We the born Unborn

HILLSTON CHILD PRISON MUNDARING WEST AUSTRALIA

Being an account of a 12-year-old incarcerated in a State "welfare" workhouse late 1970s.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

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Authors Note: This is a semi-autobiographical account (an excerpt from the unpublished autobiography), of imprisonment as a 12-year-old in the West Australian State Government 'borstal' institution, "Hillston Farm for Boys" (1978 - 1980).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.

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.”  Not wanting to culturally ostracise Frankie Panaia, he generously added, "includes you too wog!"

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. Bringing up the rear, Groupworker Ogilvie kindly corrected Frankie's marching form, advising, "stay in line wop." 

Senior groupworker John Eric La Puma, a dwarfish mongrelized Mediterranean, with a Bonapartist ego, poked a corresponding swollen boofhead out from the staff dutyroom to welcome the new meat.

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

“Frankie Panaia,” came the casual reply.

“Paaneeha what?” pipsqueak 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 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. Smartass held his tongue, a self-restraint generally requiring heraclean 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, raging: “I asked you a question smartass. Fucking answer me shithead!”

“No I won't,” he said.

“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 mass, 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 observation 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, toying with a pre-teen Tantalus, confined for days, stripped of everything. Under these tantalizing conditions, the Puma threatened 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 cracking backhand across his head

So pervasive was the collective fear of the Puma, inmates tried to forecast his shifts, steeling themselves against the height-challenged half-pint. Undeniably a repugnant brute, La Puma, stood apart from the common anglicized ass, who had wormed their way into turnkey careers, from the mitigating fact, he made little attempt to conceal his violence from colleagues and children alike. There was, although, one dirty crime the pint-sized predator managed to hide, the hideous nature of which, would not see the light of day for four decades. La Puma, in between slugging and starving State Wards, was sodomizing them.

Hillston veranda and parade ground - post closure.

Concrete bars partially removed from cell exterior.

In exemplary "doublespeak" fuckery, Hillston's three cemented cellblocks were obscenely labelled with the soaring plateau appellations of Falcon, Eagle and Raven. These unbound 'jail birds,' belied further as "house wings," each billeted twenty villatic "cabins." Assigned to rustic Raven House, the linguini lodger tailed the groupworker to his bucolic bunk for the next 18 months. Along the way, he heard the familiar cellblock din of clanging and cursing. In a voice immediately recognizable to his ears, the words, “fuck fuck fuck you fucking maggots fuck you,” echoed from the end of the corridor. The groupworker ahead 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 shit Jamie Birnie is, unbolted a cell door, then instructed Daphnis the dago to change into Hillston "clobber" and make up the bed. Along with a steel bed base bolted to the floor and wall, the cell contained a writing bench and unbreakable back wall window, reinforced with concreted bars crisscrossing the exterior. There being no toilets in the cells, inmates were forced to discipline bladders for the nightly ten hour lock-up. Children insisting on toilet access, usually in the 'wee' hours of the morning, did so at their peril, and had to silently slide their towel under the door, to servilely wait unto one of the two nightshift groupworkers spotted the signal. A days "loss of privileges," or the shorthand L.O.P., being the standard for inconveniencing the nightshift for the privilege of a piddle. Discharging underserving bladders was one of many biological compulsions attracting a special dispensation quality at the "farm school." Naturally, nourishment and gruel were the most meritorious of workhouse desserts. Such dickensian joy in vital pabulum was a sybaritic classification especially intrinsic to the vitiated Benthamite mindset; that bestial and blackest of Newcastle minerals, who, as late as the early 20th century, were oscillating malnourished ten-year-olds for pilfering victuals from London bakeries. The emaciated corpora of these High Street waifs, were so diaphanous, sacks of noisome stony turnips had to be anchored from their bruised ankles.

The avian corridors were spotless. Their timber floorboards reflected the overhead fluorescent tubes, from backbreaking and knee-scraping stripping, sealing and polishing administered over the years. Falcon House corridor continued on to the ablution block, a perverse construction, where toilets and showers afforded no privacy. Against the back wall, four commodes were lined up, facing the entrance of the ablutions, and as with the shower stalls, had no privacy screens, wherefore boys from ages of nine to eighteen showered and squatted before Hillston society, including the two "sheila" groupworkers. Clearing his Calabrese colon in public would take getting used to for Frankie, who cherished the reappraised luxuries of privacy, along with food and urination.

Abutting the ablution area were the dining room and kitchen where a medley of violence took place, dished out by kids, turnkeys and cooks. These three areas faced the parade courtyard where the daily eight musters were conducted. Around the trilateral shape of the main compound, stretched a spotless green veranda, which naturally incurred a days L.O.P., for crimes involving disorderly gaits. 

Scattered across the ten hectares of terra, were the cow dairy and paddock, horse stable, vegetable garden, two school mobiles, wood and metal workshops, swimming pool, gymnasium, sports oval, staff housing, chapel and a semi-independent housing unit, nicknamed, "Silver City." This corrugated lean-to was hastily erected to accommodate a cohort of four older and obedient inmates, privileged also with a daily ration of smokes. By the time of Frankie's arrival, Skinner psychologists were firmly in charge of the institution, and not in a sane or humane Rogerian way. Whereas the cluttered other Carl, straddling a totem, tangled between the terrestrial and transcendental, simply bewildered more, the few willing to cross the interior Rubicon. This portraiture of a jumbled Jung and his cerebral junk in logorrhea, symbolic perhaps, of a "mumbo-jumbo" archetype, was similarly diagnosed by Rome's incomparable Traditionalist. Even so, Jung possessed the nous to discard that debauched bedwetter 'Fraud,' stealing, as Oedipus stole into the maternal bedchamber, the repression-sublimation espial from the Visionary of Sils Maria. 

At the centre of these peripheral installations, stood 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 stands, along with the gymnasium, in mute testament to the untold toil and abuse endured by many. A holy Pythagorean "Decad" before Paaneeha's imprisonment, when the original commission of the institution was the Anglican Farm School, the Victorian sweatshop prided itself from Helot-like conditions, on being mostly self-sufficient, and, for its sodomite "Screws," satiating. In these good ol colonial days, subjugated scallywags maintained, sustained and fortified their own prison, as convicts had in The Roundhouse and Fremantle Prisons. This peculiar Westminster custom of compelling the Aristotelian slave-born urchin, to bind his own bonds and forge his fetters, shares a moral equivalence with the condemned captive forced to excavate his plot and knot the noose. 'Alas' those were the good ol days, when replanted rotted Piper Spuds, could batter and grope shackled "Sandgropers" raw, and work them till collapse.

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 whiny shakespearean sod waxing poetic for those good times, relishing the sanctioned cruelties against confined and concealed children. “Years ago,” the wistful Limey louse began the lament, “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 peons up and down Hillston parade ground under a scorching Sol of forty-four; or have the same fortunate felons, scrubbing corridor floors and kitchen pots until flesh girding kneecaps and fingertips peeled 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, encaved in a 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 defective 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 slavishly perform the physical training and cleaning chores. 

INTERCALATION: Now - in this eternal regna saturnia, shimmer the veridical atemporal good days. Rancid the bulk composted, subterrene the maggoty moors, whence the sods spawned loose. Man was fashioned from Promethean clay, then, 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 mince-haggis-pie. But unalloyed conquest, the loudest triumphal spectacle, is won in unseen quiet. This Via Appia, this eclipsed Phoebe, this undefended pons Horatius, this solo Nietzschean bridge, this Lenora evermore, this the answer to Oedipus' Answer, had always been The Mithraistic Way.

