We the born Unborn

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

HILLSTON CHILD PRISON MUNDARING WEST AUSTRALIA

Authors Note: This is a semi-autobiographical account of imprisonment as a 12-year-old in the West Australian State Government reformatory, "Hillston Farm School for Boys" (1978 - 1980). With the exception of minor changes and memory lapses, this account is factual (though not an exhaustive and comprehensive account), 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).

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 with blackboy trees, 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 alongside to two groupworkers. Brian Toohey alighted, then tugged open the door of the Bedford van with an unsteady gait, 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's journey from the Longmore Assessment Centre in metropolitan Perth, the prisoners poured out from the van to be promptly greeted with commands to stand in 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 "intake."

“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 clause presaging a perverse parallel with his own clandestine attacks on anuses. Smartass held his tongue, a self-restraint generally requiring Heraklean effort, 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, teasing them hourly, by stuffing his maw outside the cell door observation pane, with biscuits and cakes, afforded him great pleasure. His special modus operandi was placing 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 hated 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 14 villatic "cabins." Assigned to rustic Raven House, the linguini lodger tailed the groupworker to his bucolic bunk for the next eighteen 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 metal bed base bolted to the floor and wall, the well-appointed cabin contained a writing bench and unbreakable back wall window, reinforced with concreted bars crisscrossing the exterior. There being no toilets in the capacious cabins, 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 a towel under the door, to servilely wait unto one of the two nightshift groupworkers spotted the signal. A day's "loss of privileges," or the shorthand L.O.P., being the standard for inconveniencing the nightshift for the privilege of a piddle. Discharging undeserving bladders was one of several biological compulsions attracting a special dispensation quality at the Potteresque "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 eponymous 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 migrated 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 nutrition 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 open quadrilateral compound, stretched a spotless green veranda, which naturally incurred a day's L.O.P., for crimes involving disorderly gaits. Scattered across the glade's gentle rolling ten hectares, 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 accommodation unit, nicknamed, "Silver City." 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.

Silver City was a corrugated lean-to hastily erected to separately accommodate a cohort of four older and obedient inmates, privileged also, with a daily ration of smokes. This Polis Argentium operated behind the compound, and its seventeen-year-old citizens could romance with the "farm school's" wuthering ranges, as they pleased. By the time of the greasy calzone's arrival, Skinner psychologists were firmly in charge of the institution, and not in a sane or humane Rogerian way. Among a crackpot cast of kooky and creepy analysts, Carl Rogers always presented, the sanest. This same Carl expounded the 'crazy' notion that, therapists must integrate environmental factors and determinants, viz. the holistic extant experience unique to the individuated 'patient.' Dust-binning a landfill of diagnostic diatribe, along with the paranormal and perverse purulence purveyed by Freudian featherheads and fops, Carl conceived for the 'profession' the unthinkable: "Person Centred Therapy." Whereas the mystified other Carl, straddling a "Janus-faced" totem, tangled between the terrestrial and transcendental, more bewildered, the few willing to cross the interior Rubicon. This portraiture of a jumbled Jung and his cerebral psychologisms (symbolic perhaps, of a mumbo-jumbo i.e., logorrhoea archetype,) was similarly diagnosed by Rome's incomparable Hierophant - whose prognostic "avalanche" dillydallies. Even so, Jung retained the nous to discharge that debauched bedwetter 'Fraud': the same doodle-demented-demon stealing, as Oedipus stole into the maternal bedchamber, the repression-sublimation espial from the Visionary of Endagin. Fraud apparently tore a bardic page from that Imposter's forged "Folio" - testament to the largest literary fraud perpetrated, since the "New" replaced the "Old." The inscrutable racist rancor contra "Eyetalians," especially, if not exclusively hurled by "bangers & mash" gobblers, is thus less puzzling, when analogized with the animosity naturally 'mashed' between knave and nobile, louse and leone. Perhaps, the toga concealed sica, wielded by that theatrical traitor, was not to honour his namesake ancestor, as much as the perfidious Brute, sought to plagiarize the likeness, the very biography of civilization's most catastrophic homicide. Fifteen hundred years following the climactic fratricide, an Island of back-stabbing "blue-painted" Brutes, sought to plagiarize le terra di Saturno.   

