day, and that was after they got a good hiding. Aye the good old days. Blimey, you lads don’t know how lucky you are,” and braying so, the asinine ass marched his pubescent charges up and down Hillston parade ground under a scorching Sol of forty-four; or have the same fortunate ones, scrubbing corridor floors and kitchen pots until flesh girding kneecaps and fingertips peeled raw in bloodied protest; or entomb undead children denuded of everything except sensation, ensuring a "Sceptered Isle" experience in an Osirian abyss of rigor vivus privation, inside a concreted cavity a "wee-bit" roomier than a garish "K2 Kiosk;" or turn a 'blighted-eye,' while older boys slugged younger ones; or fill his blighty belly with extra servings in front of 'anorexic boys,' famished from punishment; or brainwash the broken, yet unbowed boy, into believing how fucking useless and evil he is, simultaneously flatulating the cherubic charms of their own "ten-pound" turds; or castigate a feverish Ward burning thirty-eight, for being "piss-weak," because the torpid twelve-year-old could not keep up with the rest in physical training and cleaning chores. 

INTERCALATION: Now - in this eternal regna saturnia, glitter the veridical atemporal good days; the rancid bulk lie composted whence spawned, amid the sodden maggoty moors from beneath they first squirmed free. Man was fashioned from Promethean clay, then, there were Others of taloned Odyssean chalk. By guile and gore, Darwin's macabre mutation reigned for an aeon in odium, defiling Victoria, clawing over Europa's breasts, onto the socratic shoulders of tall continental Uomini: swindled Sophia's Grey-eyed Hellas and Ares' Dioscuri Latium, thenceforth sallied and sailed Bram's bloodlust bats to drain the soft brown face of naked humanity. Kilted buzzards that pecked Gaia's divine eyes into a retching gravied mash of minced pie. But unalloyed conquest, the loudest triumphal spectacle of All, is won in unseen quiet. This Via Appia, this undefended pons Horatius, had always been The Mithraistic Way.

It is not from Ahab's heart I righteously and grievously 'spit at thee.' To do so poses the unthinkable, together couched between Theseus and Peirithous - forever! Neither sangue nor saliva, Sol Invictus expectorate. Before the pinkest swine, Jove's glitter is never cast through the golden gaze of His Brother.

 ______________________________

Staff carpark and rear cellblock  - post closure.

window concrete bars partially removed

Twelve-year-old Frankie was assigned to the mobile school unit, one hundred metres east of the cellblock. Split into junior and senior classes, the two school demountables were positioned on the scrub’s perimeter. Over the following months, Frankie mentally atrophied in this asbestos furnace, with equally bored classmates, killing the monotonous hours, expending unused intellect in the appropriation of tobacco. One desperate pupil cut up strips of cane and smoked them like any ordinary fag. Steven Pregelj missed his nicotine so much, he would shadow the perpetual pipe-smoking teacher Alistair Leonard, sucking up his exhalations, as they marched to and from the parade ground.

Hillston school demountables:

Teachers Alistair Leonard furthermost, Ken Griffiths nearest

A muster was called before and after every meal, including the morning and afternoon teas. Inmates lined up in the middle of the parade ground, dressed in navy blue fatigues and steel capped boots. Here they stood to attention, while being counted and cursed by groupworkers. The heat in the Mundaring hills could climb to the mid forties, and it was not uncommon, for the more delicate boys to collapse during the muster, when it was prolonged from imperfections in form and deference.

Apart from the high security cellblock, the major barrier against absconding, was Hillston's rural isolation, with the nearest residential area of Mundaring, six kilometres away. One runner a week, was the  average, usually occurring on weekends, when the "program" was slightly more liberal. Most absconders were recaptured within 24 hours, many still on the prison-farm itself. Because Hillston was mostly ringed by bush, the fugitive child invariably made a beeline for the exposed and therefore hazardous route of the six-hundred-metre driveway. Punishment for absconding was an excruciating seven days L.O.P., where boys half-starved were expected to obsequiously perform from the morning physical training, or PT, to daily chores, interspersed with repetitive marching. It was not uncommon, especially in those good old days, for bigger boys, usually the agile Aborigines to chase, capture and flog the absconder. Absconding was on everyone’s mind at Hillston, and whenever the boys mustered for a meal, or moved from one section to another, staff encircled them, as cowboys corral cattle on the open plains.

Hillston private access road.

The prisoner composition of Hillston was similar with Longmore, but without girls, whose inclusion in any 'welfare' institution Frankie observed, assured a standard of civility and comfort and critically, protection against cruelty and deprivation. Urbanized Whites or "Woggelars" (spelt, Wadjelas) and rural Noongars or Nyungars, were evenly divided in number; a population augmented with around a dozen desert full-bloods, also known as Blueblacks and Wongis. Wards and staff alike feared the Blueblacks, and consequently institutional life for them, was a great deal easier than for the rest. Many bearing ritual and payback scars, some of who, were unable to understand Australian, the Wongis had a tendency, when riled, to maul their antagonist, regardless of consequences and obstacles. The Puma himself, avoided tormenting the explosive Natives, preferring instead the docile Whites. Blueblacks though, suffered their own torments. Torn from closely knit tribes, where sleeping in isolation was unheard of, let alone in the tomb like cavity of a cell, they would occasionally rent the deathly silent mornings, with blood-curdling screams from visitations of Feather Foots and Bone Pointers. Some of the more traditional indigenous boys, after completing the woggelar's justice, then had to face the tribal justice of having thighs and calves speared.

Hillston Chapel: hand built by prisoner Wards.

Chapel stands, boarded up due to repeat vandalism.

Alienated by both western and traditional indigenous populations, the mostly part-aboriginal Noongars tended to be the most antisocial and violent of the lot, forever thumping each other, or more frequently, the Woggelar. Graham Trevor Walley, Greg Quartermaine, Leon Derschow and Jack Mourish were four angry and displaced "half-castes" sharing Frankie’s cellblock, and delighted in bullying their white neighbours. All four boys would eventually reach prison, with Graham perishing in a Roebourne police cell at the age of twenty-two, reportedly by his own hand, while Greg‘s fatigued and substance abused heart quitting sixteen years later in a Hakea Prison isolation cell. In 2004, Jack Mourish, an aspiring footballer, died by the needle, again in Hakea, formerly Casuarina Prison. Against incredible odds, the brawler Leon James Derschow, survived until 2021, departing at the age of 55.

Leon Derschow 55 (2021)

Jack Mourish 37 (Hakea Prison), heroin overdose 2004

Eris effortlessly plagued the white Wards, subjecting them not only to the violence of the Blacks, but  themselves, a common trend of discord throughout West Australia institutions. An exchange of blows usually resulted from a genuine grievance and more frequently a stronger opponent beating up on a weaker one. Physically or mentally weak personified most institutionalized weaklings. Domenic Sansalone, physically and mentally disadvantaged, in addition to being an 'inferior wog', won the trifecta for the consummate weakling. Consequently, he was the favourite object of everyone’s derision, bar the resident bitch, Sheba, and if Sheba wasn’t such an indolent obese canine, she likely would have bit him as well.

Earlier that year, Domenic inexplicably set the Bassendean Football Club ablaze; a Herostratus desecration that earned him notoriety for years to come. Morphologically, Domenic's body resembled a huge pear, with his head forming the apex, and his waist, the circumference of a beach ball. His face was cratered with deep scars, where pimples had once protruded, before they were diligently extirpated by razor-sharp fingernails. A most unfortunate boy, Domenic was brain damaged, but not enough to disqualify him from the benefits of borstal life, because like a gormless beast, he could still obey orders and buckle under the force of violence.

Frankie greeted Domenic 'Salami' Sansalone, relieved to meet another confessed "wog." The ethnic camaraderie soon dissolved, when he was teased for associating with the Salami. Domenic himself would turn on Frankie, whenever he saw the tide turning against him. Years later Frankie, then 20 years of age, encountered Domenic in the protective "dogs" yard of Fremantle prison and learned, he was not responsible for the football club arson, but was forced to confess so, by Perth’s 'finest'. Perth finest, New York’s finest and London’s finest, were specious Orwellian phrases, Frankie could never stomach. “Finest of what?” he would demand of his fellow social work students in his second semester a decade later. “Yeah,” he continued to the stunned cadets in sycophancy, “necking drunk Abos at every given opportunity and perforating the chest of every second mentally ill male they come across in the street with a 45 calibre, is just downright dandy.”

Leon Derschow (1965 -2021).

This anywhere pugilist's favourite involuntary sparring partners 

were Woggelars, including Author.

Graham Trevor Walley (1966 - 1988)

Graham was the subject of the Royal Commission into Deaths into Custody detailing events / background of his "suicide" at 22 years.

Fifteen years after his prison meeting with the Salami, Frankie spied his unmistakable pear profile, across the main Perth City street mall, in a haze of alcohol and body odour, accompanied by three wasted itinerants. There he was, changed only in height, with a slightly increased girth, and still wearing trousers around his backside, exposing his pustuled culo to the citizens of Perth. It was refreshing for Frankie to know, he was alive and a perennial burden on the State. In 2016, the two crossed paths again, and again in the city, when it seemed Domenic was gainfully employed as a peripatetic pharmacist.

Domenic Sansalone (2016) - 36 years post Hillston admission.

Mark Truslove, also ostracised, though avoided by boys and staff, was assigned to the farm work detail. Older and taller than the average inmate demographic, the anglo Truslove tolerated little crap from inmates and staff. Renowned for explosive violence, Truslove was elevated alongside the untouchable Blueblacks. This reputation of frenzied violence, is in jail yard and juvenile hall alike, the key to an easier 'unmolested' life, where "Screw" and "Crim" together, share an equal apprehension of the unpredictability of homicidal explosions. Once demonstrated, long remembered. A fact Frankie would better appreciate years later in the raw brutality of Fremantle Prison yard life. “What you have to do,” counselled Lou Cafaro, a celebrated boxer and car thief, “is smack the crap outta another Crim on the same day you arrive. Doesn’t matter who, what matters is that you smash them, with as much noise and violence possible, in front as many Crims as possible. That way, Crims and Screws, will leave ya alone and respect ya.” Lou's pupil in convict culture, nodded his head in deferential comprehension, but internally, Frankie couldn't countenance the injustice of randomly attacking a man, for the sole reason of establishing redoubtable credentials in blood-letting. Indeed, the sangue flowed like cheap "flagon" Port, drenching, over the decades, the so-called "Yards."

INTERPOLATION: Fremantle Prison (colloquially "Freo"), has since been repurposed into a bourgeois side-show viz, museum, where voyeuristic tourists line up to gambol in the depraved brutalities, immured men and boys "experienced"# throughout the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, the main attraction remains the gallows, where men were dropped like sacks of Irish potatoes. The excited squeals of paying guests, gasping with ghoulish delight, as tiny heads internally replay cinema like, the strangulation of men and boys, is perhaps an excellent qualitative indicator for this "Enlightenment" world, that is, Hesiod's decadent "Iron Age" (pertaining especially to sulphurous WA). Evidently Kali Yuga first landed upon Britain; an understandable preference given the Uranian myth associates Tartarus (equivalent to the "Ninth Circle"), with that same Atlantean swamp.

#Naturally, the loaded term suffered had to go, swapped out with the polite newspeak "experienced." Another degenerate "pc" invention by the State and their lettered Humanities whores. Compare ward for prisoner, cabin for cell, groupworker for goaler, solitary confinement for psychobiological torture, rehabilitation for abuse, farm for prison, colony for invasion, anglicized assimilation for indigenous extermination, european for british and so on.

Fremantle Prison: this British built and culturally inspired "Settimo Cerchio" of anguish and agony, shut in 1991. This Author 'experienced' 15 months of Freo's Dantean hospitality,

during the principal freophanic "laggin" of which: 

Proserpina daily anticipated him, to cross Her infernal threshold.

But, in 1987 it was not Persephone's charnel embrace,

nor Hades hellish bident, which reached out from that blackest loom...

 ____________________________________

Mark Truslove never recovered from his "rehabilitation" as this news piece reports. Following this latest corrective episode in 2014, Mark (52), died in 2017.

Frankie first met Luciano during his second spell in the Longmore prison, where he had first been detained, prior to his transfer to Hillston, and then again, after his release from the latter reformatory, and his farcical foray into Magna Grecia. In 1980, Frankie had been intercepted by welfare at Perth International Airport, after returning from Italy, following a spectacular failure in an attempt to reunite Frankie with his ageing Calabrese father. Hillston After-Care officer, Theo Merrifield, was tasked to restore Frankie into welfare custody on the basis, he remained a “placement problem.” As Merrifield nonchalantly reported during the ride from the airport: "no-one here in Perth wants you Panaia, so it's back to Longmore." A fatigued Frankie protested, pointing out, he hadn't as yet, broken any West Australian laws, because he had just walked off a QANTAS airplane. Merrifield was unimpressed, reminding Frankie of his chattel designation, viz State Wardship; a 'legal' status enforceable until his 18th year. The injustice of this arbitrary detention proved to be a watershed moment for Frankie, who vowed by Alastor, to revenge himself.

Lou Cafaro (R) in his boxing prime

Lou Cafaro - far left

Luciano Cafaro was a typical Neapolitan, carefree, boisterous and unpredictable. At sixteen, his face was already sporting the hallmarks of a veteran boxer, with his flattened nose and cauliflower ears. He befriended both Frankie and Longmore groupworker Jean Bodden, creating a clique, with the three of them grouping together at every opportunity. As usual, when anyone offered Frankie genuine friendship, he sought to reciprocate a thousand-fold. He idolized Lou, hovering about him like a satellite, making it clear, he would do anything for him, wanting nothing more than to embark on a lifetime of camorra gangsterism together. Understandably, no-one, Ward or turnkey, dared insult Lou's unmistakable Italian ethnicity, at least,  faccia a faccia. And this apparent immunity from racist vitriol, naturally drew Frankie deeper into Lou's orbit.

Longmore Remand courtyard.

Upon transfer to Assessment Division, Author became ping-pong champion

Two months into Frankie’s indeterminate Longmore sentence, Lou and Frankie completed an unusually sedated breakfast together. Today, Lou was scheduled for release. Frankie showed little emotion, and saw his pazan off with a typical jailhouse farewell: “See ya next week Lou,” and “I’ll keep your dining room seat for ya cuz.” A fortnight later, Lou was back in Longmore and the newspaper, accused of a record number of car thefts. Frankie was overjoyed, and greeted him on the veranda with a hug, and forgetting his hostile racist anglophone environment, attempted to kiss him mob style.

Facing a long term of incarceration, Lou appealed to his greatest fan, and pressed him to aid him in an escape. “Frankie when are you going on this day trip to the city?” he asked.

“Dunno its up to the Senior, why Lou?”

“Listen I have an idea about us making a team.”

Exhilarated, the wannabe Sciron asked, “yeah like what?”

“Well if you go on this day trip, can you do a runner?”

“Sure I think,” and in a burst of comprehension, “why, you want me to bust you out?”

“Shh keep it down man, fuck every-.”

“Sorry Lou, I’m sorry,” he pleaded.

“Okay okay. Now listen how many groupworkers will go with you?”

“I’m not sure Lou, I think only one.”

“Ripper. You know who?”

“Not yet. What do you want me to do?”

“Break me outta this hole.”

“You betcha Lou, but how?”

“You gotta come back to my cabin window and cut the bars.”

Frankie furiously thought about the feasibility of this, and asked, “what about the poxy roof alarms?”

“Maybe that’s bullshit, anyway you should be able see them.”

“But Lou can you fit through the window, its fucking small man?”

“Fuck, of course I can. I’ve gone through smaller holes than that”, boasted the recidivist car thief, the sexual innuendo of his reply, lost on the pubescent accomplice.

“Yeah yeah,” Frankie exclaimed, his excitement intensifying, “but how do I cut the poxy bars Lou?”

“I tell you later,” said Lou, who realised their deep confabulation was arousing the curiosity of others.

Great escape plan - mud map of Longmore Assessment Division,

Author (1980). "Are U Hungry" was a ruse, in case staff confiscated the 'plan'.

In every Longmore cell, a delinquent proof window panel, not much larger than a rear windscreen of a Fiat 500, reinforced for good measure with a thick iron grill, teasingly separated inmates from imminent freedom. At least ten feet high, the height of this aperture made it unreachable for most juveniles, even when they stood on the desk slab that extended out from the wall beneath the window, reducing the reach by three feet. It was nearly impossible for a boy to break out of his cell without aid, and notwithstanding his own physical handicaps, boys and cells were regularly searched for objects that could be used to facilitate an escape. Only once did a Longmore inmate escape from his cell. James Dickie, a uniquely introverted Noongar, had managed with a spoon, smuggled from the kitchen, to excavate an iron rod cemented into the air vent under his bed. With this iron rod that produced the same effect of a mason's hammer, he chipped his egress through the bricks directly below the window. It took him five nights to smash his way through, as he could only hammer, when the piped radio blasted into each cell for one hour. Dickie was lucky, as although his tunnelling through the bricks could be heard in the cell block, it could not be detected in the staff duty room. When patrolling staff did hear the digging, they ignored it, dismissing it as tomfoolery. The days following Dickie’s escape, every cell vent was hermetically sealed.