It is not from Ahab's cor mortuum 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 madder pinkest swine, Jove's glitter never cast through the golden gaze of His Frater.

 ______________________________

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 school demountables were positioned on the scrub’s perimeter. Over the successive months, the incorrigible 'eye-talian' 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 shadowed the perpetual pipe-smoking teacher Alistair Leonard, sucking up his exhalations, while they marched to and from the parade ground.

Hillston school demountables:

Teachers Alistair Leonard furthermost, Ken Griffiths nearest

A militarized muster was performed before and after meals, including 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, counted and cursed by groupworkers role-playing a subaltern fantasy, conceived from the fecal annals of their 'illustrious empire.' Mundaring hills could climb to the mid-forties, and it was not uncommon, for the more delicate to collapse during a muster, when dragged out from imperfections in detail and deference.

Beyond 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 entrance road. Punishment for absconding was an excruciating seven days L.O.P., where hungered children were expected to perform the daily routine in physical training and grinding chores, interspersed with repetitive marching. It was not uncommon, especially in those good old days, for bigger boys, typically the agile Aborigines to chase, capture and flog the runaway. Absconding was on everyone’s mind at Hillston, and whenever inmates mustered for a meal, or moved between sections, 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, a thicker barrier against cruelty and deprivation. Urbanized Whites or "Woggelars" (spelt, Wadjelas) and rural Noongars or Nyungars, were evenly divided in number; the latter augmented with around a dozen desert "Fullbloods," separately identified as "Blueblacks" and "Wongis." Hailing primarily from the remote "outback," institutional life for Bluebacks was comparatively easier because boys and "bosses," that is, everyone, feared the tempestuous Fullbloods: a 'nightmare-time' reality reflected in the "Cause and Effect" law heralded by the numinous Thrice, twice wound around a winged lustrous caduceus. Many Wongis bore ceremonial and payback scars, some of who, understood Australian little beyond basic commands and demands. These "youngfellas" possessed a tendency, when poked, to maul any antagonist, regardless of outcomes and obstacles. The Puma himself, avoided tormenting the explosive Natives, preferring the docile disunited Whites. Blueblacks though, suffered their own particular torments. Torn from closely knit tribes, from which the nightly slotting into siloed cells was once unimaginable, they occasionally serrated Tithonia's rosy petals, with blood-curdling screams from visitations by "Feather Foots" and "Bone Pointers." Having endured woggelar's justice, some belatedly atoned further from the sharp, yet swift reprimand in pierced thighs, contrasting the much preferred Regina sadism in 'boiling tadpoles.'

Hillston Chapel: hand built by prisoner Wards.

Chapel stands, boarded up due to repeat vandalism.

Alienated by both western and traditional indigenous populations, the mainly 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 would eventually reach prison, with Graham perishing in a Roebourne police cell aged 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, once an aspiring footballer, died by the needle, again in Hakea, formerly Casuarina Prison. Against incredible odds, the 'everlasting' brawler Leon James Derschow, survived until 2021, living a methuselah's 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 or frequently the bully beating up the bullied. The physical and mental deficient generally personified the institutionalized weakling. Domenic Sansalone, cognitively and corporeally 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 Hillston's unofficial mascot, and if Sheba wasn’t such an indolent obese bitch, she likely would have bit him as well.

Earlier that year, Domenic inexplicably set the Bassendean Football Club ablaze; a Herostratus desecration earning him notoriety for years. 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 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 obey orders and buckle under the force of violence.

Frankie enthusiastically greeted Domenic "salami" Sansalone, relieved to meet another confessed wog, when henceforth the "Ocker" canonical salami slur would be aimed elsewhere. The camaraderie promptly dissolved, when he was teased for associating with the salami. Domenic himself would turn against the pasta-fazool pazan, whenever the tide turned. Years later, approaching his twenty-first, the cured salami encountered Domenic in the protective "dogs yard" of Fremantle prison. Here, he learned Domenic was not responsible for the football club arson, but forced to confess, by Perth’s 'finest'. Perth finest, New York’s finest and London’s finest, were crafted specious phrases, he could never tolerate. “Finest of what?” he would demand from fellow social work students a few years later, when transported from one indoctrinating institution to another. “Yeah,” he continued to the apoplectic middleclass matrons, “necking drunk Abos from watchhouse bars and puncturing lunatic men shouting back at echoing voices in the gutter, with a calibre 45, is dinkum dandy.”

Leon Derschow (1965 -2021).

This anywhere pugilist's favourite involuntary sparring partners 

were Woggelars, including Author.

Graham Trevor Walley (1966 - 1988)

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 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 Perth city, when it seemed Domenic was gainfully employed as a peripatetic pharmacist.

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

Avoided and shunned by boys and staff, the stocky Mark Truslove was assigned to farm work detail. Older and taller than the average inmate demographic, the anglo Truslove tolerated little crap. Reputed for explosive violence, Mark was elevated alongside the untouchable Blueblacks. This reputation for frenzied violence, is in jail yard and juvenile hall alike, the key to an easier 'unmolested' life, where "Screw" and "Crim," share an equal apprehension of the unpredictability in homicidal eruptions. 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 you smash him, with as much noise and violence possible, in front as many Crims as possible. That way, Cons and Screws, will leave ya alone and respect ya.” Lou's pupil in convict culture, nodded his head in deferential comprehension, but internally, he 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. Biasedly it may be paraphrased: these were the Ionian's "mostly evil people." 

#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, farm for prison, groupworker for goaler, solitary confinement for psychobiological torture, rehabilitation for abuse, anglicized assimilation for indigenous extermination, European colonization for British invasion 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 been detained, prior to his transfer to Hillston, and then again, after his release from the latter reformatory, and a farcical foray into Magna Grecia. In 1980, he had been intercepted by welfare at Perth International Airport, returned from Italy, following a spectacular failure in a reunification attempt with his ageing Calabrese father. Hillston After-Care officer, (Charles) Theo Merrifield, was tasked to restore the instantly reconstituted dago into welfare custody on the basis, he remained a “placement problem.” As Merrifield sarcastically narrated during the ride from the airport: "shockingly, still no-one here in Perth wants you Panaia, and evidently neither did Benny's blackshirts, so it's back to the open arms of mother Longmore." The weary juvenile protested he hadn't as yet, broken West Australian laws, because he had just walked off a QANTAS airplane. Unimpressed, Merrifield reminded him of his chattel designation, viz State Wardship; a 'legal' status enforceable until his 18th year. The injustice of this arbitrary detention would be a watershed moment for the 'pastaogenesis' pancetta, vowing by Alastor, to avenge his swarthy self. It so happened, Nemesis nagged him for years after, habitually reminding him of an unrequited roll requiring attention. Over time, the proscribed few became a horde, and the heavily 'documented' malcontent felt like a vacillating Arjuna on the battlefield facing the multitude, among them, the consanguineous. Almighty Krishna urged on Arjuna, speaking, rive them into red ribbons, for they are already dead, and what is dead, what is unborn, cannot be extinguished. Unspeakable unparalleled wisdom, somehow sung from the Ganges.