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 panini'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 Stratford sod waxing poetic for those good times, relishing the sanctioned cruelties against confined and concealed children. “Years ago,” the wistful Limey louse launched 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 bashed 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 purified Prometheus clay, Others of "perfidious Odysseus" chalk. By guile and gore, Darwin's macabre mutation reigned for an aeon in odium, defiling Victoria, clawing over Europa's breasts, onto the wide Platonic 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. Upon the madder pinkest swine, Jove's glitter never cast through the golden gaze of His Frater.

______________________________

Staff carpark and rear cellblock post-closure,

concreted cell  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 faecal 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 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.

Hillston prisoner composition was similar to 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" (Wadjelas) and rural Noongars (alternatively, Nyungars,) were evenly divided in number; the latter augmented with a dozen or so desert "Fullbloods," identified interchangeably as "Blueblacks" or "Wongis." Hailing primarily from the "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 His winged lustrous caduceus. Many Wongis bore ceremonial and payback scars, some of who, understood Australian little beyond brute commands and demands. These "Youngfellas" tended 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. Wrenched from tribes of which, the slotting into siloed cells was unimaginable beneath a celius ceiling, 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 again from the sharp, yet swift reprimand in speared thighs, contrasting the much-preferred Regina sadism, of a thousand incisions.

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 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 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 emetic phrases, he could barely hold down. “Finest of what?” he would demand from social work students a few years later, when transported from one institution to another. “Yeah,” he continued to the apoplectic middle-class matrons, “necking drunk Abos from watchhouse bars, and puncturing lunatic men debating echoing voices in the gutter, with a .45 calibre, is dinkum dandy.”

Leon Derschow (1965 -2021)

This prolific 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 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 slightly increased girth, 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 an ongoing burden for the State. In 2016, the due dings 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.

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 Luciano 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, 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 thus 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, culturally inspired "Settimo Cerchio" 

in a double "living death," shut in 1991. 

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 first detained, prior to his transfer to Hillston, and then again, after his release from the latter reformatory, and a farcical foray into Magna Grecia. 'Returned to Sender' in 1980, he had been intercepted by 'Welfare' at Perth International Airport, 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 just walked off a QANTAS airplane. Unimpressed, Merrifield reminded him of his chattel designation, viz. Wardship; a 'legal' status enforceable until his eighteenth 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 a neglected "hit-list." Over time, the proscribed few became a horde, and the heavily documented à la  surveilled 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 wafted from the Ganges.

Lou Cafaro (R) in his boxing prime

Lou Cafaro - far left

Lou 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, forming an exclusive circle, with the trio congregating at every opportunity. As usual, when someone 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 for both dagos to embark on a lifetime of camorra gangsterism. 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 quadrangle with a hug, and forgetting his hostile racist anglophone environment, attempted to kiss him mob style.

Facing a long term of 'rehabilitation,' 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 it's up to the Senior, why Lou?”

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

Exhilarated, the wannabe Musolino brigand 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 curiosity.

Operation Dodona Oak v2 - 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 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 from 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, thereby 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 predicted with Tiresias precision, he would run and reoffend, revoking the indignant status of innocence. His imprisonment sensa 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, talking points among numerous Wards and groupworkers, Mrs Bodden's 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 Senior High.

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

When convinced the cleaners had left, the serial truant entered the high-school grounds. Having never entered the workshops during his brief enrolment, he had to guess their 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 determination robbed the robber 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, a quiet spot on the campus lawn, to rest and rehearse a 'rebooted' Dodona rescue operation.

Tuart Hill Senior 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 tool bag, 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 four 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. Just before nine, his patience utterly depleted, he stowed the cumbersome 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 triumphantly 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.