Frankie never fully understood why, from a muster of some 50 Longmore inmates, most of whom were vastly more deserving, from their compliant behaviour, he had been awarded the honor of a day excursion. Jean Bodden said it was because since his return from Italy, he had not been convicted of crime, and therefore entitled to special treatment. This explanation seemed plausible, and he gave it no more thought. Had Frankie been cognitively able to consider this Greek Gift deeper, he would have seen it was a setup. He was being played by the Longmore management, who prophesied with Tiresias precision, he would abscond and offend, thereby revoking the indignant status of innocence. His imprisonment sans convictions had provoked the more sentient groupworkers to challenge the legitimacy of his arbitrary detention. Unbeknown to Frankie, his detention was developing into a political issue among the Longmore staff, an ironic turn of events, given the majority, including the executive, resented Frankie and his serial belligerence.

The highly anticipated excursion arrived. That morning Frankie was dressed and ready for his ambitious, though patently absurd enterprise. Jean pulled him aside after breakfast, and for the third time that morning, exhorted him to behave, “now my darling you behave with Mrs Robertson today okay.”

“Yep Mrs Bodden.”

“Don’t do anything silly hon.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you adore Lou and listen to everything he says, but remember dear, our dining table rascal is in a lot of trouble now.”

“So what?” he said defensively.

“I just reminding you hon he is older and smarter than you okay.”

“Uh huh.”

“This day-leave is a chance to show us how well you can behave and be trusted, so please don’t do anything stupid like running away hon. Because if you do, it will give Longmore a real reason to keep you here.”

Unable to raise his eyes above Jean’s buxom breasts, a talking point among numerous Wards and groupworkers, Frankie mumbled an unconvincing assurance.

In the city, Debra Robertson casually turned her back on Frankie in the Hay Street Mall to study the latest fashion in high heels, giving him the chance to turn on his own heels. He tore back up Hay Street towards the first arcade, making a beeline to what was possibly the ugliest bus terminal in the southern hemisphere, soliciting bus fare coins from pedestrians along the way. The Northern Suburbs bus dropped him off at Main Street, a stone’s throw from his family's rented house in Osborne Park. Carefully avoiding the house, he strode towards his old high school of a single term, Tuart Hill High.

Perth's notorious car thieves: the Cafaro brothers (WA News 1986)

When he was convinced the cleaners had left, Frankie entered the high school grounds, and having never entered the workshops during his brief enrolment, had to conjecture to their location. He soon navigated his way to the metal workshop, fortunately located on ground level. The workshop windows, partially covered by a hedge inspired greater confidence in his undertaking, although he decided to wait for complete darkness, as Lou’s liberty, rather than his, rested on the success of the operation. The window cracked after the second assault, and he carefully picked at the loose shards, before his cautiously stuck his hand in and released the latch. Frankie pulled himself in and promptly stumbled, tripping over tools and machines in the darkness. Having no alternative, he switched on the light and furiously seized the necessary tools; a hammer, screwdriver, chisel and most critical of all, a hacksaw. Of equal importance was a receptacle, and he rushed about the workshop in desperation, anxious his carefully planned mission was to be thwarted for want of a bag. After a few frantic moments, he located a vintage leather medical satchel lying in the corner. He piled the tools inside the bag, and with an effort hauled the antiquated bag, equal in its weight to its contents, outside the window.

Discomfort and excitement robbed him of sleep that night, compelling him to begin moving at dawn. In the early afternoon, after multiple misdirections and detours, he arrived at the Western Australian Institute of Technology, and found what he thought, was a quiet spot on the campus lawn, to rest and rehearse his plans.

Tuart Hill High - Author enrolled for fragments of Term One, before expulsion

Doctor's bag similar to that used by Author

Longmore’s barbed chain-link fence was visible from where Frankie rested. He stared intently through the wire at the institution, pondering his chances of success. Exhaustion overcame him, and he leaned back onto the heavy bag of tools, closing his eyes. He was woken an hour later by a concerned student, who asked if he was okay. A prostrate Frankie stared up at the crescent silhouette, squinting from the immotile sun, trying to comprehend the situation.

“Oh um er yeah, I’m just waiting for someone Miss,” he replied, and then sat erect determined not to sleep again. He steeled himself for a further wait of what he estimated was five hours.

Perth City bus station circa 1970s

After what seemed to be the longest and most anxious wait in his life, Frankie rose to his feet ready for action. He slowly made his way towards Longmore’s perimeter fence, certain the later his entry, the safer it would be. Around nine pm, his patience utterly depleted, Frankie stowed the bag of tools in a nearby shrub, and recklessly cased the martial obstacle, searching for an insertion point, unaware groupworker and self-declared karate expert Greg Antonovich, was doing a security check around a corner pole.

“Hey Panaia, stop there, hey!”

Frankie’s exhausted mind considered his options. He began to make a move, when Antonovich, after scaling the fence in an instant, grabbed hold of his collar and declared, “gotcha sonny.” In a way Frankie was relieved he had been caught, bringing an end to a thirty six-hour ordeal of hunger, anxiety and boredom.

Longmore Remand courtyard - circa late 1970s

Panoptic Longmore Remand and Assessment Centres:

Inclusion of female prisoners greatly reduced abuse risk from staff.

Female cells were palatial in comparison to boys: 

girls had floor mats and privacy toilet walls!

At Hillston, Mark Truslove knocked on Frankie’s classroom door and asked the teacher if one of the boys could help him haul wheat from the silos situated at the back of school demountables. Leonard looked around the class and asked for a volunteer. Frankie thrust his hand in the air, eager for a diversion from the monotony of classroom life.

Frankie was filling the bucket with wheat, when 15-year-old Mark partly covered by a blackboy, unzipped his shorts and said, “Hey Frankie.”

“Yeah what?” Frankie cautiously answered, vaguely conscious of Mark’s poofter reputation.

“Come over here.”

“Why?” he asked suspiciously.

“Just come over here I wanna show you something.”

“Show me what?”

“Come over here and I will show you.”

Bucket in hand, Frankie walked towards the blackboy stump hiding Mark’s right hand, clasped around his penis.

“Do you want me to give you a headjob?” offered Mark.

Headjob, Frankie thought, what the fuck is a headjob, I hear this all the time on parade, whenever one of those bitch groupworkers is in view.

“Nah,” he said.

“Aw come on Frankie, no one will know, we’re alone here,” persisted Mark.

“Yeah I know, but I don’t do those things,” he said, still not sure what those things were, then for good measure, added, “I'm not a poofter because I like girls.”

Truslove gave up, when he watched the object of his Theban lust, heading back to the school demountable.

Mark Anthony Truslove: his court hearing claim of "terminal illness," 

was according to the cited article, disbelieved - 

Mark died a few years later in 2017.

Prone to explosive acts of violence himself, Chef Errit (Eric) Roersma was the unofficial, but indisputable lord of Hillston. In control of the pantry, the goldmine in borstals where discipline primarily centred on tucker, he intimidated everyone. In the good old days, he was known to hurl kitchen utensils at insubordinate  boys and verbal abuse at disagreeable staff. For ten years, this cantankerous cook lived on the grounds, with his fat canine bitch Sheba and wife Ruby, and from Hillston’s heart, the kitchen, he had seen and done it all.

At ten o'clock, forty boys and ten groupworkers filed noisily into the dining room for morning tea. The cacophony of voices was exceptionally loud, and the irritable Dutchman was fast losing the little patience he had. A curt "shut up" burst from his nicotine-discoloured lips, serving only to briefly quell the racket. “This is my kitchen,” Roersma reminded himself, “and I'm not putting up with this shit. By god I am still boss here, even though the place is overrun with bloody psychologists and lipsticked tarts.” An aluminium baking tray was seized, and the crusty Chef slammed it down on the stainless steel surface of the serving counter. The ear-shattering clang effected instant silence. The regnant Roersma looked over the stunned and now silent mass from the throne that was his servery, and decreed: “now that I’ve got your attention, shut up! I can’t hear myself think,” then went back to his duties.

Hillston school demountable: since demolished

Like many observers, Frankie was undecided whether Roersma was mad or bad, although after witnessing the kitchen mixer incident, the latest in a long and unchecked history of violent episodes, he was inclined to the former. It was on a Tuesday afternoon, when Frankie was serving out his week on kitchen roster, a duty abhorred by inmates, when two boys outrageously turned on the other, while Chef Roersma was yarning with the supervising groupworker. Without warning, Roersma grabbed a commercial sized mixing beater, and flung it towards the combatants, sending the steel utensil over their heads, missing by inches. “I’ll ring your necks you cunts. No one fights in my kitchen without my say so,” he clarified.

Similar dough hook 'projectile.'

One of the most decent staff members at Hillston was the new superintendent, Philip Bowyer. A slim sixty year old career psychologist, Bowyer was remarkable for his shiny bald forehead and snow white beard. He inherited the position from a protestant predecessor, who was nothing short of a despot, and in trying to humanize the borstal regime, was promptly alienated by Hillston staff, substantially diminishing both his authority and enthusiasm.

Hillston classroom

A month into his indefinite detention at Hillston, Frankie had figured William (Bill) Ward and Garry Weggelaar, as the only two decent groupworkers. Frankie befriended Bill in his first week, nominating him as his caseworker. A stocky Anglo-Australian, with a caput of auburn hair, Ward impressed Frankie by never throwing a fist or publicly deprecating the youths. In Frankie’s estimation, he was a kind, perhaps even, a normal human being, deserving the best of his behaviour. This standard of excellence mainly entailed a cessation of the hostilities, spasmodically deployed against the mostly imported rubbish, who Frankie imagined, were so encephal-primitive, the morning chore of drawing up their trousers, demanded robust cognitive effort.

Senior groupworker Gerardus (Garry) Christiaan Weggelaar, a gruff six-foot-two Nederlanders, sporting a ferocious crew cut, was a gentleman at heart. Frankie had seen him in fits of temper half-garrote unruly boys during musters and the following day, pardon the cardinal offence of attempting to abscond. He was a man of erratic contradictions, undergoing internal confusion, having to stomach for years the hideous unsanctioned abuses perpetrated around him, by predators such as the Puma. He quit the System shortly after Frankie's discharge, perhaps unable to further deal with the atrophic institutionalization of children. Youth, he once confessed to Frankie, would be cycled through the unconquerable System, increasingly deranged and dehumanized. The polyglot genius of that singular maritime "Polack," fascinated Frankie throughout his twenties. Conrad, with his trademark evocativeness, had sighted with Nauplius' precision, "the horror" of the calcium deep malignancy spread by a carceral cult, freighted from the Empire's gruesome "heart of darkness":

Prison are wonderful contrivances. Open - shut. Very neat. Shut - open. And out comes some sort of corpse, to wander awfully in the world in which it has no possible connections and carrying with it the appalling tainted atmosphere of its silent abode.

Ra never did set upon that forever crimson-spattered horizon, because His luminous beams had not, in the first instance, irradiated the hypovitaminotic Britannia brow.

Maybe the volatility of Garry's proto-Germanic values is best captured in his 1993 published memoir of 15 pages, recalling his increasing dismay with Hillston's 'progressive' rehabilitative trajectory that was "turning the farm-school for delinquents into a holiday-camp." Brutality and beatings were goed, provided the abuse accorded with directives dictated by the reich of bureaucracy. Confounded or cowered to the end, Weggelaar could not bring himself to call a scheiße stained spade, spade! His aforementioned autumnal 'eclogue,' utilizing "Golden Ass" magic, transformed a brick and mortar bastille into an pastoral "farm-school," conjuring for the naïve Reader, a Virgilian idyll of sylvan sentiment. And so the turnkey himself, becomes more deformative than the occasion, he first turned a reformative key.

Hillston chapel plaque 1961.

Frankie’s sentence in Hillston felt, from his juvenile perspective, a lifetime, from the fact he was "committed to the care of the Director for Community Welfare until 18 years of age." "Shanghaied" from Longmore, because he had with Mrs Bodden's guidance, reported groupworker Alan Lee, for assault, he was labelled a placement problem and could technically remain in 'care' until the problem resolved. Several days after his first case conference, Frankie, under the pretext of collecting firewood for the classroom absconded. He instinctively sought cover in the surrounding scrub, naturally gravitating towards the long rural driveway.

Beneath the hanging prickly pines of a blackboy, two hundred meters from the main complex, and several metres from the driveway, Frankie precariously burrowed himself. Squatting in the brush for the next hour, he understood from past experience, the pursuit is hottest, immediately following the escape. Within fifteen minutes after concealing himself, he heard the approaching voice of groupworker Neil Schorer, the athletic hockey player, chatting with a colleague, as they scoured closeby. Frankie wriggled closer to the blackboy's charcoal stump, seconds before they passed him in an arm’s length. Fuck, he thought, they're all over the place, I'll have to double back and go through the poxy bush to the other side, wherever that side fucking is.

Helios' chariot was making ready for its own exit, when the absconder made a similar move, arcing deeper into thicker scrub, backwards past the dairy and pasture, thinking he would not get lost, because he would remember individual gum trees. Within twenty minutes he stopped dead in his tracks. It occurred to him, he had compassed the large paddock, passing the same stand of trees. “Oh no I’m fucking lost and I’m going to die out here,” he lamented aloud. Frankie urgently estimated ten minutes of daylight remained to radiate his way out of Artemis' natural labyrinth. This time though, Ariadne and her Cretan thread were unavailable, leaving the nescient navigator to alone figure it out. The panicky fugitive bolted again, desperate now, not to flee, but to see Hillston. More by fickle fortuna than rational contrivance, he spotted a stock fence, and raced towards it, momentarily forgetting his outlaw status.

Crouched behind the fence, he surveyed the field for signs of life. Jill Van der Spill, one of two groupworker sheilas to be propositioned from a distance for a "headjob," by the bigger boys, was stabling a horse. He watched her until she left, then ran into the stable and rested. Famished from missing two meals, and possibly circumventing the enormous farm twice, he trudged back to the compound, with no plan in mind, other than to find food. He lurked behind the kitchen until Russell, the other Chef, departed for home. Hoping against the odds, he tried the rear kitchen door and back windows. Nothing gave, not even the dining room window, he secretly unlatched earlier in the week. The brisk sound of marching, mixed with excited voices from the direction of the gym, interrupted his frustration. Top Group inmates were returning from the sweet-shop, secured in a gymnasium locker. A weekly thirty cent spend was allowed at Hillston under strict conditions, including the in situ consumption of treats. Canteen credit was accrued from good behavior, or, as the boys euphemistically called it, “suckoling.” The thunderbolt epiphany of licorice, sherbet and redskins, cruelly sundered inside the vaulted "tuck-shop," imbued Frankie with a lightning flash of inspiration. "Fuck the kitchen grub, I’ll go for the canteen treasure," he burst aloud to the coruscant caelum, beneath the stolen shine of luna. Because, for the hedonistic sweet-tooth, tinged already with blackening decadence, and who lifted his first K-mart "Cadbury Family Block" bar aged six, a cavernous confectionery cornucopia was his "Elysium Fields." And if Cronus' dragon of metallic locks barred ingress into this shangri-la of sugar, the possessed mortal was prepared to fire and flood the orchard of hesperidium honeycomb until it surrendered its gold.

Kitchen and dining hall - rear.

Closer inspection of the canteen locker convinced a more saline villain that conventional "B & E" violence would be sufficient. The tuck-shop, situated inside near the unlocked entrance doors, could only be accessed through the locker door, or the above window. Well the door will be locked, Frankie calculated, so I’ll have to go through the window, but that’s ten-fucking-feet off the ground. Seized with hunger, Frankie racked his simple brain for a solution to this hindrance of height. A ladder! That’s it! A ladder, there’s one in the dairy shed, he remembered. Furiously, he made his way to a shed, rank with dung, and with difficulty, and a real risk of being bitten by a red-black, found the ladder. He lingered inside the leaden gloom of the fetid shed, contemplating the forbidden task ahead. Waiting here among the mass of manure, in the eternal shadow of cold recurring night, felt familiar.

Strategically the best time for forced entry, he analysed, would be when the afternoon shift knocks off at nine-thirty, leaving the two night-shift groupworkers. An awful hour of hunger and anxiety finally passed, before he returned to the gym, lugging with him, the heavy rusted ladder. Against the door, he gently rested the ladder, then went outside to take another look at the dutyroom on the far side of the parade ground. The chilly night was dead quiet, and in ernest need of those bough-bending breezes that so often roar through the Australian bush during Phoebus' celestial repose. If only Aeolus' bluster could be summoned at will. He went back inside, mounted the ladder, and tried to force the window.

Tuck-shop: housed inside gymnasium.

“Shit shit shit,” he cursed, when the window refused to budge. He reeled about in darkness, seven feet in the air, stirred more by a caramel craving, than animal hunger. He ducked outside, and tried to imagine the sound of a window smashing, and how loud, the tumult caused from a slung dead stone would carry to the dutyroom. It’s too damn quiet, he reflected, they will hear it, they will. He returned to the canteen, grabbed the ladder and dragged it to the dairy shed. Now he was jammed between Scylla and Charybdis. Either he stick it out homerically, in the intolerable cold bush, afflicted with hunger, or surrender to arrogant jailers, to suffer the penalties for absconding. He plodded carelessly towards the cellblock security grill, shivering from cold and cowardice. Two staff snugly consumed biscuits and coffee in the heated dutyroom, as the seasoned fugitive approached. Through the barred window, Frankie observed the groupworkers a moment longer, drooling over Arnott’s Chocolate Creams, the favourite of Hillston staff. He tapped on the security grill. Staff carried on supping, compelling him to knock harder, and in the process, wounding deeper the little dignity left.