Lou Cafaro (R) in his boxing prime

Lou Cafaro - far left

Luciano Cafaro was a classic Neapolitan, carefree, boisterous and volatile. At sixteen, his face was sporting the hallmarks of a veteran boxer, with flattened nose and curled ears. He befriended both Frankie and Longmore groupworker Jean Bodden, creating a clique, with the trio 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 'incorrect' Italianess, at least,  faccia a faccia. And this apparent immunity from racist vitriol, naturally drew Frankie deeper into Lou's charismatic orbit.

Longmore Remand courtyard.

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

Two months into his indeterminate Longmore sentence, Lou and Frankie completed an unusually sedated breakfast. Today, Lou was scheduled for release. He showed little emotion, and saw his pazan off with a typical jailhouse farewell: “See ya next week Lou,” and “I’ll keep your table seat for ya cuz.” A fortnight later, Lou was back in Longmore and the newspaper, accused of a record number of car thefts. Lou's chair bearer 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, pressing for his help, in an escape plot. “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 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, listen how many groupworkers will escort 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.”

Feverishly he considered 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 double entendre, lost on the pubescent accomplice.

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

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

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 barred 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 stood on the desk slab extending from the window wall, 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 a 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 effect of a mason's hammer, he chipped open a portal through the bricks below the window. It took Dickie six 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 dutyroom. When patrolling turnkeys did hear the pounding, they ignored it as tomfoolery. The days following the escape, every cell vent was hermetically sealed.

The ding-a-ling never fully understood why, from a muster of some 50 Longmore kids, most of whom vastly more deserving from compliance, he had been awarded the honor of a day excursion. Jean Bodden said the reason was since returning from Italy, he had not been convicted of a crime, entitling him to special treatment. A plausible explanation, and he gave it no more thought. Had he been able to see through this Polytropos Gift, its craven device may have been realised. He was being manipulated by Longmore management, who prophesied with Tiresias precision, he would run and reoffend, revoking the indignant status of innocence. His imprisonment sans convictions had provoked the more sentient groupworkers to challenge the legitimacy of his confinement. Unbeknown to him, his arbitrary detention was evolving into a political issue, an ironic turn of events, given the staff majority, including the executive, resented Frankie and his serial belligerence.

Mission day finally arrived. In the morning Frankie was dressed and ready for his ambitious, though patently absurd Alcibiades' enterprise. Jean pulled him aside after breakfast, and for the third time that morning, exhorted him to be good, “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 Mr Simpson (Superintendent Colin Simpson,) a real reason to keep you here.”

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

In the city's Hay street mall, Debra Robertson casually turned her back on her slippery charge,  studying the latest fashion in high heels, giving him the chance to turn on his own heels. He tore back up the city mall, entering the first arcade leading to Wellington street, charging towards what one of the ugliest bus terminals in the southern hemisphere, soliciting along the way, fare coins from pedestrians. The northern suburbs bus stopped along Main street, a stone’s throw from his family's dilapidated rental. Carefully avoiding the house, he strode towards his old secondary 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, the serial truant entered the high school grounds. Having never entered the workshops during his brief enrolment, had to guess the location. Soon enough he navigated towards the metal workshop, fortunately located on ground level. The workshop windows, partially covered by a serried hedge emboldened him, although he tarried 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 cautiously sticking a hand inside, releasing the latch. He pulled himself in and promptly stumbled, tripping over tools and machines in the darkness. Having no alternative, he switched on the light and grabbed the necessary tools; a hammer, screwdriver, chisel and most critical of all, a hacksaw. Of equal requisite was a receptacle, and he rushed about the workshop in mad desperation, anxious his carefully planned mission was to be thwarted for want of a bag. Following several frantic moments, he found a vintage medical satchel lying in the corner. He piled the tools inside the bag, and with an effort hauled the antiquated leather bag, equal in weight to its contents, outside the window.

Discomfort and excitement robbed him of sleep that night, compelling him to move when Aurora's "rosy fingers" began to flower above his cold head. 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 a 'rebooted' Dodona rescue operation.

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 bag of tools, closing his eyes. He was woken an hour later by a student, checking if he was okay. A prostrate salami 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 doze off 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. Just before nine, his patience utterly depleted, he stowed the cumbersome tool bag in nearby shrub, then recklessly surveyed the martial obstacle, searching for an insertion point, unaware groupworker and self-declared karate champion Greg Antonovich, was doing a security check around a corner pole.

“Hey Panaia, stop there, hey!”

Panaia's exhausted mind considered the single option. He began to make a move, when Antonovich, having scaled the fence in a Golden Harvest studio leap, grabbed hold of his collar to triumphally declare, “gotcha sonny.” In a way he was relieved he had been bested, 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 females reduced abuse risk from staff.

Female cells were palatial in comparison, with girl cells 

containing plastic chairs, floor mats and toilet screens!

At Hillston, Mark Truslove knocked on Leonard's  classroom door and asked if a student could help  haul wheat from the silos situated at the back of school demountables. Leonard looked around the class asking for a volunteer. Frankie thrust his hand upwards towards the invisible firmament, eager for a diversion from classroom monotony.

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

“Yeah what?” he 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,” Mark insisted.

Bucket in hand, he walked towards the blackboy stump giving cover to 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 headjobs all the time on parade, whenever one of those bitch groupworkers is around.

“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, elaborated, “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 cyclonic gusts 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 inmates and invective at vexing turnkeys. 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. Today the cacophony of voices was exceptionally loud, and the irritable Dutchman was fast losing his little patience. A curt "shut up" burst from his nicotine-discoloured lips, serving only to briefly quell the racket. “This is my kitchen,” a boiling 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 gashes.” 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 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, the "wanker-wog" was undecided whether Roersma was mad or bad, although after witnessing the kitchen mixer incident, the latest in a long and unchecked history of explosive episodes, he was inclined to the former. It was on a Tuesday afternoon, when the wog, as also addressed by the despicable Dutchman, was serving out his week on the hated kitchen duties roster, when two boys outrageously turned on the other, interrupting Chef Roersma, who was yakking 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 bare forehead and snow white beard. He inherited the position from a protestant predecessor, who was nothing short of a despot, and in trying to reform the repugnant regime, was soon alienated by Hillston subordinates, substantially diminishing his authority and enthusiasm.

Hillston classroom

A month into his indefinite detention at Hillston, pariah Panaia had figured William (Bill) Ward and Garry Weggelaar, as the only decent groupworkers. He befriended Bill in his first week, nominating him as his caseworker. A stocky Anglo-Australian, with a plume of auburn hair, Ward impressed the  Ward, by never throwing a fist or publicly deprecating the youths. In his estimation, Ward was a kind, perhaps even, a normal human being, deserving the best of his behaviour. A standard of excellence mainly entailing a cessation of the hostilities, spasmodically deployed against the mostly imported rubbish, who the dago discontent imagined, were so encephal-primitive, the morning chores of drawing up trousers and looping belts, 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 witnessed 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 pricks 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 him, would be cycled through the unconquerable System, increasingly deranged and dehumanized. The polyglot genius of that singular maritime "Polack," fascinated Frank throughout his twenties. Conrad, with trademark evocativeness, had sighted with Nauplius' exactitude, "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 exanimate crimson-spattered horizon, because His luminous beams had not, in the first instance, irradiated the lithic brow of  Agricola's once muzzled Brittani.

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, a 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.