Larger female cells palatial in comparison, 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 grain from the silos that were situated at the back of the demountables. Leonard looked around asking for a volunteer. Frankie thrust his hand upwards towards the invisible firmament, eager for a diversion from classroom monotony.

The vermicelli volunteer was filling a bucket with wheat grain, 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 grub, 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 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 quell the racket momentarily. “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 his throne that was the bain-marie, 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 Roersma's erudite palaver with the kitchen groupworker. Without warning, Roersma took hold of a commercial 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 explained.

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 him in fits of temper half-garrotte 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 departure, perhaps unable to further deal with the atrophic institutionalization of children. Youth, he once discreetly confessed, 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 beasts.

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' 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, invoking "Golden Ass" magic, transmuted a brick-and-mortar bastille into a 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 drooping prickly pines of a blackboy, two hundred meters from the main complex, and several metres from the driveway, he 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 close by. 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 denser 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 contrivance, he spotted a stock fence, and raced towards it, 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 orbiting the enormous farm twice, he trudged back to the compound perimetre, with no plan in mind, other than to find food. He lurked behind the kitchen until Russell, the relief cook, 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 liquorice, 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 aged six, lifted his first K-mart "Cadbury Family Share" equivalent, 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 Jasonic 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 double-door entrance, could be accessed either  through the locker door, or the above window. Well the door will be locked, Frankie brilliantly 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 risking a red-black kiss, 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 samsara shadow of cold recurring night, felt familiar.

The tripartite, always.

Strategically the best time for forced entry, he analysed in another genius brainstorm, 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 dormant, 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. Inside the gym, he 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 now 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 twin menaces: either persevere Homerically, "long-grassing" the intolerable frost, gnawed from the harpies of hunger, or surrender to penalties entailing naked hunger in a double "living death" hosted by their Crown. Carelessly he plodded to the cellblock grill, in shorts and shirt shivering, from a combination of cold and cowardice. Two turnkeys 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.

Dutyroom inside.

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 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 Third 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 First Group status, with remaining Wards subordinated into Second and Third Groups. Seated at the head of the dining room, First 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 last group. By the time the Paaneeha swallowed his first mouthful in thirty six hours, he was bitterly regretting his capitulation.

Rear-side view ablutions, kitchen and gymnasium

The nighshift 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. He enforced the discipline and drudgery of the Hillston regimen, with a smackhead’s fervour, hitting up on every rule recited and penalty prosecuted. A figure of flawless dress, from his gleaming polished shoes, to his  brylcreem 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 sister 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 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.

“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, cannot be broken.” For a breathtaking moment 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 the "tight-ass" Scott. A glorious spolia optima nevermore repeated.

Maintaining a metre's distance 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 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 Harry “Gomer Pile” 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 'copper-spattered 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 meridian, 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 book!”

“See that’s your problem isn’t it, no religion no respect. You 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 slippery 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.

“Ah 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 required dosage. Instead, what I ought to do, is break both your legs with a Hillston cricket bat.”

Pywell’s sanctimony, sermonized with such 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 mozzarella martyr, before retaliating with near depleted defiance, “yeah if you do, you'll lose your job man.”

“This I know Panaia, but the sacrifice will be worthy if smashing your femurs and fibulas forces you to your grotty knees before our Lord Saviour,” 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 trembling turba, in shorts and t-shirts. Pywell commanded the inmates through the drill, and as usual, when he conducted 5 B.X., the vulgar 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 endeavoured 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 Jehovah, 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?” he answered, 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 theatre.

“I’m gonna don’t worry,” promised Graham, leaning forward again, this time thumping 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 detach 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 twits need cooling off Mr Priestley,” suggested Bloxham, who had Graham in a headlock.

“Four walls of cold concrete should do the trick Mr Bloxham,” concurred Priestley, before shoving the viscous and now 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 a malefic cube noir. Flung naked into this baleful box, he was initially concerned from the fabricated darkness, then '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 wanker 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.

“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,” parodied Frankie.