Hillston dutyroom

Afforded panoptic surveillance of the 3 cellblocks and parade ground.

Except for Frankie, who remained confined in his cell, inmates were turned out at six am for the regimental basic exercises, commonly known by its acronym 5 BX. At nine, after missing another meal, he stood to attention, as the Puma peered inside through the unbreakable acrylic panel on the cell door. He unbolted the door and confronted Frankie, grinning fiendishly.

“So you couldn’t hack it in the bush. Scared of the dark are we?”

Frankie said nothing, concerned only about the next rationed meal, his pangs of hunger now twice as keen. Reading his thoughts, La Puma said, “you must be hungry. When did you have your last feed?”

“Yesterday morning sir.”

“That long ago huh. Diddums, did we forget your breakfast this morning? Seven days L.O.P.,” decreed the Puma, who swung around, throwing the door shut behind him.

By order of the Puma, Frankie was released from isolation an hour before lunch, to polish the corridor floor. Later at lunch, he joined Bottom Group at the far end of the dining room. The Hillston seating arrangement during meals had been structured, like most activities, on a punitive scale. Wards were graded upon their work performance and general conduct of the previous week. Outstanding 'suckoles' were awarded Top Group status, with remaining Wards subordinated into Second and Bottom Groups. Seated at the head of the dining room, Top Group boys were served first, after the groupworkers, and had first rights to left-overs, again after the turnkeys. Remaining scraps that were not gobbled up by these two cohorts, were offered to Second Groupers. Bottom Groupers were forbidden seconds, while the L.O.P. boys, the worst of the lot, were entitled only to the main meal and water. Morning and afternoon teas, along with recreation breaks, were also denied to the same group. By the time Frankie had swallowed his first mouthful in thirty-six hours, he was bitterly regretting his capitulation.

Hillston gymnasium: boarded up due to repeat vandalism

The night-duty groupworker, Douglas Scott, a paragon of pedantry, banged on Frankie’s cell door after switching on his light at five the following morning, and said: “Panaia get up boy.” Frankie turned over, forcing his eyes open to comprehend the despicable intrusion into his sacred morning slumber. Scottie, as his colleagues affectionately addressed him, had the door wide open, and again directed him to rise.

“What’s going on sir?” Frankie asked.

“5 B.X. sunshine.”

“But it’s still pitch black sir.”

“You’re on L.O.P. Panaia, so you get to do an extra round, while the other boys are still sleeping. Now shake a leg and get into your PT uniform sonny jim.”

Frankie followed Scott to the deep end of the corridor, half blinded from the fluorescent tubes. Douglas Scott loved Hillston, as much as Frankie hated it. He enforced the discipline and drudgery of the Hillston regimen, with a smackhead’s fervour, hitting up on every rule recited and imposed on his charges. A mannequin of flawless dress, from his gleaming polished shoes, to his greased viscous hair, squared away like an army kit, the punctilious man devoted hours in investigating and punishing infractions. Months later, he would catch Frankie returning to the cellblock with a small bag of candy he had received during an enigmatic visit from his elder sister Maria.

“What’s that you got in your hand Panaia?” he demanded.

“Just some lollies from my visitor sir.”

“You know the rules Panaia. No food or drink in the cabin block.”

“But my sister gave them to me.”

“I don’t care. Rules are rules. What would we have if we didn’t have rules eh? I know what I’ll tell you,” and he stuck his hand out, his fingernails spotless and symmetrically clipped.

“What’s the matter Mr Scott?” asked senior groupworker Weggelaar, who emerged from the panopticon dutyroom, observing the tense exchange.

Wary of Weggelaar's reputation for irregular gestures of humanity towards inmates, Scottie cringed, when the capricious supervisor drew near. He answered his superior with strained apprehension, the cadence of which, audibly discordant: “I have the ahem, excuse me, situation under control, thank you Mr Weggelaar Sir.”

“He’s taking my lollies sir. The ones my sister gave me this afternoon,” blubbered Frankie, who loved the plenitude of saturnal confectionery, more than the finitude of supernal life itself.

“Those are the rules boy. I didn’t make them, now hand them over,” persisted Scott.

Understanding the ahem situation, Weggelaar advanced closer, and said, “Come on Doug, they are only sweets. He can have them surely.”

Scottie's mealy-mouth dropped open staying agape for several seconds, before he could re-establish control of his stunned oral faculties. Never before, had a colleague publicly usurped his penal authority, let alone in defence of an inferior inmate.

Eventually Scott found his lost lingua to object: “but the rules sir! No boy is allowed to take food into the cabin block!”

“Yes Mr Scott, but just this time. They are from his sister after all.”

“But what sort of message is this sending to the boy? The rules sir, can not be broken.” For a moment it seemed Scott's sadistic 'analness' would prevail, until Weggelaar pulled seniority, directing him to back off. Frankie gushed undying gratitude to Weggelaar, and raced off to the cell to feast on his candy, a treat all the sweeter, by the victory against the "tight-ass" Scott. A precious victory never to be repeated, in his entire institutional life.

Keeping a distance of one meter from his prisoner, Scott commanded Frankie through the 5 B.X. for the next twenty minutes, and then returned him to his cell. Ten minutes later, he was released again, and lined up with the main population, to execute the general 5 B.X. in the gymnasium.

Hillston: main compound post-demolition

Multiple black-belt Harold “Gomer” Pywell conducted the morning PT in full combat dress of King Gee overalls and steel capped boots. Other than the Puma, Frankie feared the British immigrant Pywell the most, and not from an ever-expanding rainbow of karate belts he frequently boasted in mastering. Frankie apprehended something more minatory, yet less tangible; a religious fanaticism. A psychotic protestant, Harry, imagined himself as a soteriological crusader, charged with a Templar-like mission to rescue Christian civilization from demonic delinquents. Pywell's self-anointed assignment was to be prosecuted by dragging juvenile infidels 'down that paved road' of righteousness through rectification and atonement. If soft violence failed, then bone-shattering force, as sanctioned from a warped scriptural exegesis, was to be ministered.

Six months into Frankie’s 'rural rectification,' Pywell crossed his cell's threshold on a blessed Sunday afternoon, to confront him over a dining room trespass. Having missed his favourite dessert of custard and jelly, Frankie was in no mood for homilies from a puritanical 'cretin.'

“When are you going to learn Panaia?” raved Pywell, his karate-chop hand strangling the Redeemer's Word, bound inside a tattered King James.

“Learn what and from who...you Gomer, and your useless religion!”

“See that’s your problem isn’t it, no religion no respect. You are are sick with sin.”

“Kiss my pimply ass ya bible bashing wanker!”

“Apologize for that you vulgar demon-”

“Make me ya poxy maggot!”

Pywell wordlessly prayed during a sinister silence, rabidly staring down into Frankie, who remained impiously seated on the bed. “You know what Panaia, I am prepared to sacrifice for your unclean soul,” he enigmatically proclaimed.

“Jesus come again Gomer! I don't speak spastic.”

“At any cost, unrepentant lost souls must be saved,” he thus spake, the deliberate enunciation perceptibly frenzied.

“Oh sit on it Gomer,” countered Frankie, with diminished bravado, realizing the imbecile immigrant had now, in his anxious eyes, swapped the clownish "Gomer Pyle" persona for maniacal Grand Inquisitor.

“Any cost,” iterated the dead serious Christian, whose eyes seemed inflamed with the burning flesh of Bruno.

“Ooh I’m super-duper scared now man. What ya gonna do, whip me with your poxy black-belts and crucify me?” apostatized a reinvigorated gentile. 

“Panaia I wouldn’t waste energy strapping you, because a flogging won't produce the required effect. Instead what I ought to do, is break both your legs with a cricket bat.”

Pywell’s sanctimony, delivered with such categorical conviction, now greatly affected Frankie whose alarm was compounded from the penumbra of fanatical concentration eclipsing the maniac's countenance. That Pywell omitted to also reject the utility of the crucifixion barb, did not escape the Ward's pagan cognizance. 

Christ, he's really going to break my legs, considered Frankie, before replying with near depleted defiance, “yeah if you do, you'll lose your job man.”

“This I know Panaia, but my sacrifice will be worthy if smashing your femurs and fibulas forces you to your grimy knees before our Lord Savior,” adding ominously, while squeezing harder the Gospel, draining from it the remaining Ichor of Christ: “according to Scripture, I might not have a choice.”

In a winter cold gymnasium, Gomer Pywell, risen in a pulpit of pharisaicalness, loomed messiah like before the vulgar turba, trembling in shorts and t-shirts. They went through the drill, and as usual, when Pywell conducted 5 B.X., his captive heretics were subjected to various calisthenics. “Stick your leg out like this and stand still,” Pywell commanded, elevating his own leg in a demonstration of balance, still wearing his boots. Falling over themselves, the boys endeavored to ape the unbalanced clown, with 13 years practice in palm-striking chipboard opponents under his chromatic belt. “Come on you useless bunch,” the rectal rector jeered, as he continued to suspend his boot in the air, gloating in his lordly feat. He put his foot down to the relief of the Wards, and again rebuked them for their profane uselessness.

Steam engulfed the ablutions, as boys showered on a tag basis in the six cubicles, which were divided into two opposing rows. As usual whites were last, with Blueblacks and Noongars tagging a cuz (cousin) or brother, regardless of their position in the purple tinea bath queue. Graham Wally, a confused part-Aborigine, with a large chip on his shoulder, waited unnecessarily behind Frankie, and said: “Hey wog, hey wog.”

Frankie ignored him, hoping against proven tradition, he would stop.

“Hey ding greaseball, I heard you got seven days, ha ha ha.”

Frankie remained unresponsive, and contrary to common belief, in juvenile institutions, this was the worst kind of response.

“Wog! Wog dog,” continued the aspiring teen thug, and he flicked Frankie on the tip of his ear. The other boys laughed, spurring on Wally’s attack.

“You think you're smart don’t ya wog?”

“Drop him Wal,” said Lionel Hicks, another cuz.

“Nah, he’ll just cry like a baby. Won't ya wog?” and he reached over and flicked Frankie's other ear.

“Fuck off Wally! What do you want? I didn’t do nothing to you huh,” protested Frankie.

“Fuck you ding, I just hate poxy wogs. You wait cunt you’re gonna get it.”

“Make im piss cuz,” urged a brother enjoying the spectacle, beneath a hot shower.

“I’m gonna don’t worry,” promised Graham, and he reached over again, and this time thumped Frankie in the back of the head, causing him to wince in intolerable pain.

“That’s it,” said Frankie, and he swung around and lunged blindly at his tormentor. The ablutions exploded in an uproar of howls and hoots, with the cuz Noongars generating the loudest applause, as the combatants rolled about on the wet floor, grappling each other, seeking the advantage. Staff quickly intervened, separating the two, yanking them apart by their hair.

“You like fighting do you Panaia?” said John Priestley, who helped separate them.

“He fucking started it,” shouted Frankie, pointing his finger squarely at Wally.

“Fuck you ding wog cunt, your still gonna die,” answered Wally.

“I think these two need cooling off Mr Priestley,” said Bloxham, who had Graham in a headlock.

“Four walls of cold concrete should do the trick Mr Bloxham,” rejoined Priestley, before he shoved Frankie out of the doorway, into Falcon House, towards the designated punishment cell.

View from Hillston classroom

Not unlike most penal institutions, Hillston had its traditional notorious hole. Cabin 33, the first cell on the right in Falcon House, was crudely, though effectively modified with the wall and door optical apertures shuttered, and the light globe encased in a wire cage. When the door was shut and the light killed, the cell became a black cube. Frankie was flung in here naked. Initially concerned by the absence of light, he overcame this apprehension, when he could still hear the goings on, outside the cell. In the Hole, he remained until after lunch, and was then returned to school.

Making an enemy with Walley was parlous, as upsetting one Noongar, as Frankie painfully discovered, upset many, and a few Blueblacks too. From this moment on, many of the Noongars persecuted him, calling his names at every opportunity, hurting him in any way possible. Frankie was standing on parade a few days after the ablution incident, when an aboriginal inmate behind him in the middle row, cleared his sinus with a single violent blast through the nostril.

"Mr Griffith’s and Mr Leonard’s class file off,” ordered the senior groupworker. Frankie automatically responded to the command, lining up for the march to school.

“Eww Panaia,” remarked Schultz, one of the few Noongars Frankie got along with, “What’s that on your hair?”

“I don’t know. What Schultz?” asked Frankie.

“It looks like a huge snot. Yuk!”

Frankie brushed the back of his head with his hand, and collected a glob of yellow-green snot that had been fired on him during the muster. “Fucking dirty boongs,” he cautiously murmured, as he bent down to rub his hand clean in the red stones of Stoneville.

Rare image of populated Hillston parade ground 1975

Lesley Schultz was one of the heaviest and jolliest Noongars Frankie had come across. A grin was permanently fixed on the chubby chops of fourteen-year-old Schultz, who was possessed with a proclivity for borrowing Holden Commodores, sensa prior agreement with the owners. Poking fun at everything and anything, the jolly giant joked and jested from dawn to dusk. Frankie liked him a lot. Anyone who can laugh all day, without hurting someone, must be okay, he assessed, as he allowed himself to be drawn into the infectious society of Schultz.

On his seventh and final day of L.O.P., Frankie was busted by Scott for sculling tea from another boy’s cup.

“You have just won yourself another day Panaia,” announced a zestful Scott, sitting at the head of Bottom Group table.

“Why?” Frankie demanded angrily.

“Come on Panaia, you know the rules. Boys on L.O.P., are not allowed tea,” came the keen retort.

“Fuck you wanker.”

“He he,” snickered Jamie Birnie, a permanent member of Bottom Group.

“What Panaia?”

“What? Which Watt? Watt's sitting with the Top Group,” said Frankie, parodying Scottie's indignation.

“He said fuck you sir,” interceded Sansalone, another frequent member.

“Ya poxy dobber Sansalone,” said Frankie.

“You shouldn’t talk to groupworkers like that,” counselled Sansalone, in his usual pathetic way of ingratiating himself to goons and like garbage.

“Thank you Domenic. And that’s another day for you smart ass,” advised Scott.

“I don’t fucking care. Shove your L.O.P., up your tight shiny ass!”

“Right Panaia that’s three days, and if you say one more word, you’re off to 33.”

Wrecked from three more days, Frankie exploded: “Get fucked cunt dog!” bringing the dining room to a remarkable standstill.

“That’s its Panaia. Let’s go,” said Scott, visibly flustered from such a sustained public attack.

“You gonna get it now,” sniped Sansalone.

“Fuck you ya poxy slow-,” and before Frankie could complete the next expletive, groupworkers Farmer and Bloxham, both reeking of cow dung, rushed over from their tables, and immobilised him. Twisting Frankie's arms excruciatingly high behind his back, the half-witted herdsmen frogmarched him out of the dining room towards the cellblock, while in the background, the boys hooted in schadenfreude.

Cell aka 'cabin' block: 1 of 3 corridors. Cell 33 left side 

 and closest to dutyroom in background.

“Strip,” ordered Bloxham to a cornered Frankie in 33. Bloxham slammed the door shut on the naked child and switched the light off.

“And if you so much as fart in there wog, I’ll have your guts for garters,” advised Farmer.

His corporeality reduced to the primal functions of pulse, breath and consciousness, Frankie remained in 33, until inmates returned to the cellblock following dinner. The Wards filed past 33 just before eight, enroute to their final toilet trip.

“Hey wog still alive?” someone generously inquired.

“You're gonna get it ding cunt when you get out,” kindly reminded another cobber. Ten minutes later, inmates filed back past the Hole, dispatching more taunts and threats, increasing Frankie’s contempt for his fellow prisoners. How can they do this, he thought, I am one of them, and they should be helping me, not making it worse. Why? What is wrong with them? Don’t they know who the real enemy is? “It’s not me, it’s the fucking 'groupwankers' you should be stirring,” he remonstrated aloud, answering his own interrogatives. Promethean perhaps, in unmasking the chameleon nemesis, Frankie's refractory foresight became a perennial stygian 'Heel.' Again and again, he pointlessly railed, slinging uphill Sisyphean stones against an impervious titan, who uplifted their child prisoners one day and knocked them down the next. Shouting like Pan, he raged with Laocoon prescience, at a mangy felinus effigy, creeping behind a Wall of bureaucracy, concealing a cast of pallid Hadrian sadists and smiling Sinons, only to be throttled by viperous stings from fellow Wards. Bitterly, he watched a childhood char into cinders, as an Astyanax or an Ascanius witnessed betrayed Ilium, and her Dardanian sons of the Italian Troas, burn.