His sentence in Hillston felt, from a 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, under the pretext of collecting firewood for the classroom, he "legged it." Instinctively he sought cover in the surrounding scrub, naturally gravitating towards the long driveway entrance.

Underneath 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. He 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 circumvented the large paddock, passing the same stand of trees. “Fuck shit I’m fucking lost and I’m going to die out here,” he lamented aloud. He 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, the dingbat desperado surveyed the field for signs of life. Jill Van der Spill, one of two groupworker sheilas to be propositioned from a distance for "headjobs," by 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 ranging 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 under strict conditions, including the in situ consumption of treats. Canteen credit was accrued from good behavior, or, as inmates euphemistically called it, “suckoling.” The thunderbolt epiphany of licorice, sherbet and redskins, cruelly sundered inside the vaulted tuck-shop, imbued Francesco with a flash of inspiration. "Fuck the kitchen tucker, 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 Share" equivalent 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 ladon and the three sorelle 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 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, he racked his callow braincase 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 it. 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.

The tripartite, always.

Strategically the best time for forced entry, he analysed, would be after the afternoon shift knocks off at nine-thirty, leaving behind the nightshift. An awful hour of hunger and anxiety finally passed, before he returned to the gym, lugging with him, the heavy rusted tool. 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 with the ease enjoyed by the harridan Hera. He went back inside, mounted the ladder, and tried to force the window.

Tuck-shop: housed inside gymnasium.

“Shit shit shit,” he cursed in Giza rhythm, when the window refused to budge. He reeled about in darkness, six feet in the aether, stirred more by caramel craving, than animal hunger. He ducked outside, to imagine the noise 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 floundered in the Messina Strait between two dire menaces: either persevere homerically, "long-grassing" the intolerable frost, gnawed from the harpies of hunger, or surrender to penalties entailing naked cold hunger. Carelessly he plodded to the cellblock grill, in shorts and shirt shivering, from a combination of cold and cowardice.Two staff snugly consumed biscuits and coffee in the heated dutyroom, as the seasoned fugitive approached. Through the barred window, he observed the nightshift 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 the cowardly cannoli, who remained confined in his cell, inmates were turned out at six am for the basic exercises, commonly abbreviated to the 5 BX. At nine, missing another meal, he stood to attention, as a gloating Puma peered inside through the unbreakable acrylic panel on the cell door. He unbolted the door and confronted the prisoner, grinning fiendishly.

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

Frankie said nothing, concerned 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 majesty's breakfast this morning? Seven days L.O.P.,” sentenced 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 hall. Hillston seating arrangement during meals had been structured, like most privileged activities, on a punitive scale. Wards were graded upon their work performance and general conduct for the preceding 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 the Paaneeha 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 the cell door after switching on the light at five the following morning, squealing: “Panaia get up boy.” He turned over, forcing his orbs 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?” he asked.

“5 B.X. sunshine,” beamed back Scottie.

“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.”

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

“What’s that you got in your claw Panaia?” Scott 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 out his hand, the fingernails spotless and symmetrically clipped.

“What’s the matter Mr Scott?” asked senior groupworker Weggelaar, emerging from the panopticon dutyroom, having observed the tense exchange.

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

Sonny jim was less circumspect: “he’s taking my lollies sir. The ones my sister gave me this afternoon,” blubbered the defendant, 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, suggesting, “come on Doug, they are only sweets. He can have them surely.”

Scottie's mealy-mouth dropped open, 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 defense of an inferior inmate.

Eventually the sadistic Scott found his lost lingua to object lickety-split: “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 while it seemed the Scott's stereotyped 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 enriched, from the victory against "tight-ass" Scott. A glorious spolia optima nevermore repeated.

Maintaining a distance of one meter from the prisoner, the chirpy Scott commanded him through the 5 B.X. for twenty minutes, then returned him to his cell. Ten minutes later, he was again released, 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 (Harry) “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. He apprehended something more minatory, yet less tangible; a religious fanaticism. A psychotic protestant, Harry, fantasized 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, sanctioned from a warped scriptural exegesis, was to be ministered.

Six months into dingbat'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, the guinea gentile 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 bonkers bible!”

“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 fruitcake!”

Pywell wordlessly prayed during a sinister silence, rabidly staring down into the sinner, impiously seated on the bed. “You know what Panaia, I am prepared to sacrifice for your unclean heathen 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.

“At any cost,” iterated the dead serious Christian, whose own 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?” profaned the reinvigorated recidivist. 

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

Pywell’s sanctimony, sermonized with such categorical conviction, now greatly affected the diabolical ding-a-ling, 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 Pagan's purview. 

Christ, he's really going to break my legs, considered the potential martyr, before retaliating 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 messianic before the vulgar turba, trembling in shorts and t-shirts. Pywell commanded the inmates through the drill, and as usual, when he conducted 5 B.X., the captive heretics were subjected to various calisthenics. “Stick your leg out like this and stand still,” Pywell demanded, elevating his own leg in a demonstration of miraculous balance, still wearing his boots. Falling over themselves, the boys endeavored to ape the unbalanced underling, with 13 years practice in palm-striking chipboard opponents under his chromatic belt. “Come on you useless bunch,” jeered the jackass Jehova, as he continued to suspend his boot, gloating in his lordly feat. He put his foot down to everyone's relief, again rebuking them for backsliding uselessness.

Steam engulfed the ablutions, while boys showered on a tag basis in the six cubicles, which were divided into opposing rows. As usual Woggelars were last, with Blueblacks and Noongars tagging a brown cuz or actual bro, regardless of their position in the tinea bath queue. Graham Walley, a 'mixed-up' Noongar, queued unnecessarily one cuz behind Frankie, and began: “Hey wog, hey wog.”

He ignored him, hoping against the empirical evidence, Walley would stop.

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

He remained unresponsive, and contrary to common belief, in "juvie" and jail alike, was the worst defense.

“Wog! Wog dog,” continued the aspiring teen thug. 

Eliciting no answer, he flicked wog dog on the tip of his ear. The boys laughed, spurring on the popular Walley.

“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?” reaching over to sting ding's neglected other.

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

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

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

“I’m gonna don’t worry,” promised Graham, leaning forward again, this time thumping in the back of his greasy head, causing him to wince in intolerable pain.

“That’s fucking it!” decided the wop. He swung wildly around and lunged at his tormentor. The ablutions exploded in an uproar of howls and hoots, with the cuz Noongars generating the loudest applause. The combatants wrestled on the wet purple floor, grappling each other, seeking the advantage until staff separated them by yanking their hair.

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

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

“Fuck you ding wog cunt, you're still gonna die,” repudiated Walley.

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

“Four walls of masonry should do the trick Mr Bloxham,” concurred Priestley, before shoving the greasy and wet wop out of the doorway, into Falcon House, towards the punishment cell.

View from Hillston classroom

Not unlike most carceral institutions, Hillston provided a traditional cubicle crucibulum. "Cabin 33," the first cell on the right in Falcon House, was crudely, though effectively modified, with the wall and door windows iron plated, and the lightbulb locked in its own cage. When the door was shut and the light killed, the hackneyed "Hole," became an malefic cube noir. Flung naked into this baleful box, he was initially concerned from the fabricated darkness, 'chilling' when the goings on outside could be heard. In the Hole, he remained until after lunch, then returned to school.

Making an enemy with Walley was parlous, as upsetting one Noongar, as he painfully discovered, upset many, including a few Blueblacks. That point on, multiple Noongars persecuted him, calling his names at every opportunity, hurting him in any way possible. He 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 blast through the nostril.