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

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

“You shouldn’t talk to groupworkers like that,” counselled Sansalone, in his 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,” observed Sansalone.

“Fuck you ya poxy slow-,” and before Frankie could fulminate the next expletive, groupworkers Farmer and Bloxham, both reeking of 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 dago. Farmer slammed the door shut on the naked child and switched the light off.

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

His biology reduced to three primal functions of pulse, breath and consciousness, The wog remained in 33, until inmates returned to the cellblock following dinner. The Wards filed past 33 just before eight, enroute to the extravagant privilege of a 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 prognostication was a perennial stygian 'Heel.' Again and again, he railed Heraklean, 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 tribe of pallid Hadrian sadists, only to be throttled by viperous stings from fellow felons. 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 bilious 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 furnished cell, restoring the "six-star" luxuries of a mattress, linen and pillow.

McCall Centre - Cottesloe 1970s

State Wards [boys] 'filtered' through this primary institution (formerly sewerage processing facility), were confronted with the Pythagorean arboreal "Fork": 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 hall incident, and informed the worst of his caseload, he had a visitor. Ward dropped him off at the administration building.

“Hello Frankie,” greeted a smiling Diana Lawlor, who was on 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 unrehearsed empathy in Lawlor.

“That should not be allowed,” she evaluated in a monumental clinical 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, 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 caseworker, 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?”

“Nope.”

“Mr Merrifield is his name.”

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

“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 caseworker Mr Ward, 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, even if it's for temporary weekend release?”

“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 aside the resident rigatoni the following week, from the afternoon-tea muster parade. He languidly introduced himself, notifying, “Tomorrow is your case-conference slick.”

“Yeah Mrs Lawlor and Mr Ward already 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 offload 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 stingy geezer called Joe, and their house is painted blue or something.”

“I suppose we can find the 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 Joe 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 croc handler?”

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

“Unsurprising indeed. Right re-join 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 ragu 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 three 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 the meantime, subject to the quality of his suckoling, he could be weekend released to his grandmother, provided she agreed to have him.

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 chewed 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 leprous 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.” The pomodoro punk 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 lined-up in the ablutions, after draining blameworthy bladders, when a curious calamari turned on Pywell, a preferred target, inquiring, “hey Gomer what does your book say about this place?”

“Say about what?” replied Pywell, overlooking the name-calling.

“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 the al dente ding 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 "retard wog dog."

Fed to his back teeth of L.O.P., the besieged belligerent ripped into Gomer and the "Good Word," until dragged away under a spectator volley of greaseball, wop, spaghetti muncher and king of dings. Sepulchred inside 33, the passible polenta emerged from the tomb 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 vanquished himself with words, Anaxagoras had announced, everything has a share in everything; language not being exempt. Lost inside a arcane lexicon, the only Occidental opera, since Turnus fell that matters, a literal understanding might yet be essayed on the baffling condition. A sulking Heraclitus, who not unlike Homer's supreme sook, 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 stream flowed on and on. Yet it was not change continuous, as much as reruns of the bewildered islands, projected onto a Parmenidean screen, so wide, nothing beyond ever existed. The pedantocratic polarity pushed between the latter so-called "presocratics" (as if philosophia began with a combative pugnose and his bare-skinned wrestler, who, we are taught, Apologized sick for that tectonic symposium, catering thigh-slapping hemlock and an Asklepion 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 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?”

Shithead 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 lunchtime muster of 40 bellies rumbling 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 the cell door.

He now heard Hillston boys on the parade-ground, their boot heels scraping the bitumen gravel. Panic set in. He listened intently, pressing an ear against the joint of the 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 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.