“When will it sink into your thick bloody head that you can’t beat the System Panaia,” retches the pusillanimous groupworker, exonerating himself from the crimes of institutional tyranny, while paradoxically indicting the same System. This excusatory "unbeatable System" seemed an apologia mantra especially sacred to the deformed and unrecognizable Pallas polis viz, Britannicus, in which a unique barbarism against the vulnerable, defenseless and indigent, prevailed in yellowest servitude to a congenital dynasty of crowned inbred parasites. The effeminate despotism of bureaucracy and its Hydrae corridors to Erebus; the debased "blue-painted" Periclean polis, demanding socratic death, before disobedience. Carceral "black flower" abominations, in which "la perfide albion" and battered bambino were together hostage. Which of the two more degraded unknown.

Only when the general population had been locked down, did staff transfer Frankie from 33 to his 'normal' cell, allowing him to return to the furnished luxury of a mattress, linen and pillow.

McCall Centre - Cottesloe 1970s, adjacent Leighton Beach.

Many State Wards [boys] 'filtered' through this primary institution (formerly a sewerage processing facility), were confronted with the Pythagorean arboreal "Fork": either left or right divergence shoved towards. The bough 'elected', more or less dictated the destiny and duration of the journey ahead.

Groupworker Ward excused himself, as he entered Frankie’s classroom two days after the dining room incident, and informed Frankie he had a visitor. Ward dropped Frankie off at the administration building.

“Hello Frankie,” said a smiling Diana Lawlor, who was doing her circuit of institutions, as the roving child psychologist.

“Hello,” growled Frankie, still smarting from her therapeutic antics in Longmore.

“Come in and sit down Frankie, I want to talk you.”

“What for? Nothing changes anyway.”

“I can see you are not happy Frankie.”

“Well you wouldn’t be happy if they starved you too?”

“Well sit down and tell me about it,” said Lawlor soothingly.

The opportunity to gripe to someone, who cared or at least presented they did, softened his demeanour. He began ventilating his troubles, and when he got to the part about cell 33, he thought, he discerned genuine empathy in Lawlor.

“That should not be allowed,” she momentously commented.

“Yeah,” said Frankie, “what good is all this headshrinking crap and that, if groupworkers can lock up us boys like dogs huh?” Lawlor offered nothing, as she always did, when he contrasted the magniloquent therapy of psychology, with the brutish and degrading conditions of institutional life.

“I read in one of your behaviour dockets you were in a fight with another boy. Tell me about that.”

“Wally started stirring me and that.”

“And how was he stirring you?”

“Calling me names like ding and wog and that.”

“You should try to ignore him, and then perhaps he would stop.”

Assaulting this fossilized dowager with a large inutile Freudian tome would have been therapeutic indeed for Frankie, harmlessly though, he exhaled the exasperation, and explained, “Mrs Lawlor you can’t ignore it here. Its twenty-four hours a day. There's nowhere to hide!”

“Do you think your own behaviour is provoking other boys like Graham and Jack into picking on you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well your own bad behaviour towards the staff may be upsetting them.”

“Oh that’s bullshit. They’re poxy groupworkers and they’re the enemies, the same maggots who lock us up every night in boxes. They should be joining me, not fighting me. We’re on the same side god damn it!”

“I see. But maybe the other boys don’t see it that way, and see the groupworkers as friends, not enemies.”

“Then they're poxy idiots,” said Frankie hypocritically, which Lawlor picked up immediately.

“So you don’t have friends among the groupworkers?”

“Nope.”

“What about Mr Ward?”

“He’s different.”

“How is he different Frankie?”

How do I explain to her, he thought, that Wardie is different, because there is a kindness in him only I can see. Just like Weggelaar and Bodden, he does not rejoice in the misery of kids. He is not an unfeeling robot like that git Scott, who would happily watch a kid die from starvation, than bend the rules. He is human, and I have seen his humanity, as I have seen Jean’s, Gary’s and David’s, and I would do anything to please these people.

“He isn’t nasty to the boys,” he said finally.

“How long have you been here now Frankie?”

“I dunno about seven weeks, and still don’t know why I’m fucking here anyway.”

Ignoring the expletive Lawlor explained, “you’re here because Longmore felt the Hillston program would be good for you.”

“Well it isn’t,” and adding cynically, “unless it’s to lose weight.”

“Ha ha. Have you met your Aftercare officer yet?”

“No who is he?”

“Mr Merrifield.”

“So?” asked Frankie, who was beginning to identify a lexicological pattern from the misnomers in welfare jargon; farm, program, cabin, groupworker and now aftercare officer.

“He is the person, who will arrange a placement, before you are released from here.”

He shrugged unimpressed.

“Next week is your case conference with Mr Bowyer.”

“So?”

“We will be meeting with your Aftercare officer and case worker to discuss your future.”

“Aaah,” Frankie lazily exclaimed, a veteran of case conferences.

“Do you have any ideas about where you want to go Frankie?”

“Outta of this hole.”

“Yes but you must have another place to go.”

“Any bloody where, even the desert.”

“Well you know that’s silly. Anyway I have to see another boy, so I will speak to you again next week. Try to stay out of trouble Frankie.”

“But the problem is, trouble won’t stay away from me,” he replied, as he made to leave.

James (Jamie) Birnie, younger brother of David, 

followed Author through a chain of State institutions 

beginning age 5 in McCall Centre.

Sol's cor,  McCall Centre - circa 1975

Theo Merrifield pulled Frankie aside a week later from the afternoon-tea parade, and introduced himself. “Tomorrow is your case conference. Did you know?”

“Yeah Mr Ward told me. So you're the bloke, who will care for me after?”

“Bully for you, apart from your rotten behaviour, you have a sense of humour. Now is there anyone you can stay with, anyone at all? The problem is, there is not many places out there, we can send someone like you.”

Frankie thought about this, and then answered, “My grandma in Midland.”

“Your grandmother in Midland. What’s her telephone number?”

“She doesn’t have a phone.”

“What’s her address then?”

“Dunno, all I know is she lives in Midland with a fat geezer called Joe, and their house is painted blue or something.”

“That’s okay I can get her address later. If I ask her, whether you can stay with her, what will she say?”

“Dunno, she’s old and don't speak Australian and her husband (de facto), don't like me.”

“He's not the only one I'm told. Is there anyone else, like an uncle?”

“Nope that’s it, just me grandmas.”

“Right rejoin the muster. We will meet again tomorrow at your case conference.”

“Ah Mr Panaia” said Bowyer, who stood up to take Frankie’s hand the next afternoon. “I have heard a lot about you, all of it bad.” Chuffed from the insinuation of notoriety, Frankie held his tongue, and sat down between Ward and Lawlor. Merrifield took a chair, sitting alongside Bowyer. The conference concluded twenty minutes later, with the result, Frankie required, at least another two months of the Hillston rehabilitative program. In two months time, he would be conferenced again, and depending on his progress, be transferred to Darlington cottage, Hillston’s halfway house in Parkerville. In the meantime, and again depending on his behaviour, he could be weekend released to his grandmother, if she agreed to have him.

Back in the asbestos classroom, Leonard queried Frankie to the outcome of his case conference. “Nothing,” replied Frankie, leaning back in a chair, tossing a deeply gnawed Bic school edition pen up into the "wind's belly."

“Ha ha Panaia is here for good,” offered Steven Pregelj, a boy always ready for a laugh at someone else's expense. Frankie ignored him, and looked out of the window, staring into nothing, brooding over everything. Pregelj dragged Frankie's leperous lapis back to its saturnian realm, with another crack typical of his rotten character: “jingoes cod you gonna be old and bald, before you get outta ere he he.” Frankie was undecided whether Steven, was a white or black fella with his crude blend of Australian and Aboriginal slang, and a crown of shaggy sandy brown hair he knew was common among desert blacks. His skin though, was pale as the next Empire snotrag. Frankie played it safe and let the jibes slide.

Steven made 55.

Fifties seems to be the median figure former Hillston inmates,

not 'misadventured' in their 20s and 30s, are scissored by Atropos.

Hillston school report by Ken Griffiths 18 November 1980

Hillston boys were standing in line, waiting for a turn in the shower, when Frankie turned on Pywell, a preferred target, and inquired, “hey Gomer what does your book say about this place?”

“Say about what?” replied Pywell, overlooking the epithetic slur.

“About how you people treat us boys like animals. Is that really Christian?”

“What a dickhead,” someone reported from the back of the line.

“Have you heard spare the rod and spoil the child?” asked Pywell.

“What does that mean?” returned Frankie with real interest.

“It means, boys like you need correction, because if you are not disciplined, you will grow up into terrible sinners.”

“So starving boys, flogging them and locking them up in poxy holes is okay in the bible? It's gonna make us better Christians?”

“If it means you stop sinning, and turn towards our Lord, then yes.”

“You’re a spastic man.”

“Don’t push it Panaia.”

“You’re an mental case,” fired back Frankie, convinced the way to revolt, was to fight with his only weapon in reach - speech.

“That’s a day L.O.P. sport,” retaliated Pywell.

“Suck shit ya greasy ding,” ratified a boy, busy on the bog.

“Hero!” someone else yelled out in approval.

Fed to his back teeth of L.O.P., Frankie ripped into Pywell and his bible, unleashing a torrent of blasphemes, until he was again dragged away to the 'sepulchral 33.'

The following morning Frankie was greeted with the boofhead and piercing peepers of La Puma. “You’re starting to piss me off,” he declared, as he backed Frankie up against the wall, clipping him under the ear. La Puma left and returned a few minutes later, with a rag at his feet; a piece of fabric he had kicked from the cleaning store to the cell. He commanded his prisoner to pick the rag up and follow.

La Puma led Frankie to Eagle House corridor, and told him to polish the floor until his image could be reflected in the shine. Hungry from missing breakfast, Frankie went to his hands and knees, launching into a polishing frenzy, desperate to impress the Puma, fearful he would be deprived of lunch too. When he finished two hours later, Frankie's knees were red sore, from the friction of his flesh pressed against the jarrah floorboards. He humbly tapped on the dutyroom door, to inform his overseer, he had finished. The Puma slammed a third biscuit into his gob and escorted him to Eagle House, to inspect his labour.

“This floor should shine like a mirror Paaneeha,” said La Puma, “is it shining like a mirror to you?”

Frankie looked down into the boards, desperate to catch his reflection, perceiving only a blurred dull image.

“No sir.”

“Right back to your bin cock.”

The noisy lunchtime muster of 40 bellies growling on the parade ground, was fifteen minutes away, reckoned Frankie. From his punitive experiences in Longmore, he understood isolated inmates received meals during the muster stage, because a prisoner was tasked from the ranks to perform the demeaning chore of delivering food to secluded prisoners. In the hundreds of days Frankie was to hang in isolation, he had studied this prison routine, beginning from the meal’s preparation in the kitchen, to its journey across the prisoner yard, through the cellblock, and finally to the door of the cell.

Frankie could hear the Hillston boys on parade, their boot heels scraping the bitumen gravel. Panic settled in. He listened intently, pressing his ear against the joint of the thick cell door, hoping to hear a lock turn and grill swing on its iron hinges; sounds familiar to all men trapped inside a cage of mortar and metal, with nothing, than the next rationed meal to anticipate.

Hillston Wards had now marched into the dining hall. The cellblock remained quiet. La Puma had exited earlier, to oversee the lunch muster, leaving behind the sole dutyroom groupworker. Frankie heard the faint tinkling of cutlery, as this groupworker dealt with his own lunch, destroying any hope of a feed, because he knew the meals for inmates and staff, were delivered together. He faced the window in private shame. Igneous tears streamed down his face.

Keen pangs of hunger wracked Frankie, and he pounded on the unbreakable rectangle panel, until the inconvenienced groupworker strolled down to the cell door.

“What’s your game Panaia?” he asked, his pinkie deep in his mouth, probing the wisdom teeth for lamb chop gristle.

“Where’s my lunch?” demanded Frankie, through the observation panel.

“Ask Mr La Puma when he gets back, cause its got nothing to do with me, so shut up.”

“Get ripped ya poxy maggot,” roared Frankie, as the groupworker turned around to return to the dutyroom and lunch. Lifting his knee to his belly, Frankie kicked out and smashed his heel against the heavy solid door. He reeled back in pain, thinking he had sprained his ankle, so he switched foot and kicked again, only this time, he used the full surface of the foot to better absorb the impact.

La Puma returned to the cellblock an hour later, smiling, when his cancerous cerebrum comprehended the source of the racket. Here’s another one I’ve rattled, he thought, as he zeroed in on his prey, as a hyena closes on a cornered cub. Through the thick Plexiglas panel, La Puma’s black beady pupils muted Frankie, with their penetrating stare. He unbolted and swung the door open, maintaining his fierce stare on the captive.

“What’s up your arse shithead,” he yelled, his upper lip quivering in rage.

Subdued from the mere presence of La Puma, Frankie meekly inquired to the whereabouts of his lunch. “You forfeited lunch cock, because of the lousy job you did on the floor.”

“But I already missed my breakfast sir.”

“Someone get me a box of kleenex, because you’re breaking my heart. I’ve had shitheads in here for days without food Paaneeha. You’ve only missed two meals, so think yourself lucky cock. Now if I hear so much as another squeak out of you dickhead, you’ll lose more than your lunch, you’ll lose your fucking teeth! Understand?” Too scared to challenge his power, and yet too angry to yield, Frankie employed passive resistance by refusing to answer. Stepping closer to increase his intimidation, La Puma barked, “answer me!” Frankie stood his ground, his belly apparently braver than his heart. “You really are a slow learner Paaneeha, aren’t you?” Without waiting for a reply, La Puma clobbered Frankie on the right side of his head, then snatched his thick Grecian hair, and ruthlessly yanked him to 33.

At two-thirty La Puma handed over the afternoon shift to the relieving Senior Lionel Baker, a transaction, apart from the actual dialogue, discernable from the cavity of 33. Baker, a dull but reasonable man, released Frankie from the punishment cell after the rationed evening meal, he had allowed against the wishes of La Puma, and returned him to his cell. Frankie promptly jumped into the comfort of his bed, regaining the body heat lost from six hours naked in the dead sterility of 33. An hour later, he woke to the rapping on the door viewing panel, by gleeful inmates mocking him, for both the hardship he suffered, and the recreation he missed.

The PYWELL Photograph 1979: British immigrant Harry Pywell, far right,

threatened to break this Author's legs, because religious scripture

endorsed such medieval violence against "disobedient boys."

Tony or Eddy (?) Dabb (left) and Russell Miller (right).

Group Worker Alan or Andrew (?) Christensen seated

Harrold (Harry) Pywell, 2014

Then still spouting puerile religious and 'self-defense' babble, this time via 'Farcebook.' The 'epic' irony being that, his greatest enemy was always his deranged and paranoid Self.

For the first time in its heinous history, Hillston recruited a full-time psychologist. Half the age of her roving peer Diana Lawlor, Marian Binnie was a grotesque creature in more ways than just her fabricated appearance. Short and stumpy, she had, from head to foot covered her flesh, in deep makeup, rendering her features more artificial than a store mannequin. Her hair was petrified in a rich orange dye, making her easily visible, in spite of her tiny stature, from any point in the compound. When the Hillston Blueblacks learnt the surname of this latest British immigrant, they fell into fits of laughter, chuckling thereafter, whenever she was sighted throughout the institution. Binnie, in one of the hundreds of native tongues, translated into vagina. “Miss Binnie,” the Blueblacks would call out, “show us your Binnie,” and they and the boys in the know around them, would erupt.

One of the first boys Binnie would interview, was Frankie, summoning him two days after his latest visit to 33. “Thank you Mr Taylor,” she said primly, dismissing the escorting groupworker. “Sit down please. My name is Ms Binnie and I am the new psychologist.” Sick of being counselled by therapists, who provided little more than a brief distraction from the drudgery of institutional life, people, who could offer a thousand reasons to justify the brutal conditions of his existence, but never ameliorate them, Frankie slumped in the chair and yawned at the transplanted 'shrew,' pumped with selfish ambition and racist anglophone arrogance.

“Tired are we?” she asked smarmily.

“Yep I’m tired of people like you who talk and do nothing.”

“And what do you expect people like me to do?”

“Well for one thing get me outta of this hole, and another stop these animal groupworkers from treating me like I am one of them – a fucking animal!”

“How do they treat you like an animal?” asked Binnie blandly.

“They lock me up in 33 and starve me. That’s how! Now can you stop that?”

“My business, Mr Panaia is what’s going on inside your head, and not what happens to you on the block.”

“Yeah well my business is what’s not going into my stomach from days of starvation,” riposted Frankie, who then stood up to leave. Binnie sprung from her recliner and shoved her well-fed and pampered torso, between her client and the door, demanding he sit down.

“I don’t wanna, I’m finished with you,” he declared.

“You are not finished until I say so young man, now sit down.”

“You can force me stay here, but you can’t make me talk,” he countered, certain a tactic of silence would achieve an equal effect in conveying the deep scorn he harboured for such clinical parasites. The next fifteen minutes the two engaged in a contest of mute staring, with "Bitch Binnie," as Frankie intuitively labelled her, backing down, and sending him back to class, with a promise of being called upon again.