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

“Eww Panaia,” remarked Schultz, the only Noongar he got along with, “What’s that on your hair?”

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

“It looks like a huge snot. Yuk!”

He brushed the back of his head with his hand, and collected a glob of yellow-green snot fired onto 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 happiest 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., sonny jim 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?” he 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,” replied Frankie, parodying Scottie's indignation.

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

“Ya poxy dobber Sansalone,” said the second wop.

“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 days, he exploded: “Get fucked cunt dog!” bringing the dining room to a remarkable standstill.

“That’s it Panaia, let’s go,” said Scott, visibly flustered from the 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 his arms excruciatingly high behind his back, the half-witted herdsmen frogmarched him out of the dining hall towards the cellblock. In the background, the boys shrieked in schadenfreude.

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

 and closest to dutyroom in background.

“Strip,” ordered Bloxham, standing over the ding-a-ling. Farmer slammed the 33 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,” farewelled Farmer.

His biology reduced to three 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 anxiously checked up.

“You're gonna get it ding cunt when you get out,” kindly reminded another. Ten minutes later, inmates filed back past the Hole, dispatching more taunts and threats, increasing pariah's contempt for his country-mansion-mates. 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 monster, Paaneeha's refractory foresight was a perennial stygian 'Heel.' Again and again, he railed heraclean, hurling uphill Sisyphean stones against an impervious Cerberus, which 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 you can’t beat the System Panaia,” retches the pusillanimous turnkey, exonerating himself from the crimes of institutional tyranny, while in the same fetid breath, indicting said 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 'dysentery-dynasty' of inbred parasites. The effeminate despotism of bureaucracy and its sociopath Lernaean cadres, undying and unrelenting; the debased "blue-painted" Periclean polis, demanding socratic death, before disobedience. Carceral "black flower" abominations, in which "la perfide albion" and brutalized bambino were equally hostage. Which of the two more degraded unknown.

Only when the general population had been locked down, did staff transfer the grease monger from 33 to a 'normal' cell, restoring the furnished luxuries 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 Leonard's classroom two days after the dining table incident, and informed the favorite of his caseload, he had a visitor. Ward dropped him 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 the old client, still smarting from her therapeutic antics in Longmore.

“Come in and sit down Frankie, I want to talk with 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,” she said soothingly.

An opportunity to gripe to someone, who cared, or trained to act so, softened his demeanour. He began ventilating his troubles, and when he got to cell 33, he thought, he discerned genuine empathy in Lawlor.

“That should not be allowed,” she evaluated in a monumental breakthrough.

“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 bunk of psychobabble, with the actual brutality of institutional life.

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

“Walley started stirring me and that.”

“How was Graham stirring you?”

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

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

Slamming this fossilized dowager with an ammoniacal tome 'discharged' by the philommedes Freud, would have been clinically cathartic, 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 fucking hide!”

“Do you think your own behaviour is provoking others 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 boys don’t see it that way, and regard the groupworkers as friends, not enemies.”

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

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

“Nope.”

“What about  your case worker, 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 again the expletive Lawlor explained, “you’re here because Longmore felt the Hillston program would be good for you.”

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

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

“No who is he?”

“Mr Merrifield.”

“So,” he remarked unimpressed, identifying an expanding lexicological pattern in reality distortion.

“He's the officer that arranges placements, before you can be released.”

He postured another so what.

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

“Yippee.”

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

“Aaah,” he expired, already a veteran of case conferences since Bridgewater.

“Do you have an idea where you want to go after Hillston 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 another boy is waiting, so we will speak again next week. Try to stay out of trouble.”

“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 the resident rigatoni aside a week later, from the afternoon-tea parade. He languidly introduced himself, advising, “Tomorrow is your case conference champ.”

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

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

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

“What’s 'me grandma's' telephone number?”

“She doesn’t have a phone.”

“What’s her address then skip?” he continued, yawning.

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

“I suppose we can find her address. If 'me grandma' is asked whether you can stay for weekends, 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 in this imperial commonwealth of a vast continent, perhaps an uncle, strewth, even a canine trainer?”

“Huh canine what? Nope that’s it, just me grandmas.”

“Unsurprising indeed. Right rejoin the muster.”

“Ah Mr Panaia” said Bowyer, who stood up to shake Frankie’s hand the next afternoon. “I have heard a lot about you, all of it negative.” Chuffed from the insinuation of notoriety, the wannabe ruffian held his tongue, and sat between Ward and Lawlor.  Merrifield took a chair, sitting listlessly alongside Bowyer, speaking little throughout the proceeding. The conference concluded twenty minutes later, with the decision, slippery skip required, at least another two months in Theocritus farm life. In two months time, he would again be conferenced, and depending on his progress, transferred to Darlington cottage, Hillston’s halfway house in Parkerville. In the meantime, subject to the quality of his suckoling, he could be weekend released to his grandmother, provided she agreed to have him.

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

“Ha ha Pininini is here for good,” offered Steven Pregelj, a boy always ready for a laugh at someone else's expense. He ignored Steven, and looked through the window, staring into nothing, brooding over everything. Pregelj dragged his 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. He 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.”

“Mental case!” he fired back, convinced the way to revolt, was to deploy the only weapon in reach - speech.

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

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

“Hero!” someone else yelled in consensus, seconded elsewhere with "retarded wog dog."

Fed to his back teeth of L.O.P., the besieged belligerent ripped into Gomer and the "Good Word." The dickhead dago continued a torrent of blasphemes, until dragged away under a spectator volley of greaseball, wop, spaghetti muncher and king of dings. Sealed inside 33, he re-emerged from the sepulchraled space seven hours later.

Back then, the mouthy meatball muncher could not have conceived how near he came to landing upon a fundamental ontology from his weaponization of language, profane vernacular though it was. Preceding that Agora rambler, who would vanquish himself with words, Anaxagoras had announced, everything has a share in everything; language not being exempt. Lost inside a arcanum lexicon, the only Occidental opera, since Turnus fell, that matters, a literal understanding might yet be essayed on the baffling human condition. A sulking Heraclitus, who not unlike Homer's supreme sulk, got his toes wet, proposed fire to be everlasting everything. His holocaustic flame, it is said, was not the vulgar element: and what chance did the flicker stand, against Thales silvery sea, rushing before it. Meantime, Greece's "gloomy Gus" and his puddle flowed on and on. Yet it was not change eternal, as much as reruns of the bewildered islands, projected onto a Parmenidean screen, so wide, nothing beyond ever existed. The pedantocratic polarity supposed between the latter so-called 'presocratics' (as if philosophia began with a combative pugnose and his bare skin wrestler, who called in sick for that tectonic symposium, catering thigh-slapping hemlock and an Asclepian rooster plucked by Diogenes) served to occlude further the nexus that mattered, between yin and yang, nox and dies.

The following morning Paaneeha was greeted with the malevolent macrocephaly and pernicious peepers of La Puma. “You’re starting to piss me off shit-for-brains,” he complained, as he backed him up against the wall, clipping him under the ear. La Puma left, returning a few minutes later, with a rag at his feet; a piece of fabric he kicked from the cleaning store to the cell. He commanded his prisoner to pick it up and follow.