Next on Binnie’s list was the chunky Schultz, whom she had, in consultation with the nurse, put on a radical weight reduction diet. In the first week of his diet, Lesley Schultz was compliant, enjoying the extra attention he received during meal times. The novelty began to wear off in the second week though, and his resolve was finally broken, when Chef Roersma served up extra helpings of bread and butter pudding, with 3 boys on his table doing thirds. Eventually, his jolliness transformed into sourness, and where a healthy grin once illuminated his chubby cheeks, a grim dour expression manifested.

Lunch had come and gone on a Friday, and First, Second and Bottom Group boys were enjoying the allotted twenty minutes of free activities on the parade ground, while boys on L.O.P. looked on with envy from the dining room benches. Meanwhile Schultz had been sent for by Binnie. Several minutes later, Les abruptly exited the cellblock sobbing, shuffling along the veranda towards the strictly out of bounds carpark. Behind him, Binnie called for Schultz to return. He ignored her and continued to wail and walk. Three groupworkers soon surrounded Les, who was now approaching the steps to the staff carpark. They jumped him, and attempted to subdue the heavy lad the only way qualified brutes know how. Les resisted, and tried to break free, while Binnie and the boys looked on in unusual silence. A groupworker kicked Les' right leg from under him, and with a sickening thud, sixty kilogram Schultz crashed belly first into the veranda concrete. Les screamed in pain and anger, struggled furiously, inviting staff to pin him on the pavement with their knees. A fourth groupworker sprinted from where he had been sitting outside the dining room, and grabbed a thrashing leg. Now, with a groupworker on each limb, Les was half carried, half dragged along the green veranda, to the cellblock and 33. Here he remained for the rest of the day denuded of clothing.

The veranda (R) Les Schultz was body slammed into.

Author stood by green steps, when he confronted Marion Binnie,

who was frozen by the dutyroom grill.

Binnie’s machine like brain temporarily short-circuited. She had not shifted from the safe place by the administration block. Behind the veranda railing, Frankie, who had witnessed the entire drama, turned to face Binnie, and above the ebbing shrieks, asked in a most caustic tone, “tell me again, how your poxy headshrinking helps us boys?”

Marian Binnie and bitch. As of 2009, this British immigrant still

'practiced' clinical psychology in Perth. Indeed the turd can flee the bleached cliffed bog, but whither its flies, its fetid strain endures. 

Graham Butterworth slept in the cell opposite to Frankie’s. He was the only prisoner in the borstal permitted to keep his hair collarbone length, and for a reason Frankie could not as then ascertain, he would drop his daks, and flash his pale pommy posterior all over Hillston. From classroom to dining room, whenever the occasion allowed for it, Butterworth dropped his underwear. A decade after Hillston was decommissioned, Frankie received a letter from the nascent exhibitionist, who had scribbled in childish hand, how he had, over the years maintained a repressed homosexual crush on him, recalling his "happiest moments at Hillston" were when the two showered in opposite cubicles. The dissolute missive went on to explain, how the correspondent cross-dressed on a daily basis, and that, the synthetic hermaphrodite would like nothing more than to suck the living daylights from his former co-prisoner, while sporting a pair of scarlet high heels, colour matching his lipstick. Even for the somewhat degenerate Frankie, the depravity of the content appalled him, so he sought to hunt the raging faggot down, to personally communicate a reply. He begun with the post office, as the letter provided a post box address for correspondence. Postal policy prohibited disclosure of the box owner details, so Frankie answered the letter in a most masculine manner and left it that.

The two prisoners were tossing socks, rolled into the shape of a ball, between their cell doorways waiting for the dinner muster. During this exchange, fourteen-year-old Butterworth ducked into his cage, reappearing in the doorway, with his scrotum wrapped over his penis. “Look at me,” he said, “I’m a woman my name is Miss Binnie,” and together they chuckled at the penile parody. “Panaia!” a groupworker shouted from the top of the corridor. Frankie stuck his head out of the cell doorway. “Front and centre, the chief wants to see you.”

PR PHOTO OP: Tony (or Eddie) Dabb 'endearingly' guided by another migrant British groupworker (Ken Smith) - Hillston woodwork shop. Needless to say, the 'fatherly' pose was artificial. Turns out Smith, was a wannabe 'thespian' later cast in a minor role in the local (Perth) feminist production "Fran" (1985).

Work activity Inmate / Staff assignment sheet 1979:

Author assigned to Alistair Leonard (School Teacher)

Meeting Bowyer on his own for the first time and for no apparent reason, except for his chronic and well-documented belligerence, long since considered normal by inmates and turnkeys alike, Frankie struggled towards the administration block, a little daunted.

“Thank you Jim” said Bowyer, dismissing his subordinate back to the block.

“Sit down Frankie,” said Bowyer, who then asked: “Are you nervous?”

“Nope,” he said dishonestly.

“Good because I just want to meet you on our own. You have become quite the celebrity here. The dockets I have on your behaviour! Well, lets just say I need a separate file cabinet just for yours,” he said smiling, drawing his chair closer to Frankie in the middle of the office. Perplexed by the unorthodox manner of the man, and by the appearance of genuine interest in his welfare, Frankie sat stiffly in the chair.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on Frankie?” he asked, again in conciliatory tone.

“About what sir?” Frankie said, finally finding his tongue, amazed at hearing his christian name spoken by an adult.

“About your behaviour. You must be getting sick of loss of privileges by now. You’re on a Hillston record.”

“I don’t reckon I should be here anyway.”

“Why?”

“Well they only sent me here, because I complained about a groupworker in Longmore for hitting me.”

“That may be so, but the fact is you’re here now aren’t you?”

“Yeah I know, but why do they have keep locking me up in 33 and starving me?”

“Starving you!” Bowyer exclaimed “you’re exaggerating aren’t you? The discipline program is very clear. Boys confined to cabin must receive meals. Rationed of course.”

“Yeah well why don’t they tell Mr La Puma that, because I have already missed heaps of meals because of him, and when they do give me a meal, half of its gone anyway.”

“Well that’s wrong and harsh-”

“And what about when groupworkers hit you and lock you up in 33 naked and without light!” Frankie added, in a stream of indignation.

In what appeared to be shame, Bowyer stared down at his shiny Italian slip-ons, before he answered, “Yes I know about 33 and Mr La Puma, and I don’t like it too, but…”

Jesus Christ, thought Frankie, he’s taking my side, the fucking Super is agreeing, fuck it, must be some sort of trick, Jesus fucking Christ!

“Listen Frankie, I would like to make a bargain between you and me. Interested?”

Instinctively cautious, Frankie said, “What is it first…sir?”

“You never let your guard down, I reckon you could play a good game of chess. Have you played chess before?”

“Yes sir.”

“OK this is the deal, if you can make Top Group and stay there for two weeks I will allow you to move to Darlington Cottage. You know about Darlington don’t you?”

“Yeah it’s a hostel over in Parkerville.”

“Sort off, it’s more a halfway house than a hostel, managed by on-site cottage parents, who live with their two children. Mr Priggs and his wife are the house parents. So is it a deal?”

“Okay.”

“Good you better get back to the cabin block or you will miss the dinner muster, and another meal,” he said smiling. On the veranda, Bowyer watched Frankie, until he reached the cellblock grill, until itself opened like a huge mouth to swallow a morsel.

Cow Shed: Hillston's milk mainly sourced from farm cows

An opened envelope was handed to him, as he passed the dutyroom, his fourth letter since he arrived at Hillston. “Suckole,” David Metcalf called him, as he walked down the corridor to his cell. Something fucking weird about that Metcalf, Frankie observed internally, before turning his attention to the censored letter. It was from Jean, who had replied to his letter sent two weeks before. He spread out the folded sheets, ready to relish this missive, but would have to wait until after dinner, because just then, the wing groupworker issued the order for line up.

Seated in the doorway of his cell, Frankie turned Jean's letter over in his hands. All the boys were now confined to their respective wings, allowed to read and talk among themselves for an hour, before the eight-thirty lock up. “On the personals,” a sunny Scottie called from the small storeroom outside the dutyroom. A handful of Top Group and Second Group boys promptly gathered, waiting to be handed a small wooden box tagged with their surname. This privileged activity involved nothing more, than the temporary release of personal sundry items, boys had accumulated during their Hillston imprisonment. Old letters, comics, photos and playing cards were all contraband in the cells, and thus stowed under lock and key. The only items Frankie had in his personal box were letters, along with stamps, he philately ripped from envelopes, he and other inmates received.

In 1991, David Ernest Metcalf, who followed the Author to Riverbank, then prison, hung himself in a new Casuarina prison cell, days prior to his scheduled release. David was 26, and on a number of occasions, had been 'rehabilitated' in Fremantle Prison. On one of these occasions, this Author neighboured the cell caging David, whose [untreated] anguished, if not harrowing schizophrenic 'rants,' could be heard during the long hours of lock-up (4pm - 7.30am). David, as with many 'Welfare' Wards, was finally rehabilitated by his own hand. 

It’s been a good day Frankie observed privately, I got a letter, a meeting with the Super and I finished L.O.P. last night. Reading Jean's letter, he was amused at the little difference, between her written and spoken word.

Hi Hon,

Let’s get one thing straight Hon, I did not betray you about the Mr Lee matter. Hon that was out of my hands and I was as much surprised as you were when I found out you had been sent to Hillston. Anyway Hon what’s done is done and now you have to try to make the most of it. Mr Ward has been telling me about you and how you have been getting into trouble frequently. Well firstly let me say Hon I’m not surprised I mean after all you would not be Frankie if you were not always in trouble. But Hon you’re nearly thirteen years old now, (nearly a man), and, (I know I have told this before), you have to take responsibility for your actions. In other words my darling no one is in control of your behaviour except you, so that means if you make a mistake then you have to take responsibility for that. I know its hard sweetie, but try Hon, if not for yourself then for Mr Ward and me. You know he really likes you and believe it or not watches out for you down there. Be nice to him Hon because he is one of the few friends you have there.

I’m not promising anything Hon but maybe I can come down there next month for a visit, but that depends on how busy I am, there is so much overtime here now and my son Brett is getting ready for university. So anyway if I can’t come and visit I will ring okay. So remember please please Honey be good, try and show them that Frankie Panaia can behave and can turn the other cheek, and can be a mature man. Remember my darling you are responsible for your own actions.

Love Mrs Bodden

Jean Bodden: former Longmore prison groupworker, who befriended the Author. Jean was a typical vilus British groupworker, but atypical in that, unlike her bestial compatriots, she treated the Wards with dignity and kindness.

"Mrs Bodden" is always remembered with fondness and gratitude.

A few weeks after this letter, Frankie received another from Jean. In this letter she explained how, in consultation with Bowyer and Merrifield, she had the green-light to seek a temporary placement for Frankie at the notorious Clontarf Boys Home, a stone's throw from the Longmore prison in metropolitan Perth. Frankie had heard tales about Clontarf, which he understood was run by a cloister of Irish Christians. He also knew it was an old institution and more liberal than the Hillston regime, providing much more freedom of movement. This last quality was sufficient, and he now shifted hopes for his liberty, albeit partial, on the efforts undertaken by Jean Bodden.

Six weeks passed since the private conference with Bowyer, before Frankie fluked a two-week run of Top Group. An achievement rendered easier, due to a heavy head cold, an affliction, which for Frankie acted, as a natural calmative. Bowyer kept his promise and had Frankie transferred to Darlington Cottage on a Monday morning. Cottage parents Gavan and Doris Priggs met Frankie in the stony driveway. “So you’re Frankie Panaia eh?” Gavan Priggs asked with a fat almost incomprehensible Cockney accent.

“Were glid to have you here Frankie,” chirped Mrs Priggs, “and we hope you will be happy here too.” Something false rang in the pair’s greetings; a forced almost contemptuous politeness Frankie had frequently encountered.

“Why don’t you wander around to the back and meet the other two residents, while we have a chat with Mr Ward,” suggested a supercilious Gavan Priggs.

Shortly after Ward's departure, the Priggs summoned Frankie back to the front yard. “Now you listen boy,” began Gavan Priggs “you were sent here against our wishes, cause we know you’re going to stuff up. Aren’t you, you little wop? So here is your first and last warning: you stuff up, you will be back up the road so fast, your greasy feet won’t touch the ground. Understand?”

Frankie nodded his head, interpreting the threatening tone, rather than the words.

Priggs continued, “Good now here are the rules; that’s your kennel there,” and saying so, he pointed to an annex separated from  the spacious double brick house. “Rule number two you don’t talk to, or play with my boys. Rule number three you don’t enter my house without my wife’s, or my permission, and rule number four, you don’t leave the grounds for any reason. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes Mr Piggs er Priggs.”

Priggs' oldest boy, ten-year-old Gary ran wailing to the house door the following day. “Daddy Daddy that new Hillston boy broke my bike.”

“What Gary?” Priggs asked from the prohibited sanctum of the house. Gary ran into the house sniveling, and Priggs stormed out seconds later shouting.

“Git over ere Pinaia!”

Frankie presented himself, angrily confident he could extricate himself from the childish mess caused by the negligent actions of Priggs' spoiled sprog.

“What did I tell you yesterday?” he frothed.

“I didn’t do anything,” he yelled back trying to match Priggs' vicious demeanour.

“You were told, were you not, not to speak to my boys and not to touch their things?”

“I did not touch their poxy things.”

“Bollocks stop lying you delinquent sod, you couldn’t lie straight in bed you friggin eyty tosser.”

This time Frankie had to request Priggs to repeat his Cockney babble, as gushing guttural thick, even Frankie’s ears, accustomed to the gutter accents of the kingdom, could not comprehend. Pavlov's pooch and its demonstration of conditioned reaction intrigued Frankie a decade later, when he sat abnormally attentive in the Psych 101 lecture. Ring the bell and fido salivated, lubricating its jaws for an anticipated feed. That’s why, Frankie self-examined, my flesh cringes and bile rises within, whenever the auditory sense, is begrimed with an unmistakable brogue of one of Her majesty’s minions.

Priggs obliged an uncomprehending Frankie, “open your earole wop. You’re a lying shite. You buggered me son’s bike, didn’t yer?”

“No I didn’t, he fucking broke the pedal, cause he hit the fucking fence.”

“You lying wop. Bollocks! My son doesn’t lie.”

“Yes he does and fucking is!”

Priggs moved closer, aiming to administer a clip under the ear to the unctuous wop, when Mrs Priggs emerged from the house.

“Don’t you swear at me, you greasy wop shite,” returned Mr Priggs, whose final volley, was backed with a unintelligible grumble from Mrs Priggs.

Turning his back on the Priggs, Frankie concluded the exchange with a favourite Hillston boy salutation of 'get fucked wanker.' The Priggs scrambled into the house and to the telephone.

“Crikey Frankie, twenty-four-hours,” remarked a bewildered Bowyer.

“They hated me, they didn’t give me a chance sir.”

“But one day Frankie, come on really!”

“Ah what’s the use, you won’t believe me anyway.”

“ Try me.”

“Well for starters he hated me because I’m a ding, and then he blamed me for his son’s bike pedal, which he broke, not me!”

“Hmm Mr Priggs tells a different story. You verbally abused him and his wife. Is that true?”

“Yeah, but that was after he accused me of breaking his son’s poxy bike”

“Okay okay, let's leave it for now, as there is no chance of you going back.”

“Good, cause I wouldn’t go back even if you paid me.”

Bowyer brought out the chessboard and invited Frankie to play. “You move first,” he said. Frankie advanced a pawn, with Bowyer responding likewise. Several moves later, Frankie checkmated a seemingly stunned Bowyer. “I’m impressed Frankie, no one has ever beaten me that quickly.” Frankie positively glowed from the compliment. A little later, when his strutting Mussolini ego had decompressed, he suspected Bowyer had outmaneuvered him in a different battle of wits, by orchestrating the victory.

“Listen,” said Bowyer after he cleared away the chessboard, “how would you like to meet each week for a game of chess?” Frankie pondered at length about this unheard, although irresistible invitation.

“Well?”

“But what about the other kids sir? You know maybe they will think I’m getting special treatment or something.”

“The other kids and the groupworkers for that matter, don’t have to know. It will be our private thing.”

All of Hillston, it seemed, sniggered at Frankie’s lightening-fast eviction from Darlington Cottage, confirming to many, he was the hopeless habitual delinquent he had long been labelled. Merrifield approached Frankie on the parade ground four weeks after his record breaking placement, and explained how Jean Bodden had miraculously secured a temporary bed for him at the Christian residential school, Clontarf. In addition, Jean had simultaneously and single-handedly, convinced the Department to transfer him on a trial basis.

Infamous for its austerity, and then perversity, Clontarf Boys’ Town had a grim history, stretching back to Federation. Hundreds, if not thousands of testy urchins, had been entered into the monastic like institution, a principality unto itself, beholden to no authority, but Him. The fraternity of stiff Irish Brothers never had it so good for so long; free to fondle an Arcadian phalanx of orphaned and abducted males in any manner desired. Fortunately for Frankie, by 1979, the Order’s grip on its phallic dominion, had slackened to a limp. Now, most of the traditional Brothers, many of whom had savoured decades of passionate sacrifice, their Theoginis appetites surfeited, had departed to a higher arcadia, leaving behind an impotent mixture of ancients and neophytes to preserve the tradition. A hopeless endeavour, when an evolved and hard generation of cocksure youths sought to emasculate the authority of their robed masters, by reciprocating the violence.

Clontarf admin: 12 yr Author pinched "Winfield Blues" 

from the admin and was promptly ejected.

Into this morbid and moribund climate, Frankie was thrust, several years before the institution was finally shut-down in a spurt of scandal that ejaculated from the stimulus of sodomite revelations. Discipline and order had all but collapsed, and for the first time in his institutional life, Frankie felt more intimidated by the kept, than the keepers. Stuck in time and tradition, the dwindling Order, bereft of religious and devoid of secular power, was flaccid against the currents of change breaking on all sides of their holy grounds. Modernity and its turbine of liberal democracy had beat a path to St Peter's gates, and the hounds of secular bureaucracy were baying out front.

Cut from the same limestone deposit buried beneath McCall Centre, Clontarf, even during daylight, was disquieting. At night, in the seventy-year-old dormitories, where countless tears had shed and wounds bled, it was especially ghastly. Everything, the door hinges, floorboards, window frames and roof beams groaned from the muffled sobs of unrequited shades. Pain and despair soaked the very foundations of the grim institution, and Frankie was having none of it. One other boy now remained in his seven bed dormitory, and on the weekends, he would disappear for leave, leaving Frankie alone with the phantoms of past. After lights out, Frankie flickered like a dying globe, between drowsiness and alertness, starting at every noise, the source of which, became more diabolical as the Plutonian nights advanced. In the mornings, he wearily sought out the dorm Brother, begging transfer to a populated dormitory. Brother Ferguson, an insomniac, who spent entire nights in the car park tinkering with an antique Austin, rejected his pleas, claiming his fears were figments of a heathen mind.

Every type of infraction had been perpetrated a thousand times before Frankie’s arrival at Clontarf. Nothing, it seemed, could top the event, he witnessed on the afternoon of his admission, when a Brother retreating from the dairy, charged past Frankie, nursing a bloodied nose. This incident shook Frankie’s ego, undermining his self-esteem, which had so far been cultivated from a history of unparalleled intractability. Over the next seven days he moped about in this wild environment, baffled in how to perform, without the harness of panoptic supervision. Unrestricted in his movements during daylight, he instinctually gravitated to the prohibited administration block to discover a booty of staff personal effects, including Winfield Blues, his favourite tobacco brand.

Simulating uncanny biblical symmetry, Frankie, on his eighth-day of trial placement, was cast out by the Brethren for breaking the eighth commandment. Frankie was duly restored to the 'welfare' custody of Hillston.

"Winnie Blues": pre-teen Author's preferred brand of 'fags'

Several weeks following his disastrous expedition inside the Clontarf institution, Frankie was approached by his Aftercare officer during morning-tea break in the Hillston dining room. “Good news Panaia, your grandmother has agreed to have you for weekend leave,” announced Merrifield.

“Ripper, when can I go?”

“As soon as you make Top Group again for two weeks. Can you do that?”

Such conditions amused Frankie, as much as they frustrated him. Given the right incentive, he could roll over and beg like the rest of them. “Sucking up” he said to Merrifield, “I can suck up, if I have to.”

A dull month of boredom ensued, punctuated with regular visits to 33, before Frankie yielded and sucked his way to Top Group. Nine months had come and gone since Frankie first arrived for a Dickensian dose of brutalisation and now, dressed in his shrinking civvies, he was marched back to the same spot, he first disembarked to be transported with three other boys to a weekend of actual freedom. Toohey, his temperament and gob just as odious as they were nine months ago, freighted his passengers to Midland train station carpark, the drop-off and pick-up point for boys residing north of the Swan River. It was three-thirty on a Friday afternoon, when Frankie began the one kilometre walk to his grandma’s house in West Midland.

“Remember,” warned Toohey, to the boys still in earshot, “Sunday four sharp! If you’re late, you will be reported AWOL.”

Frankie rapped on the front fly-screen door that was locked whenever Joe and grandma were at the back veranda. No one answered, so he shouted Joe’s name, drawing him from the backyard, where he was wading through his second pouch of Drum for the day. Frankie’s presence disrupted their afternoon routine of sitting in the Perth city mall in front of the Coles New World Variety store. So regular was their weekday routine, the couple had become part of the mall itself. Years later, when both became too invalid to maintain this routine, the Hay Street mall for Frankie, was deficient, as if the city had lost another heritage landmark. Across two decades, the Calabrese companions had congregated at the store front of Coles New World, becoming familiar to other bench squatters, farewelling the remains of bitter senescence, in the tranquilizing bustle of city life.

Armed with a walking stick, more as a defensive, rather than a mobility aid, Joe Cavallaro parked his hefty behind on one of the many street mall concrete benches, crass legacies of the seventies architecture, when concrete was rediscovered. He ploughed through his tobacco, and was content it seemed, to sit in silence and watch the people of Perth swagger past. They mostly strutted, the pedestrians, moving from shop to shop and office to office. Men suited up pounded the pavement, arrogantly convincing bystanders and perhaps themselves, of their executive status. Errant juveniles roamed aggressively, searching for delinquent distractions to vacuous existences, while Skinheads stomped about in steel capped Doc Martens, hunting ethnic heads to kick.

Another thuggish export from that imperial paddock of cultural "tea leafs," Skinheads patrolled Hay Street mall, more often than it was patronized by the old couple. Fresh from feculent Liverpudlian slums, the Scousers would coalesce like pungent odours in the centre of the mall. These craven packs intimidated and extorted passers-by, male and female, young and old, pursuing individuals, who dared to retaliate or resist along the mall, wielding a metal bin basket or other Perth City Council utility, not bolted down. Most Saturday nights, Skinheads battled against their arch-enemy, the Rocks. Mainly comprised of Italian Australians, the sole remit of the Rocks, was to seek out and engage Skinheads. By the late eighties, Skinheads had largely disappeared from the urban landscape, with many former members absorbed into the larger and more profitable gangs of the police and prison industries.

Giuseppe (Joe) in his beloved Hay Street Mall.

And again...

When Coles New World rolled its doors shut at five-thirty, signalling the end of trade for the day, Joe would rise in earnest, grasping his bus timetable and pensioner concession card, exhorting his spouse, to "andiamo." Weary from the day’s activities, and usually burdened with Coles groceries, the couple would slowly negotiate the two-hundred-metre walk to Irwin street bus stop, to board the 306 to Midland. On one unforgettable occasion, Giuseppe misplaced his travel concession card, compelling him to pay full fare. His card was later found, between the swollen buckled cushions on the back veranda couch, but the damage had been done. The temporary loss, had cost Joe an extra twenty cents, infuriating him for days after. “Minkia minkia," he cursed in Mezzogiorno dialect, appalled at his unforgivable lapse in vigilance.

Upon hearing the commotion from the front, the old boy raced to the locked fly-screen door, saying ello repeatedly, one of the few words in his repertoire of Australian, he had mastered since his immigration twenty-five years earlier. Seated in a chair, Rosa Badalota waited for her grandson to greet her. Her index finger deep in her snout, up pass the first joint, she managed an “Ow oo arr?” in response.

“Bene bene nonna. Coca Cola, do you have Coke?” Frankie enjoined, immediately exploiting his weekend of liberty, remembering Grandma always kept a stock of goodies for unpredictable visits she received from her dozen or so grandchildren.

“Ey?” she asked.

“Coke, drink,” he said.

“Si friz.”

“Friz?”

“Yesoo friz friz”, she said, and then blurted incomprehensible dialect to Joe, who sprung from the sofa, and rushed into the kitchen.

“Oh you mean fridge!” said Frankie, as he watched Joe open the fridge through the back fly-screen door.

“Friz yesso friz”, she said, as Joe handed over a cold can of coke. Joe had decided that the “friz” was off limits, which meant whenever Frankie sought, or was offered refrigerated sustenance, he would have to beat Frankie to the fridge. Joe’s stinginess, and lengths he went to avoid expense and loss, derided by the entire clan, was comical. Frankie suspected that, during the decade the couple had lived together on Byers road, their traditional backyard dunny had not been blessed with a new bog roll. He further supposed, the couple had remained unwashed during the same period, because he had not witnessed either of them, during his numerous Byers road sojourns, bathe beyond sluicing their faces and hands in the morning.

Frankie sunk his first soda, slaking a long and unbearable soft drink thirst. He exhaled a burp, then requested a smoke, which Joe duly obliged, by offering his pouch of Drum. After lighting the clumsily rolled cigarette, he took a deep dangerous draw, sending him into an instant coughing fit. He persisted with the smoke, until his insubordinate lungs suffocated into submission.

Joe shifted his Ceres' fed saddle off the twenty-year-old couch, the coils breaking through the padding, and headed for Midland's own 'epicurean garden,' seventy-seven metres in length. A veritable Pomona orchard, split down the middle into rectangular strips, it yielded a Mediterranean myriad of vegetables and fruits. The luxuriant loam, envied by Frankie’s uncles, enriched over the years from composted organic waste, produced zucchinis, olives, lemons, figs, mandarins, oranges, persimmons, pomegranates, tomatoes, lettuces, broccoli, artichokes, locusts, beans, peas, tea and a magus' manna in herbs. At the furthest end of this Garden of Alcinous, a bamboo plantation was cultivated in the mandatory Italian chook-yard, ensuring every inch of Demeter's dirt was utilized. Harvested bamboo poles were then re-planted to stake tomatoes and other vine bearing crops. And finally, lining both sides of the edenic estate, stretched out the hellion, yet indispensable nectar, sacred to Bacchus.

That Friday evening, when Astraeus declined to reunite with Eos, Frankie's maternal nonna was herself reminded of her appointment with Hestia. Rosa tossed a soggy matchstick, an oral hygiene tool employed for the past hour, to excavate lunch remnants from her rotten molars, into her de-facto's sunflower bed. She then shuffled into the cucina to prepare dinner. Dinner was customly Southern Italian, insignificant in size and variety, unlike the main course of the day. Rosa served up two fried eggs floating in a pool of olive oil, inviting Frankie to mop the plate dry with heavy chunks of Italian bread. Joe was typically presented with pranzo pasta leftovers, and he too saw it off with bread chunks, washed down with two mugs of homemade Dionysian hoama. Following dinner, Rosa rehearsed a refrain of indignation of home duty sacrifices, before clearing the table. From the hearth, the trio migrated to the TV room, adjacent to the master bedroom. Frankie swooped on the new colour TV, flicking through the three stations. It was barely eight-thirty, when Joe began yawning ominously in the background, communicating his intention to retire the household. “Dormire dormire,” insisted Joe abruptly, and then he switched off the TV. Frankie petitioned Joe, promising to mute the volume, so as not to disturb his sleep. Joe was unmoved, pointing to his antique watch. He then terminated the exchange by switching off the room light too. Noise was not Joe’s concern, as Frankie soon realized, it was the consumption of metered electric power.

Joe seated on his ancient couch - back veranda

An unfulfilled Frankie sat on his bed in the spare room adjoining the kitchen. He had heard stories about this room, where it was rumoured a relative of Joe’s passed away on the same bed, haunting the room since. Was it his wife? Frankie wondered. Listening intensely for signs of waking life though, Frankie heard only the deep rattle of snoring from Joe’s bedroom and the surreptitious scurrying of mice in the room, which also doubled as a storeroom for groceries and garden produce. He ventured out, and tiptoed to the TV room door turning the squealing brass doorknob excruciatingly slow. Joe’s bulk shifted loudly in bed, the springs pinging, but his engine like snoring continued. Frankie switched the TV on, and plonked himself arm’s length from the screen. His mesmerization was interrupted ten minutes later, when Joe, alerted somehow to the unlawful use of the power utility, rumbled in, his gut heaving from the exertion. Frankie cursed at both Joe’s and his own luck, and retreated to his bed, abandoning hope of outwitting the old man.

The routine continued for the remaining two days at grandmas. In the morning everyone sat at the back veranda, winding themselves up for the day, and the heavy pasta lunch. Lunch was then followed by smokes in the TV room. During this activity, Joe and grandma often dozed in their recliners, with Joe managing to keep an eye open, surveilling the juvenile guest. Around one o'clock, Joe would rise in routine panic and pull from his trouser pocket a timetable, desperately announcing the departure schedule of the next city train. By one-twenty, the trio were on the West Midland platform waiting for the train. Hereon out the post meridiem destination would typically alternate from hosting la puttana Fama at a casa del cugina and strolling between a "Butcher's Apron" population of bronzed colonists, though always terminating at the city storefront of Coles New World.

Toohey rolled up four sharp on Sunday afternoon, violently braking the van in front of two boys. “Where’s Walley?” the odious sot shouted through the window, his grotesque Silenus like features turning a deeper shade of claret.

“AWOL,” Kaycinski answered with delight. Richard Kaycinski’s gall amazed Frankie. A Polish Australian, with a surname no one in the institution could properly pronounce, he was one of the most vocal bigots, among Hillston’s white population.

“You can’t talk you fucking Polish...Polish cunt,” Frankie countered once to Kaycinski, during a common truck in ethnic epithets.

“At least I’m not a grease-ball wog cunt,” Kacinski effortlessly traded.

Frankie thought furiously for a moment, before reciprocating, perpetuating a transaction, invariably leading to fisticuffs, “get fucked you poxy Polish.... You.... ah fuck!”

“Stupid cock!” spat Toohey and then grunted, “get in.” Inside the Bedford, the air was rank with the driver's spiritus. The passengers recognized the decrepit public-house smell, as soon as Kaycinski slid open the van door. Tommy Bropho, from south of the river, was pinching his nose in exaggerated disgust. The absence of the fourth boy kept the Wards in an excited state on the journey back, each speculating the fate of the latest fugitive.

Merrifield met Frankie later that same week, outlining another proposal for conditional freedom. “How would you like to move to the Hillston House?” he asked referring to one of the three staff houses, spaced along the driveway entrance, constructions that were partially erected from the sweat of Hillston boys. Two of the houses were now staff occupied: Chef Roersma occupied the furthest, and Superintendent Bowyer the nearest. Hillston House, stood between the two, and encompassed by bush, was still a three hundred-meter walk from the main compound. In the morning, Hillston House residents, escorted by the sole House groupworker, would walk to the parade ground to join the mainstream regime until late afternoon. There was only one inmate resident at the time of Merrifield's offer, a Blueblack, who understood a smattering of Australian. Serving time for sexual offences, Edward Wunuburra bore multiple payback spear scars across his legs. Edward was a repeat offender.

“Yep sure Mr Merrifield.”

On the same afternoon, a bewildered Frankie was transferred to Hillston House, just in time for dinner with Edward and groupworker Schorer. When Frankie understood Edward was alone, he thought he understood the urgency of his relocation, never before experienced in his favour.

Schorer pulled Frankie aside the same evening, and counselled, “just a word of warning Panaia, Eddie’s a bit superstitious about feather foots.”

“Huh?”

“You know witch doctors, bone pointing and other blueblack hocus pocus.”

“Oh I see, and so?”

“So if you hear any mumbo jumbo at night, you know what’s it about.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not scared are you?”

“Nah.”

“Anyway now that he’s got company, he might settle down.”

“Maybe.”

The woggelaar wog would especially remember this witless exchange, when Schorer with quintessential 'Rhodesian' acuity, expertly debunked an indigenous tradition of stellar wisdom, arcing across millennia, in an 'Old York minute.' Had the twit's wit Darwinized a conscious superior to that of a "Townshend Turnip," he might have recognized the shared hieroglyphical symmetry between the divine Rainbow Serpent, with Occidental and Oriental (i.e., Kemetic, Hellenic, Semitic, Asiatic etc) theology, ontology, philosophy and cosmogony viz., 'mythology.' When Cecil 'wanked' lyrical for his "fine flower," he was not moved by the esoteric rose and lotus, rather, it was the pestiferous white hogweed, which eugenically transported him, and in a very different sense, 'his' manacled multitude.

Far from the compound floodlights, Hillston House, in the moonless night, was cloaked in a blind ebon pall, evoking shameful fears of the dark in Frankie, who missed the palliating lighting in the cellblock. The two boys were now camped in a five-bed dormitory, a demountable annexing the staff house, where behind a locked door, the shift groupworker slept. Two beds across from Eddie, Frankie, worn from the day’s chaotic events, flopped down belly first, directly shutting his eyes, in a doomed attempt to cheat kemet Nyx of Her shadow imperium of wraiths. Wrestling with separate culturally confected bogeymen, the Wards tossed about, before sinking into unconvincing sleep.

“Eeeeeeeeeeyaaaaaaaaaah eeeeeeeeeeeyaaaaaaaaah” exploded all over the annex seconds into the witching hour. So thunderous loud, the window louvres rattled. More demented eeeeeeeeeeyaaaahs rolled unabated, impossibly increasing in volume and terror. Wunuburra launched into the atmosphere from his mattress, landed squarely on the linoleum, then catapulted out from the room to the front steps. Nothing could be discerned of his raven envelope, except for flashes of brilliant white teeth, as he screamed his way out of a nightmare and the dormitory. Instantly, Frankie was on the heels of Wunuburra, fleeing whatever spectral horror was harrowing Wunuburra. Outside on the house steps, Schorer flicked on the veranda light and flew out, demanding: “What’s going on? What happened?” Wunuburra was wildly jerking about, sputtering, making ready to take further flight. Frankie was dazed, his citrine heart banging violently, his face pasty with the infectious terror of Wunuburra. “What happened?” shouted Schorer, “Panaia what happened?”