La Puma led shit-for-brains to Eagle House corridor, commanding he polish the floor until his image reflected in the shine. Hungry from missing breakfast, he went to his hands and knees, launching into a polishing frenzy, desperate to impress the Puma, fearful lunch would too be denied. When he finished two hours later, his rubbed his red sore knees, then humbly tapped on the dutyroom door, reporting to the overseer. The Puma slammed a third biscuit into his gob and escorted him back to Eagle House, to inspect the labour.

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

He looked down into the hardwood, desperate to catch a reflection, spying only a blurred and 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 the isolated inmate. From similar punitive experiences in Longmore, he understood secluded inmates received meals during the muster stage, because a prisoner was tasked from the ranks to perform the demeaning chore of delivering food to the solitary confined. In the hundreds of days Frankie was to hang in solitary, he had studied this prison routine, from the meal’s preparation in the kitchen, to the journey across the yard, through the cellblock, and finally to the door of the cell.

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

Hillston Wards had marched into the dining hall. The cellblock remained quiet. La Puma 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 lunch, destroying any hope of a feed, because he knew 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 the Ward, and he pounded on the unbreakable door panel, until the inconvenienced groupworker ambled to the cell door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subdued from the mere presence of La Puma, shithead 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 an unauthorized 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, yet too angry to yield, dickhead employed passive resistance by refusing to answer. Stepping closer to increase intimidation, La Puma barked, “answer me!” The boy 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 him on the right side of his head, then snatched his mop of Grecian hair, to ruthlessly yank 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 the "slow-learner" from the punishment cell after the rationed evening meal, he allowed against the wishes of La Puma, and returned him to his cell. "Frank the wank" 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 observation panel, by gleeful inmates mocking him, for both hardships he suffered, and 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

Harold (Harry) Pywell, 2014

Then still spouting 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 free-ranging peer Lawlor, Marian Binnie was a grotesque creature, plastered in unctuous makeup. Short and stumpy, she appeared so cosmetically artificial that stood still, resembled a mindless store mannequin. Her hair was petrified in a rich orange dye, making her easily visible, in spite of her small stature, from any point in the compound. When the Blueblacks learnt the surname of this latest British immigrant, they fell into fits of laughter, chuckling thereafter, whenever sighted throughout the farm's gentle rolling hills. Binnie, in a local native dialect, translated into vagina. “Miss Binnie,” the Blueblacks would call out, “show us your Binnie,” and the boys in the know around them, erupted.

One of the first rude farmers Binnie 'forcibly' interviewed, was the greasemonger, 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 air-headed leeches, offering little more than a pause in the drudgery of institutional confinement, pneumatic psychologists, who could confect a thousand reasons to justify the execrable conditions of his existence, but never ameliorate them, he slumped in the chair and yawned at the transplanted lamia, pumped with selfish ambition and anglophone arrogance.

“Tired are we?” she queried 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?” blandly asked the imperial 'vagina.'

“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.”

“Yeah well my business is what’s not going into my stomach from starvation,” came the comeback. He stood up to leave. 

Binnie sprung from her recliner thrusting her pampered torso, between the coerced 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, 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 they dialogued in mute staring, with "Bitch Binnie," as he intuitively labelled her, backing down, 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 weight reduction diet. In the first week of the regime, Lesley Schultz was compliant, enjoying the extra attention he received during meal times. The novelty began to fray in the second week, with his resolve collapsing, when Chef served up extra helpings of bread and butter pudding. That three boys on his Top Group table did thirds, was unhelpful. Soon, Les' jolliness transmuted 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 L.O.P. boys looked on with envy from the dining hall 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 quickly surrounded the boy, now approaching the steps to the staff carpark. They jumped him, subduing the heavy Ward the only way qualified brutes know. 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 hall, 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 and distressed.

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

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

who was frozen by the dutyroom grill.

Binnie’s machine like brain short-circuited. She had not shifted from the safe place by the administration block. Behind the veranda railing, the garlic muncher, witnessing the drama, turned to face the gargoyled "bitch," and above the ebbing shrieks, asked in his most caustic tone, “tell me again, how your poxy headshrinking helps us boys?”

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

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

Graham Butterworth slept in the cell facing the oleaginous wop. Inexplicably Butterworth 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 dropped his daks, and flashed his pale pommy posterior all over Hillston. From classroom to dining room, whenever the occasion allowed for it, Butterworth lowered his underwear. A decade after Hillston was decommissioned, the reformed ravioli received a letter from the nascent exhibitionist, who had scribbled in childish hand, how over the years he maintained a repressed homosexual crush on him, recalling his Hillston "happiest moments" were when the two showered in opposite cubicles. The pornographic post went on to reveal, the correspondent crossdressed on a regular basis, and how the synthetic hermaphrodite, while sporting his prized pair of scarlet high heels, colour matching his lipstick, would like nothing more than to suck the living daylights from his former co-prisoner. Even for the degenerate dago, the depraved content appalled him. He sought to hunt down the raging faggot, to personally communicate a reply. The return address was a post box number. Postal policy prohibited disclosure of the renters details, so he answered the letter in a most masculine manner and left it that.

The pair were tossing socks, rolled into the shape of a ball, between 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 bawled from the top of the corridor. He 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 Kenneth (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 and for no apparent reason, except for his chronic and well-documented belligerence, long since considered normal by inmates and turnkeys alike, the Calabrese carbonara struggled towards the administration block, daunted.

“Thank you Jim” said Bowyer, dismissing his subordinate back to the wilds savannahs of the wings.

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

“Nope,” he said dishonestly.

“Good because I just wanted us to meet on our own. You have become quite the ahem, celebrity here. The dockets I have on your behaviour! Well, lets just say a separate file cabinet is needed just for yours,” he said smiling, drawing his chair closer. Perplexed by the unorthodox manner of the man, and by the appearance of genuine interest in his welfare, he 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?” he said, finding his tongue, perplexed at hearing his christian name spoken by a turnkey and the boss.

“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 naked and starving me?”

“Starving you!” Bowyer gasped indignantly "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 if I get 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!” he added, in a stream of indignation.

In what appeared to be shame, Bowyer stared down at his shiny Italian slip-ons, before answering, “Yes I know about cabin 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 with you. Interested?”

Instinctively cautious, he replied, “What is it first…sir?”

“You don't let your guard down, I reckon you could play a good game of chess. Have you played chess?”

“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. Outside on the veranda, Bowyer watched the ding, until he reached the cellblock grill, until itself opened as a Bocca dellla Verita to swallow a malefactor 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 on the cell floor, 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 cell doorway, he turned Jean's letter over in his hands Inmates were now confined to their respective wilderness wings, permitted 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 sundries, Wards accumulated during their farm stay vacation. Letters, comics, photos and playing cards were contraband in the cells, and secured under lock and key. The only items fettucini Frankie had in his "personal box" were letters, along with a loose collection stamps, salvaged from envelopes, discarded by other inmates.

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 further 'rehabilitated' in Fremantle Prison. On one of these occasions, this Author neighboured David's cell, sometimes hearing his [untreated] anguished, if not harrowing schizophrenic 'rants,' 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 him at the notorious Clontarf Boys Home, a stone's throw in distance 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 him 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 boyo,” began Gavan Priggs “you were sent here against our wishes, cause we know you’re going to stuff up. Won'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 twaddle, 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 a Psych 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 having savoured decades of passionate sacrifice, their Theoginis appetites surfeited, had departed to a higher Thebes, 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 promptly excommunicated.