“I don’t... I don’t know.”

“Ayunda Ayunda,” shrieked Wunuburra, and he then bolted towards the road.

“Wunuburra! Wait Wunuburra, its okay, its okay,” said Schorer, finally grasping the situation. Schorer quickly caught up with Wunuburra and led him back to the dormitory.

All three were still shaking moments after the event, as Schorer solaced the boys and perhaps himself, insisting it was just a nightmare.

“Fuck that was no nightmare Mr Schorer. Jesus fucking Christ. Fuck he fucking jumped six feet in the fucking air sir!”

“Well you know, I warned you, didn’t I. These Wongis really believe in feather foots, don’t ya Eddie?”

Wunuburra mouthed two of several operative words, he had absorbed at Hillston, in order to demonstrate submissive respect, “storry thir.”

“Bugger Eddie, I’m sure they heard you screaming all the way to Kalgoorlie.”

“What if he does it again?” asked Frankie unamused, “I mean how am I gonna sleep, if he keeps spazzing out like that?”

"Now do you understand Panaia, why you were express delivered today?"

Frankie stayed on point, repeating his question. 

“Don’t know and don’t care, as long as you both stay inside the dorm. Got that Eddie? No more running around outside.”

“Thir.”

“Right, its three in the bloody morning. I’m going back to bed, and so are you two,” concluded Schorer.

That morning Frankie could not go back to sleep, nor for the following three nights, when his uneasy alliance with Hypnos was persistently shattered by the soundless trespass of Wunuburra’s feather foots. A delirious Frankie demanded respite from Melinoë's wretched handiwork, and so quitting Hades like Aeneas, was mercifully returned to the illumined cellblock, and the mortal sanity of isolation. There was nothing sibylline, divine, nor comedic about this latest chapter into Frankie's expiation odyssey.

Mail was bellowed from the top of the cell corridor and Frankie, certain there would be none for him, spitefully ignored this sacred institutional ritual.

“Panaia!”

A stunned Frankie marched up to the groupworker and was jolted again, when two torn envelopes were thrust at him. One was from Jean, and the other postmarked Italy, from his sister. He sat in the cell doorway, ignoring Butterworth’s queer taunts and genital flashes, and mentally prepared himself to decipher Maria’s habitual morose prose.

Dear Frankie,

Arrivederci from Roma! Well brother I made it. I arrived in Italia a week ago and I just love it. It is so cultured and sophisticated....

Re-reading the letter in making sure he was not mistaken in the offer of travel and ultimately freedom, Frankie jumped up and let out a squeal of joy.

“Hey Butterworth guess what?”

“You’re dog snot and I’m not.”

“Nah serious.”

“Yeah what?”

“I’m outta here man. I’m going to Italy.”

“Huh?”

“I’m going man, I’m going to Italy.”

“Where...to wop country!”

“Panaia’s going to ding land,” chimed in Lee Furey two cells along. Lee was a puerile shit Frankie had come to blows with on numerous occasions.

“Ha ha ha, what the hell ya gonna do in wog land? Munch on spaghetti,” hypothesized Butterworth.

“Ah fuck you and you too Furey, ya poxy cocksucker! You’ll still be here tugging yourselves, while I’m living it up in Rome.”

“Panaia, Butterworth, keep it down,” interjected John Henderson from the the top end of the corridor.

One of several postcards from Italy,

inviting / preparing Author to reunite with his father and sister.

As groupworkers went, the amiable John “Hendo” Henderson came across as an inoffensive eccentric. A hairline receding to his nape, he was the oldest and baldest member of Hillston staff. He was well-liked by everyone, including the resident rover Sheba. Inmates knew, whenever Hendo supervised their work detail, or cellblock, life would be pleasant and sweet from the tobacco and biscuits he occasionally disbursed. He indulged the inmates with extraordinary patience, content to recline in a corner and study them with bird-like eyes, as they horse played around. During ablutions, he seemed especially tolerant, permitting his pubescent prisoners deliciously long steaming showers during the winter months. Anticipating the permanent closure of Hillston in 1984, Hendo, along with several colleagues, transferred to the Riverbank prison. It was in Riverbank, Frankie observed, how during showers, Hendo, in spite of his age, often perched himself on the highest point, allowing him an interrupted view of the open shower cubicles. Many years passed since Frankie’s discharge as a prisoner Ward, before he understood Henderson’s indulgence in the shower block, was really a disguise for pederastic voyeurism.

At Hillston, Hendo’s personal life was steeped in intrigue. It was rumoured, after his wife’s death, he had shacked up with a hot eighteen-year-old Oriental. It was also speculated, he had moved out of his house to live in a caravan. This, as it turns out, was true, as a mobile home was spotted for weeks parked in Hillston’s staff carpark, though, there was no sighting of the famed Oriental nymph, whose stimulative Venusian illusion had the Wards, including Frankie, panting harder than a rapacious Pavlovian cur.

Frankie sat down and skimmed over the letter again noting this time, the unusual light style of his sister’s composition. She had been writing to him on a regular basis since his first imprisonment in Longmore, cultivating a sibling bond that never existed in freedom. Up until now, her letters were pessimistic ramblings on the grimness of life, punctuated with somber stanzas, sliced from a poet she was currently enraptured with. Along with bits and pieces from Ezra Pound, Coleridge’s Cristobel often featured in these literary dirges, conveying as much meaning to the bogan Frankie, as a plate of hors d’oeuvre to the bitch Sheba.

He studied his father’s letter and could not get past the opening salutation, “Caro Frankie, filio mio.” The small floral print fluttered to the ground, as he flapped the envelope wildly in search for it. “Dad must really love me” he mused, “it’s just like that Cinderella fairy-tale with that cunt of a mother. Sooner or later I gonna be rescued.”

“How long will I have to wait before I can go to Italy sir?” asked Frankie, during his weekly chess game with Bowyer.

“I’m not sure, but it could be a while yet. There is a lot of paperwork to be processed, for example, we need to get you a passport first, and we also need the permission of your legal guardian, the Director of Community Welfare Mr Maine.”

“Oh damn. That’ll take for ever, and what if he says no anyway?”

“I’m confident he will say yes.”

“Oh yeah why?”

“Let’s just say Mr Maine, the Director, and many of his staff will be happy...ah pleased for you.”

“You mean they will be happy to get rid of me?” said a smirking Frankie.

“Well they won’t be unhappy,” parried Bowyer diplomatically.

“But that could take ages, I mean I don’t know how long I can last here sir. I’m sick of Hillston and I’m sick of the boys. I mean I shouldn’t have ever of come here anyway. I didn’t do anything in the first place.”

“Frankie how long have you been here?”

“Dunno, nearly a year I think.”

“Well you have been here more than a year, so why can't you hold out a few more weeks, hmmm? With luck you might be on a jumbo jet within the month.”

“Another month! I can’t take another day here.”

“Come on now, every Friday you have weekend leave, correct?”

“That’s only if I stay in Top Group.”

“So stay in Top Group.”

“Easier said than done sir,” said Frankie, invoking his idiom of the week.

Hillston cell (aka cabin) interior:

Concrete bars behind window removed

On Thursdays a select group of inmates were bussed to the Mundaring Town public library. An excursion in futility, as many boys, were illiterate or indifferent, and in any case, lending from the library was prohibited, because books, excluding the spiritual Gideons fodder of Occidental prisons, were contraband. These excursions were opportunities for boys to taste a few moments of gilded freedom, mingling with inoffensive adults, who did not shout them down every ten minutes. The jaunt was also used as an opportunity for flight, where boys legged it, either on the approach to, or departure from the library entrance. Once inside the building, absconding was impossible, as staff guarded the one and only exit. Thus the short march from bus to library and back, was an excellent opportunity to abscond, as boys understood groupworkers were reluctant to abandon the multitude, in pursuit of the individual.

Ixion's wheel of welfare bureaucracy turned torturously slow, and following a frantic and fruitless wait for news of his liberation, Frankie took flight on a Thursday afternoon, six weeks after the Bowyer confab, discussing his Via Appia to freedom. Frankie was undecided in his plans, when he boarded the Hillston bus enroute to the library ten minutes earlier, but the onboard scuffle with Geoffrey Rosenthal made up his mind.

“Fucking ding,” said Geoff, without cause.

“Oh fuck you too man,” countered Frankie, as the bus rumbled along Stoneville Road.

“Nah you fuck off you ding dog. You wait cunt, you are dead.”

Something broke inside Frankie, as he recalled the first occasion Geoff racially abused him in McCall Centre.

“It never stops, never," he desperately exclaimed under his breath.

“What was that greaseball?”

“I said this!” snapped Frankie, who lunged at Geoff, jabbing at his face three times with his elbow. Geoff was stunned momentarily, shocked, as was the attacker, with the rare display of ferocity. Geoff struck back sending Frankie into the aisle, crashing against legs and boots. Frankie tried to quickly raise himself, aware of his vulnerable position, but was immediately floored again by the boots of jeering boys. David Coutts, the tallest groupworker Frankie had ever encountered, pulled him to safety, and returned him to his seat next to Geoff. “Both of you have just won yourselves three day’s L.O.P.,” said the gigantic Coutts. Three days' L.O.P. automatically divested Frankie of the right to weekend leave, as he was also plunged to Bottom Group for seven days.

Geoffrey "Geoff" Rosenthal (22) - Pinnaroo Memorial Park: 

perished likely from 'misadventure.' Much of his short

ferocious life was a theatre of violence.

Most Wards had never been brave enough to challenge the six-foot-six Coutts, whose massive cranium projected the mindless hardness of Mundaring Weir granite. As far as Frankie knew, the crazy Blueblack Chris Edwards was the only boy to have physically confronted Coutts. A week before Frankie’s departure to Italy, Coutts and Edwards sat together at the Bottom Group table during lunch. Coutts’ Frankenstein’s monster like torso necessitated multiple servings, and Edwards, with five other boys, watched with jealous hunger, as he devoured serving after serving. Edwards, who also was on L.O.P., whispered to another boy violating the prohibited privilege of speech.

“Did you just say something Edwards?” Coutts demanded, sensa disrupting the vile motion of his slavering mastication.

Edwards stared blankly at Coutts.

“Well?”

Edward’s pupils dilated, intensifying an unblinking savage stare.

“I’m speaking to you sport, so answer me, and in English!”

In a flash, Edwards whipped his plastic chair from under him, and swung the solid metal legs high, aiming for Coutts' cyclopean dome. Amazingly the ogreish Coutts reacted just as fast, raising his own chair in time to intercept the strike. Groupworkers from every table rushed Edwards, violently pinning him to the ground. He was frogmarched to 33, and then transported within the hour, to the infamous Riverbank institution.

“You’re dead cunt, you are so fucking dead,” augured a festering Geoff. The Fates however, differed, and Geoffrey David Rosenthal's own tenuous thread, was scissored before his twenty-third birthday, reportedly from 'misadventure' on a train track. The pell-mell pugnacity that illustrated Rosenthal's terrestrial dalliance with forbearing Tellus, likely awed Anubis and Orcus, from his chutzpah to thrash in the mercurial waters for as long as he did.

“He’s off," someone remarked from the ranks, as Frankie fled, kicking up copper coloured stones in his wake. Much to his relief, no one gave chase, and he tempered his wild pace a few moments later. Great Eastern Highway, the direct route to Midland, was a stone’s throw from Mundaring Town. Frankie crouched in the loose scrub lining both sides of the highway. I'll give it thirty minutes, he thought, and then thumb a lift. Phil Bowyer in the meantime had been alerted about the latest fugitive, and made plans to personally track him down. He raced to his Landrover, and roared down the driveway, ignoring the speed humps along the way, confident he could anticipate Frankie’s next move.

Frankie jogged a further kilometre west along the highway, before he felt safe enough to stick out a thumb. A further 300 metres was covered, before a motorist swung over erratically. Frankie cautiously approached the car with its male occupant.

“Where ya going matey?” the stocky balding driver asked, with an intensity not unnoticed by Frankie.

“Where you going first?” replied Frankie.

“Anywhere you’re going cobber.”

Frankie became more suspicious of the 'cattish' bloke, obviously prowling for a victim catamite.

“Uh its okay thanks, I’ll walk.”

Greasy beads of forehead sweat slid down the motorist's slimy chops. He repeated his offer, his voice sounding desperate.

“Nah thanks,” Frankie said, again from the front passenger window.

“Ah come on. What’s the matter, you’ll be okay matey,” and as he said this, he stretched over towards the stripling hitchhiker. Frankie studied the leathery arm hanging on the seat headrest. Something about his hand, as it closed into a fat ugly fist, unnerved him. He was certain this sweaty 'saxon shit' was another "poxy poofter" out to molest him. One of those insectile "buggars," he recalled, who bugged him "every-single-fucking-time," he ventured alone into a Perth public toilet, noxious with the stench of urine, excrement, buggery and shame. He turned away from the car and walked on. The "kid-tamperer" tailed him for several seconds, driving off, when Frankie swung around, signing a different digital code. Bum-bandit 'Bazzas' skulking in the shadowy recesses of dimly-lit public amenities, would always for the vagabond Ganymede, evoke an image of cursed Arachne; 'subculture' spiders weaving in wait to entangle unsuspecting youth, trapping the prey inside a sticky cubicle-shaped web. These 'hairy' tarantulas had so infested Perth city and environs, the chthonic nomenclature "rock-spider" became standardised Australian vernacular. Unluckily for Frankie, the Gods never once stalked him for his bastard youth; no, his would-be abductors were of another indelible tyrian pedigree, lower than the mutts prowling the haggis putrescent Gorbals. And, a Cup, he was not to bear, rather, it was to be his cupped Culo bare.

“Well I can’t fucking walk all the way,” Frankie blurted out loud in frustration. He then spotted the solution to his dilemma. A Charlie Carters supermarket lay ahead of him like a desert oasis. He sauntered in and accosted the first housewife spotted.

“Excuse me Missus, I’ve lost me bus money, can you lend us twenty cents?”

She looked him up and down, unsure what to make of his navy blue shorts, shirt and black boots. A plump dribbling baby squirmed in the trolley’s basket.

“Sure,” she said, and she reached for her bulging purse. “Oh bother, I’ve no change! Here you go, take this and change it at the check-out.” Reluctantly Frankie accepted the handsome vermilion note, unsure he was able to repress a Laverna passion to scarper with the unexpected windfall. He returned a few moments later, with the change. One good deed deserves another, he thought. Emphatically, he thanked the shopper, and headed to the nearest bus stand.

20 dollar note

Charlie Carters store

Ugly green concrete bus shelters were unique to Perth where the working classes atrophied in wait, cursing, spitting, vilifying and urinating, until a green bus arrived to engorge and then disgorge them at some merry-go-round destination. He ducked into one of these shelters just in time to catch sight of Bowyer’s Landover through the porthole, barreling along Great Eastern Highway towards his position. Bowyer whipped by, missing his chance of checkmating Frankie.

“Whoa just in time. Fuck!” exclaimed Frankie. He peered around the wall to see the receding back of Bowyer’s vehicle. He waited. Only triple zero buses thundered along for the next twenty minutes. And he waited. He stuck his head out again and caught sight of Bowyer’s Landrover racing along in the opposite direction. “The Super's going around in circles, fuck he means business,” moaned Frankie.

Finally the bus arrived. Frankie boarded the vehicle greatly relieved.

“And where would ye be going laddie?” asked the driver.

Before answering, Frankie looked into the bus, designed to carry sixty-nine souls, and was dismayed to see it was empty.

“I’m going to Midland why?”

“Oh ay to Midland, ye be very young now laddie.”

Why can’t this dumb poxy Scotsman shut his gob and do his job, Frankie cursed mentally. “I’m old enough to ride buses and here’s me money! Twenty cents to Midland right?”

“Aye tweenty cents it is.” The driver rolled off a ticket, albeit with odd hesitation. Frankie seated himself at the back, thinking the driver had eyed him in similar fashion as that perspiratory poofter, who pulled over to offer him a 'lift.'

Perth metropolitan bus 1970s and 80s

“Damn it! They must have taken the six o’clock,” expelled the "Goombah" in annoyance.

The 306 pulled away, having unloaded three forlorn looking passengers in front of the urine reeking 19th century Railway Hotel, intersecting Great Eastern Highway and Morrison Road. Joe and grandma disembarked from the succeeding bus forty minutes later, trying hard to reciprocate farewells to the familiar driver. As Frankie anticipated, the old couple was suspicious of his unexpected Thursday presence. He sought to mollify them by claiming early weekend release for outstanding behaviour. Joe pointed to his Hillston fatigues.

“Oh that um er, my private clothes are dirty.”

Grandma was anxious to get home, so she ended Joe’s interrogation with a brutal, “shut up and walk cafone!”

Railway Hotel (formerly Midland Inn) Gt Eastern Hwy West Midland

Content to follow the retired couple’s droll routine, Frankie passed the days pleasantly until Monday morning, when he was forced to leave, because the hosts refused to be bluffed with more claims of excellent borstal behaviour and extended leave. Before leaving the house though, the rogue sneakily unlatched the storeroom window and then bade the owners, a robust farewell. Later that morning Frankie strode with business through the Hay Street mall. Piccadilly Arcade was his target, and the mission, a stamp collectors shop. He remembered the tiny establishment from a previous weekend leave, when abandoning Joe and Grandma at their Coles New World post, he explored the nearby arcades. 

This morning, the philatelic retailer was staffed by a dopey blonde. Two large stamp albums sat on the glass counter just beneath her big breasts. The Australian vintage stamps were sealed inside sheaths of plastic, making it difficult to filch them individually. Frankie flicked through the sheets, scanning for the most highest priced. The sheila studied her moisturized cuticles, simultaneously balancing the phone handset between her face and shoulder. “Bruce came around again last night and..., can I help you there?”

“Nah thanks just looking.”

He waited a few seconds, giving the chick time to slide back into the bi-dimensional feminine world of wooly balls and shopping malls. The ring binders opened easier than expected. He pulled three sheets, lowered them behind the counter, then softly clamped the rings closed. His next move, to exit the bathroom size shop with three sheets of premium collectors’ stamps, was trickier. If only I had a bag, he winced privately, thinking how stupid he was to have come so unprepared. He glanced up at the bimbo's face, still cradling the handset, trying to detect vigilance. Nothing, she suspects nothing, he assessed. Hugging the loot against his own breast, he swung around and walked out, listening for a pause in her telephone conversation. Soon after, he clumped noisily through the main shopping aisle of Coles New World, determined to replace his awkward boots with lighter footwear. How ironic, he mused, while trying on a bright new pair of Jimboots, to be chased for pinching running shoes. Bolting was not necessary, as no one grabbed for his shoulder, when he exited the store, wearing new shoes.

The ubiquitous Australian Jimboot.

Grandmas and Joe's house West Midland, where Author was 

released to on "weekend leave" from Hillston.

Around three o'clock that afternoon, Frankie approached the empty Byers road house. He snuck down the narrow side path dividing Joe's house from the neighbours, and easily scaled the four-foot gate into the rear yard. He struggled with the storeroom window, as it had not been opened for some time. After vainly rifling through musty closets and cupboards for money, he sneezed his way to the TV room, and for the rest of the afternoon, split his attention between the extant "telescreen" and the street-side window. At five-thirty, the anxious intruder killed the TV and stood in the dreary greyness announcing twilight, watching for the arrival of Grandma and Joe. Funereal dusk, reinterring Hemera, descended, and the foreboding sensation of cumulative loss returned. Always, the searing Epictetus whisper, memento mori, sighing from the ashen light dying on the other side of the barred window, and this, this was his lingchi of a thousand blows.

Through the grimy window, Joe, with his de facto waddling behind him, appeared in view. Frankie ducked behind one of the three sofa chairs, just before Joe unlocked the door. Grandma arrived minutes later, wheezing between grumbling over the oppressiveness of walking. Within the hour, the couple dealt with their evening repast, then prepared to migrate to the TV room. Joe switched on the light and the TV, forcing Frankie to squeeze deeper into the recess behind a corner chair. Across the room, the hide of Joe’s culo barely grazed the sofa's vinyl, when he spied a bright Jimboot heel. He raced over shouting, and rapped the intruder sharply on his head, with his fleshy knuckles.

“Ow! Why ya do that?” complained Frankie, flushed with shame.

Che diavolo stai facendo? Rosa Rosa!”

“I’m sorry Joe, I got nowhere to sleep.”

“Rosa Rosa vene ca!,” shouted Joe.

“Gesù Christo Santa Maria!,” entreated Rosa, when she realised the cause of the tumult. Joe took the intrusion more seriously than Frankie bargained, hustling off to the neighbours, to phone for the police. Cursing again Tyche's handiwork, Frankie promptly took leave, walking off into the night, clutching his philatelic loot.

Joe's backyard vegetable garden. Grandma pictured.

“Oi rise and shine sleeping beauty.”

Then Frankie heard, “kick him in the ass that will wake the little sod.”

Two constables were standing over a curled up boy on a train station bench.

Nursing a swollen lip compliments of Midland police, Frankie was back in 33, just in time to whiff the moist aroma of morning tea scones emanating from the dutyroom. Marion Binnie summoned for him two days later, temporarily releasing him from his repulsive cleaning duties, where La Puma had him scrubbing the ablution commodes with a toothbrush. Such demeaning chores really tickled La Puma, who occasionally neglected his general duties, to humiliate his solitary prisoner.

“After you finish the shitters, you can start on the kitchen veranda stairs, while everyone has lunch.”

“Yes sir,” replied Frankie, understanding the sadistic sting of the task, when forty boys and their appetites, would muster on the courtyard to then march past, dishing out insults to a kneeling Frankie, while he scoured the hard to reach places of the dining room steps.

“What da ya want?”

“Sit down” demanded Binnie.

“Tell me what ya want first?”

“Sit down Panaia.”

Frankie considered his options, undecided which was worse: scrubbing toilet bowls or massaging Binnie’s ego. Both were equally repugnant.

“Where did these come from?”

“What?”

Binnie picked up the sheets of stamps from among the psychology clutter on her desk.

“These.”

He sat down.

“They’re mine,” he shamelessly protested.

“Really? They’re very expensive aren’t they?”

“So?”

“So back to you.”

“They’re mine from my collection. Everyone knows I collect stamps.”

“Yes I know that, but tell me then, how does a twelve-year-old afford stamps, which Mr Sleeth, who by the way collect stamps himself, has priced over three thousand dollars?”

“None of your goddamn business. Who do you think you are, a cop or something?”

“You stole them, didn’t you?”

“No I didn’t.”

“Frankie you stole them, when you were on the run.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t have to Mr Panaia, because I can and will confiscate the stamps regardless.”

“No you can't.”

“Oh yes I can and will, because you and I both know they’re stolen.”

Binnie badgered him for another forty-five minutes, applying  her headshrinking claptrap. Frankie capitulated, when she promised immediate pardon from his seven day sentence of L.O.P. and reinstatement of weekend leave, in exchange for a full confession, including a commitment to personally restore the swag to its owner.

West Australia Police Headquarters & Lockup

WA's worst career criminals operated from within this Stalinist citadel

The following day, Binnie led a morally intoxicated and apologetic Frankie back to the stamp shop. The owner, still unaware of the theft, received the stamps with dazed indignation. On Binnie’s bidding, the philatelist agreed not to involve the police.

It was no real surprise for Frankie later that morning, when the Puma on discovering Binnie’s bargain, rescinded it, reinstating his L.O.P. “She’s just the headshrink and nothing more cock,” he explained to a distressed boy, who had been banking on a full lunch. La Puma continued, “there's only one boss in the cabin block, and that’s the Senior, not some tampon-strapping tart.” The real blame for this catastrophe lay according to Frankie, not with La Puma, but with Binnie and himself. She should have known better than to make stupid promises she couldn’t keep, and I should have known better in believing the poxy pom bitch, he analysed bitterly. Everything, he concluded, was lost; the stamps and worse, his bellicose reputation, rarely compromised, forfeited in a weak moment of moralisation and appetite. Existentially, this was a crisis moment, and he vowed, while acrid tears soaked his cheeks, to never again trust another adult. Decades after his marbles matured into "tombolas," he eventually came to appreciate the perennial sagacity of the East:

Seek counsel from women, then undertake the contrary!

The Krotons were less tactful. Timaeus, in lecturing the ponderous 'omniscient' Gadfly, whose scattered dialectic was so nebulous, dispersed astral high above Aristophanes' Clouds, the shifting 'noble helium' of which, collapsed like unto a supernova, was adamant: unvirtuous men were recast by Pyrrha into women.

Following his rationed lunch, the more distasteful from his recent psychological defeat, he directed a verbal assault on the nearest groupworker, discharging venom, until he was relocated to 33.

“Put your clothes back on Panaia,” Merrifield said, three hours later, two of which, had been devoted to banging the door. “We need a mugshot for your passport, and we can’t take it in 33 now can we,” he sympathetically clarified.

Frankie jumped into his clothes, relieved to regain dignity and warmth, albeit for a hiatus long enough to shoot a passport photograph. 

“So I’m going to Rome then sir?” he asked, trying hard to stifle his rising excitement.

“Looks like it charlie,” Merrifield confirmed matter-of-factly, who personally couldn't give two shits, whether the problem prisoner was shot into Saturn's hexagon, or just shot.

Whether inside a metropolitan piggery or local opioid vendor,  

every Plebeian gets a mugshot.

A Bogan in bogan Midland

On the eve of his departure, Frankie lay in unsettled silence on the cell bed, unconvinced he was really leaving, worried it was a meticulously contrived "Sokel Hoax," by the likes of La Puma, who immensely enjoyed tormenting Wards with sham clemencies, from penalty pardons to the wretched extreme of imminent release. The next day he was relieved to discover the Puma was not on shift, and when he was escorted to the block after breakfast, to strip and clean his cell, a pre-release prison ceremony practiced universally, he allowed himself to openly rejoice in his upcoming freedom.

All of Hillston’s inhabitants had something to say in the days leading up to his release. The Noongars and Woggelars stirred him endlessly, thrilled he was returning to wog land, to diet on greasy pasta and meatballs. Worse still, several groupworkers requested he send postcards of bella Roma, while the more deluded recommended, he leave a gift in appreciation of Hillston’s hospitality. This insulting request, chorused also by Bill Ward, outraged him more than the racist teasing combined. Frankie demanded of Ward why, if he had anything in the first place to gift, he should give a present to anyone in Hillston.

“Fair go curly, it hasn’t been that bad,” reckoned his closest Hillston ally.

“Nah you're right Mr Ward, it’s been a dinky-di holiday camp. I’m such an ungrateful wanker.”

“So they want a present do they?”

“Make sure you sweep and mop right under that bed Panaia.”

“Yeah.”

“What Panaia?”

“Yes Mr Scott.”

“Watch it sonny jim," reprimanded Scott, "you’re still on Hillston time.”

“Yes sir.”

“That’s better. When you have finished and changed into your civvies, report to the dutyroom.”

“Yes Mr Scott.”

Frankie peeled off a thick work sock, and in one foul motion gifted the sum total of his appreciation for Hillston and Department of Community Welfare. “Here’s my present you poxy maggots,” he rasped, as he flung the laden sock under the steel bed base, which he had so often battered with his hands and feet during the unbearable confinement periods of "stripped cabin."

An hour into the QANTAS flight, Frankie was munching his way through a third bag of complimentary nuts between sips of coke. He marvelled at how it was only yesterday, he was sitting in the cold comfort of cell 33, and today, reclining in the cool comfort of seat 13F. His one regret being, he would never again get to enjoy the jovial company of Lesley Schultz. "That Blackfella was so happy-go-lucky, he would giggle in a plane crash," he privately joked.

The jovial and jolly Lesley Schultz (2017)

A little revenge is more human than none (Nietzsche)

More institutional images can be located at this LINK

****FIN****

KEITH ANDREW MAINE: FORMER DIRECTOR DEPT COMMUNITY WELFARE

The Director of the Department for Community Welfare (Keith Andrew Maine) who had oversight of statutory children's institutions during the 1970s in WA, died in 2018. I recall meeting this individual on one occasion, most likely at the Hillston institution.

Keith Maine was ultimately responsible for the physical, psychological and sexual violence perpetrated by groupworkers, male and female, throughout the 1970s; depraved abuse, which wrecked so many young lives. As with many of his aging vile colleagues and collaborators, he exited comfortably in a nursing home at the ripe age of 88 years. His life of leisure and longevity, was in stark contrast to the many State Wards, who perished at much earlier ages, typically in their late teens and twenties.

In a grievously unjust and dickensian society such as West Australia, there will never be legal justice or adequate redress, commensurate to the ghastly abuses inflicted against children as young as 5. It is thus incumbent on us Survivors, to seize justice, not only for Ourselves, but critically, for so many State Wards, who lie buried beneath the West Australian dirt, unavenged and unknown.

JOHN ERIC LA PUMA: HILLSTON GROUPWORKER & SERIAL RAPIST

La Puma (Senior Groupworker), was possibly the most vicious, feared and loathed staff member in Hillston's sordid and sad History. This exemplary "maggot" died in 2015, several weeks before the Perth Child Exploitation Squad (keystone kops), were set to arrest La Puma for multiple historic child rape offences. This Author was interviewed by the same police, who explained how they had planned to apprehend La Puma, only to realise he had died 6 weeks before the issuance of his arrest warrant.

La Puma bashed, raped and tortured State Wards during his long 'and satisfying 'Child Welfare' Career.

La Puma's favourite form of torment was teasing half-starved pre-teen boys (including the Author), stripped naked in cell confinement and who had not been 'fed' during their confinement. La Puma's trademark torment was placing a plate of hot food in the cell of a ravenous and cold Ward and threaten additional severe 'punishment' (typically the extension of cell confinement by days and or physical violence), should the famished child so much as whiff the plate of hot food.

La Puma was indeed a twisted piece of excreta or as the Ancient Romans once described such human filth - corpus vile.

La Puma was never prosecuted for his countless crimes against little boys. He was 'symbolically 'questioned' at least once by the West Australian Police in 1991 due to a complaint made by this Author (see Google Album). Typically, La Puma denied everything....

Beady eye La Puma was an especially hideous looking creature. His dwarf like torso (165 cm), was 'crowned' with a massive head grossly disproportionate to his diminutive stature. He must of felt like a 'big man' when he belted and tortured boys as young as 9 years old.

Raping State Wards

A former Hillston Ward has since disclosed to this Author, La Puma repeatedly raped the Ward by removing the Ward from Hillston grounds under the pretext of an 'excursion'. This was a common modus operandi of the pederast group-worker, as sexual abuse of boys was in the main, not tolerated by staff in the confines of the panoptic institution. Alternatively, a groupworker could beat a child to an inch of their life, while his witnessing colleagues would not so much as blink.

NB: An unsolicited and bona-fide email detailing La Puma raping a State Ward is pasted further below. Identifying information redacted.

Hoaxing the Wards

Another 'hobby' of La Puma was orchestrating horrible hoaxes against the Wards. Hoaxes included telling a boy he was going to be discharged; he was allowed weekend leave; his punishment had been cancelled; he was going to be rewarded with extra food and so on.

La Puma pulled one of his hoaxes against this Author, claiming the Author was going to be released. La Puma took much delight in setting boys up with false promises of reward or relief to then snigger with vile laughter (his face contorted with risus sardonicus), when the child finally understood he had been hoaxed.

This Author became so cautious against La Pumas hoaxes that when the 12 year old Author was scheduled for release and departure for Italy in 1979 (to reunite with his father), this Author refused to believe his imminent release compelling Hillston staff to almost eject him from the institution. Up until the very morning of his discharge, this Author hounded groupworkers, demanding to know whether he was being hoaxed by Senior Group Worker La Puma.

In spite of the fact La Puma was not even on shift the same morning of the Authors departure, the loathsome influence of La Puma was so pervasive, he was feared just as much in his absence, as he was in person and on duty.

REDACTED  'TESTIMONY' OF CHILD RAPE PERPETRATED BY JOHN ERIC LA PUMA

From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Sent: Friday, 31 May 2013 4:00 PM

To: fpanaia

Subject: Re: Hillston?

Hi Frankie

Thank you so much for writing back to me mate, I really appreciate it.

Staff wise from hillston..obviously mr lapuma, mr Kimberly (cunt..) mr Moss, I see you already named mr Scott. Most of the other staff were ok?

I spent 15 days straight in ctc..yea confined to cabin.

Unfortunately I was at Castledare! I like yourself spent time at mt Lawley reception centre but thankfully had no issues with anyone there. I have been to long more but it was overnight. Thankfully I never got to riverbank, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have come out of there.. I don't know how you survived being there.

I have quite a few mr lapuma stories but this one may be of interest to you! One day he came to me & said I was being released & we went & got my street clothes & got dressed. We drove all the way to my house in balga, pulled in the drive way & pulled straight out again. He stopped around the corner & lit up his pipe & said this is the power I have over you, I of course was pretty upset by now. We then drove back towards hillston & half way up the greenmount hill he pulled into a street & into a bush track where he sodomised me, this was the beginning of a reign of terror which didn't let up.

Yes I have seen the videos you have put up frankie & can't praise you enough in your bravery.

I have only in the last few months told some people what happened to me.

I'm waiting to be interviewed by the royal commission into child abuse. I want the opportunity to tell my story so people may know I existed!

END___________________________________

From hell's heart, I stab at thee;

for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee... (Melville)

La Puma's burial record (2015). MCB list 2 entries: first entry detailed actual burial / inhumation; the second, cremation. Seems La Puma's initial grave site was 'defaced', and his family authorised exhumation for cremation. La Puma's putrid coal undoubtedly separated into oblivion or to another unenviable destination.

***********************

 

PERCIPIENCE rather than forgiveness or fury, 

is the hateful screw's MASTER KEY.

  corvus niger arrives late for most

Wondering if Paddy made it to 'Carrickfergus'