Into this morbid and moribund climate, Frankie was thrust, several years before the institution was 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 wounds had bled and a Jordan River of tears shed, 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 remained in his seven bed dormitory, and on the weekends, he would 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, petitioning 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, on the eighth-day of his trial placement, the lodger was cast out by the Brethren for breaking the eighth commandment. He 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 he 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 home. 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 almost became a feature of the mall. Years later, when both were 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, fare welling 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 mall concreted benches, crass legacies of the seventies architecture, when cement was rediscovered. He ploughed through his tobacco, content it seemed, to sit in silence and watch the people of Perth swagger past. They mostly strutted, the pedestrians, bouncing 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 another 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, clasping a 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 slowly negotiated the two-hundred-metre walk to Irwin street bus stop, to board the 306 to Midland. On one momentous occasion, Giuseppe misplaced his travel concession card, compelling him to pay full fare. His card was later found, between the buckled cushions on the veranda couch, but the "oh the humanity" moment was irreversible. The card misplacement, 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, recalling 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 her nipote to mop the plate dry with heavy chunks of Italian pane. 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 or wander between a "Butcher's Apron's" murder 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,” dickhead ding once traded with Kaycinski, during a common truck in ethnic epithets.

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

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 belched, “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 approached Frankie later that same week, outlining another doomed aftercare scheme. “Hillston House needs another body, you interested charlie?” he flatly asked, referring to one of the three staff houses, spaced along the driveway entrance, constructions partially erected from the sweat of Hillston boys. Two of the houses were staff occupied: Chef Roersma occupied the furthest, and Superintendent Bowyer the nearest. Between these two, the repurposed third property, Hillston House stood, and encompassed by bush, it was still a four hundred-meter jaunt to the main compound. In the mornings, House residents, escorted by the assigned groupworker, walked to the parade ground to join the mainstream regime until late afternoon. One inmate was 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 ridged scars across both 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 he understood Edward was alone, he thought he understood the urgency of the 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 woggelar 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 from the demiurgical Rainbow Serpent (or Waugal,) with Occidental and Oriental (i.e., Kemetic, Hellenic, Semitic, Asiatic etc) theology, teleology, ontology, philosophy and cosmogony viz., 'mythology.' When Cecil 'wanked' lyrical for his "fine flower," he was not moved by the esoteric glory imbued in the Rose and Lotus, rather, it was the pestiferous white hogweed, which eugenically transported him, and in a very different sense, 'his' manacled mangled 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 four-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 the spectral horror 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?"

He  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 the wog dog could not go back to sleep, nor for the following three nights, when his uneasy alliance with Hypnos was persistently shattered by the soundless steps of Wunuburra’s feather foots. Subsequently, a delirious dago demanded respite from Melinoë's wretched handiwork, and so quitting Hades like Aeneas, mercifully was returned to the lit cellblock, and mortal sanity of isolation. Nothing sibylline, divine, nor comedic could be gleaned from this episodic Ionian expiation. When 'enlightened and rational' Lockean suffering became itself the final comforting terminus, akin to the terminal amor fati 'involuntarily embraced' by Herr Übermensch of Röcken  (does he circle eternal, flitting above Mary's glaciers to the score of wailing Valkyries; if ever a heart was ruptured by another homo!) the moment to expedite the arrival of the galloping quaternary had passed. When da Vinci's 'occult' exhortation was all, but invisible to the fading European oculus, a wily St George draco spewed from its patronizing gullet, its calciferous Enlightenment, ushering in Hesiod's last Age: when grown men call moon sun, woman man, hell heaven and endarkenment enlightenment. Free Will, freed from Olympus, must compass the Freed back to Vesuvius. Press closely to the belly an ear, the growling voracity, can be heard, then listen again to hear mocking laughter. Man does not descend with an inaudible Nietzschean whimper, rather He sinks to a symphony of guffaws. Thus the final edict the august nepot did issue: "Plaudite, comoedia finita est."

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, the "ding-a-ling," as he was sometimes endearingly addressed by the less hostile, jumped up and let out a squeal of "bonza" 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 Rome.”

“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 occasion.

“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 sometimes disbursed. He indulged the inmates with extraordinary patience, content to recline in a corner and study them with bird-like eyes, while they horse played around. During ablutions, he seemed especially tolerant, permitting his pubescent prisoners deliciously long 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, perched himself on the highest point, allowing him an interrupted view of the open shower stalls. 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 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 regularly writing him since his first imprisonment in the Mount Lawley Reception Centre, cultivating a sibling bond nonexistent in freedom. Up until now, the letters were ruminations on the solemnity of life, punctuated with somber stanzas, sliced from a poet, she was enraptured with. Along with snippets from Ezra Pound, Coleridge’s Cristobel frequently featured in these enveloped dirges, conveying as much meaning to the bogan greaseball, as a bowl of hors d’oeuvre to the bitch Sheba.

He studied his father’s letter and could not get past the opening salutation, “Caro Francesco, 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 innocently mused, “it’s just like that fairy-tale with that cunt of a mother. Sooner or later I gonna be rescued.” Alas, Orestes, and an Electra to electrify him, would not pay tribute to the House of Atreus. Since the pathological onset of postmodernity, Clytemnestras, Phaedras and Medeas, are inviolate. Re-adoption of the first-born sun in gynocentric devotion to the curvy "triple-goddess" rationally must be included in the next wave.

“How long will I have to wait before I can go to Italy sir?” asked Frankie, during the weekly chess match 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, and we also need permission from your legal guardian, the Director of Community Welfare, Mr Maine.”

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

“I’m confident he will say yes.”

“Oh yeah why?”

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

“You mean they will be happy to get rid of me?” the smirking inmate decoded.

“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, a year I think.”

“Well it has been a year and more, 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, because the majority, were illiterate or indifferent, and in any case, library lending was prohibited, because books, excluding the Gideon fodder of Occidental prisons, were contraband. These outings 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 for an opportunity for flight, where boys legged it, either on approach to, or departure from the library entrance. Once inside the building, absconding was impossible, as staff guarded the only exit. Thus the short march from bus to library and back, was an choice opportunity to abscond, as boys understood groupworkers were reluctant to abandon the many, 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 the ding, 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 days,” said the gigantic Coutts. Three days' L.O.P. automatically divested Frankie of the right to weekend leave, from being 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 pariah's exit to Italy, Coutts and Edwards sat together at the Bottom Group table. Coutts’ Frankenstein’s monster torso necessitated multiple lunch servings. Bottom Group boys observed with jealous hunger, as Coutts devoured serving after serving. Edwards, also on L.O.P., whispered to the boy seated beside him, 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, tackling him to the floor. He was frogmarched to 33, then transported within the hour, to the infamous Riverbank.

“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 600 metres west along the highway, before he felt safe enough to stick out a thumb. Another 300 metres was covered, before a motorist swung over erratically. Cautiously he approached the car with its male occupant.

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

“Where you going first?” he replied from the front passenger window.

“Anywhere you’re going cobber.”

He 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. "Call me -azza cobber," he 'cooed' incoherently, repeating his offer, the voice desperate.

“Nah thanks,” said the cobber.

“Ah come on. What’s the matter, you’ll be okay matey,” and as he said this, he stretched over towards the stripling hitchhiker, who studied the leathery arm hanging on the seat headrest. Something about his hand, as it closed into a fat 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, malodorous from a compost of urine, excrement, buggery and shame. He turned away from the car and walked on. Barry or Gary tailed him for several seconds, driving off, when matey swung around, signing a different digital code. Bum-bandit 'Bazzas and Gazzas' skulking in the shadowy recesses of dimly-lit public amenities, would always for the vagabond Ganymedes, 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 anthropogenic 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 intestinal 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,” the decamped scamp blurted aloud in frustration. He then spotted the solution to his dilemma. A Charlie Carters supermarket lay ahead of him like a proverbial desert oasis. He sauntered in, accosting the first housewife spotted.

“Excuse me Missus, I’ve lost me bus money, can you lend us twenty cents?” he pleaded in a sickly Twist mimicry.

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 the woppish whippersnapper 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 happily 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 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 the 'wanted unwanted.'

“Whoa just in time. Fuck!” he exclaimed. 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,” he moaned.

Finally the bus arrived. Greatly relieved, he boarded the vehicle.

“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 aye to Midland, yer be very young now laddie.”

Why can’t this dumb poxy Scotsman shut his gob and do his job, he 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. The sole passenger 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 that intersected 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 he strode with business through the Hay street mall. Piccadilly Arcade was his target, and the mission, robbing a stamp collectors shop. He remembered the tiny establishment from a past 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 highest priced. The sheila studied her moisturized cuticles, expertly 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 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, the oily outlaw 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 intruder killed the TV and stood in the dreary grey 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 villain 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 the horizontal hooligan heard, “kick his wog ass that will wake the little sod.”

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

Nursing a swollen lip compliments of Midland's 'finest,' the captured runaway was back in 33, 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, when La Puma had him scrubbing the ablution commodes with a toothbrush. Such demeaning chores really tickled La Puma, who occasionally neglected his supervisory duties, to humiliate his solitary prisoner.

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

“Yes sir,” replied the Paaneeha, understanding the sadistic sting of the task, when forty boys and their appetites, convened on the courtyard to march past, dishing out insults to a kneeling dago, while he scoured the hard to reach places of the steps leading to the dining hall.

“What da ya want?”

“Sit down” demanded Binnie.

“Tell me what ya want first?”

“Sit down Panaia.”

Frankie considered his options, the worse unknown, scrubbing toilet bowls or massaging Binnie’s ego. Both 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 genuinely collect stamps, 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.”

“Panaia you stole them, when you absconded.”

“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 forty more minutes, applying  her headshrinking claptrap. He capitulated, when she promised immediate pardon from the seven day L.O.P sentence, 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 shoplifter back to the stamp shop. The owner, unaware of the theft, received the stamps with dazed indignation. On Binnie’s bidding, the philatelist agreed not to involve the police.

It should have come as no surprise for the panettone penitent, when just before lunch, the Puma, on discovering Binnie’s bargain, rescinded it, reinstating his L.O.P. “She’s just the headshrink and nothing more cock,” he reasoned to a crestfallen boy, banking on a full lunch. He continued, “there's only one boss in the cabin block, and that’s the Senior, not some tampon-strapping tart.” 

The culpa communis for this catastrophe lay, according to the greasy guido, 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 moment of moralisation and mangiare. Existentially, this was a crisis moment, and he vowed, while acrid tears soaked his cheeks, to never again trust an adult. 

Decades after his marbles matured into tombolas, he came to appreciate the abiding sagacity of the East:

Seek counsel from women, then undertake the contrary!

The Krotons were slightly 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. And whence the light of Luna purloined!

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

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

Slick jumped into his civies, 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 chuckles,” matter-of-factly confirmed Merrifield, 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 Pharmakos opioid vendor,  

every Plebeian gets a mugshot.

A Bogan in bogan Midland

On the eve of departure, the "dirty dago" laid in unsettled silence on the cell bed, unconvinced he was really leaving, worried it was a meticulously contrived "Sokel Hoax," by La Puma, who enjoyed toying with Wards, orchestrating sham clemencies, from punishment pardons to the wretched extreme of imminent release. La Puma elaborated such charades to the point of escorting the dressed-up delinquent to the carpark, only to pirouette, laughing into the child's crushed eyes. Being 'played with' by La Puma, was the nearest selected Wards got to 'fiddle' with toys. Plastic Junoesque toys, as had confected candy, constituted the empyrean octodad, until Pymander blew across the eons, dissipating a cumulonimbus of inky hubris. Toys, He reminded, are but trinary, buried as one together with stone and salt. The same fire-engine toy gifted to All ex utero, and to inflate this conceited hot air, would be an infelicitous Jovian contradiction. 

Next day, the perennial pariah was relieved to learn the Puma was not on shift, and when escorted to the block following breakfast, to strip and clean his cell, a pre-release ceremony practiced universally, he allowed himself to openly rejoice in his upcoming freedom.

Cacodemonic Puma could have been the double incarnate of Ephesus' scumbag twins, villainous demigod dicks, roaming about Heraclean antiquity, lying and thieving. Deception was their royal power, plaited throughout Sol's Creation, hoodwinking the hoi polloi, misleading the mob. Today's La Puma exemplars, might therefore remind the Hellenist and Mythographer, to the existential value in the layered tapestry of myth. La Puma embodied the Trickster on a 'miniature' and puerile scale. Real hoaxers prevail; the adult Tricksters, the Cercopes of Enlightenment (viz. Endarkenment,) the Deceivers of 'liberal-market-democracy' and so forth. And what is this clan patronymic, if not Distractor? Without man-made distraction, Maya Herself, becomes the illusion. Consumed first into child care, then customer care, coronary care, aged care and perhaps palliative care. Under the grey sterile shawl, veiling the hastening drip, do children, career and cars answer the question. It's the same question difficult to entertain above the Hollywood din, Tabloid twaddle, Stadium roar, Tavern rage, Pill paralysis and finally, polished mahogany lid. When from one man, another man is pointed to the rainbow, he sees clouds, the contempt of the Ages itself, appears less contemptible. And harken the hectoring refrain so expertly engineered, drumming even now inside the Reader's ear: who has time for such cosmic claptrap! Who indeed has time. Here the 'matter lies,' because the Groupworker yet watches.

In the days leading up to this final flight to freedom, all Hillston’s inhabitants opined on the extraordinary novelty of his departure. The Noongars and Woggelars stirred him endlessly, thrilled he was returning to wog land, to feed on greasy marinara and meatballs. Worse yet, a handful of groupworkers requested he send postcards of bella Roma, with the more deluded recommending, he leave a gift in appreciation for Hillston’s hospitality. This offensive petition, chorused also by Ward, outraged, him more than the racist teasing combined. He 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 front and centre to the dutyroom.”

“Yes Mr Scott.”

Frankie peeled off a 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, after he flung the laden sock under a steel bed base, so often battered with his hands and feet, during the unbearable 'experiences' of "stripped cabin."

An hour into the QANTAS flight, the disinterred dago was munching his way through a third bag of complimentary nuts between sips of coke. Frank Panaia marveled how yesterday, he was confined in the cold comfort of cell 33, and today, reclined in the cool comfort of seat 13F. His one regret perhaps being, he would never again get to enjoy the slapstick society of Lesley Schultz. "That Blackfella was so bloody happy-go-lucky, he would giggle in a plane crash," he joked to himself.

The jovial and jolly Lesley Schultz (2017)

 

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.

From hell's heart, I stab at thee;

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

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___________________________________

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'

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