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 bucko?” he asked, his pinkie deep in his piehole, 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 it's 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. 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 Puma's mere presence, shithead meekly inquired to the whereabouts of 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, dago dickhead employed passive resistance, 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, discernible 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 privileged indulgence of a 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 suffered, and recreation 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 stumpy creature. Plastered in unctuous makeup, 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 thickets and springs, resplendent with the delightful chatter from frolicking pixies and sprites. Binnie, in a native dialect, translated into vagina. “Miss Binnie,” the Blueblacks would call out, “show us your Binnie,” and the boys in the know, 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 otiose 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 childhood, 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, returning him 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 also unhelpful. Soon, Les' jolliness transmuted into sourness, and where a healthy grin illuminated his chubby cheeks, a grim dour expression manifested.

Lunch had come and gone on a Friday, and First, Second and Third 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,

 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 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, the incipient "trannie" 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 disportment, 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 escorted Calabrese carbonara struggled towards the administration block, daunted.

“Thank you Jim” said Bowyer, sending the subordinate back to the wind-swept wings.

“Sit down Frankie,” said Bowyer, who 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, let's 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 the turnkey 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 First 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 "wascally" wog, until he reached the cellblock grill, until itself opened as a Bocca dellla Verita to swallow a malefactor morsel.

"Suckoling" weekly ladder sheet.

Shockingly, Author listed in "Third Group."

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 checking-in at Hyatt Hillston. “Suckole,” David Metcalf called him, when he walked down the corridor to his stately stanza. Something fucking weird about that Metcalf, Frankie assessed 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 greasy 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 perky Scottie warbled from the small storeroom outside the dutyroom. A handful of First and Second Group boys promptly gathered, waiting to be handed a wooden box tagged with their surname. This additional 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 naturally contraband in the cells, and thus secured under lock and key. The only items fettuccine Frankie had boxed, were letters, along with a loose collection of stamps, salvaged from envelopes, discarded by inmates.

In 1991, David Ernest Metcalf, who followed the Author to Riverbank, then adult 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 he 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, "hon" received another from Jean. In this letter she explained how, in consultation with Bowyer and Merrifield, she got 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 Irishmen. He also knew it was an old institution and more liberal than the Hillston regime, offering 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 Bowyer conference, before Frankie fluked a two-week run of Top Group. An achievement rendered easier, due to a head-cold, an affliction, which for the wilding wop 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. “We're 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 he had frequently encountered.

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

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

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

Priggs continued, “Marvellous, 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 2. you don’t talk to, or play with my boys. Rule number 3. you don’t enter my house without my wife’s, or my permission, and rule number 4., 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 snivelling, and Priggs stormed out, shouting.

“Git over ere Pinaia!”

"Pinaia" 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' viciousness.

“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.”

“Bollock! Stop lying you delinquent sod, you couldn’t lie straight in bed you friggin eyty tosser.”

This time the slippery sod had to ask Priggs to repeat his Cockney clacker, 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 Frank 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, he 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 eyty, “open your earole wop. You’re a lying shite. You buggered me son’s bike, didn’t yer?”

“No I didn’t! Gary fucking broke the pedal, cause he scraped 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 hiss 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, come on really!”

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

“Try me.”

“Well for starters Priggs 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 him to play. “You move first,” he said. Frankie advanced a pawn, with Bowyer responding likewise. Several moves later, he checkmated a seemingly stunned Bowyer. “I’m impressed Frankie, no one has ever beaten me that quickly.” Gullible guido positively glowed from the compliment. A little later, when his strutting Mussolini ego had decompressed, he suspected Bowyer had outmanoeuvered 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?” The parmesan peasant pondered over 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.”

“Boys and groupworkers included, don’t have to know. It will be our private thing.”

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

Infamous for its austerity, 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 youth 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, 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, he was thrust, several years before the institution was shut-down in a spurt of scandal 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 in 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 with the muffled sobs of unrequited shades. Pain and despair soaked the very foundations of the grim institution, and he was having none of it. One other boy remained in his seven-bed dormitory, and on the weekends, he left, leaving him alone with the phantoms of past. After lights out, he flickered like a dying globe, between drowsiness and alertness, starting at every noise, the source of which, became more demonic as the Plutonian nights advanced. In the mornings, the bolognese bandit 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 head.

Every type of infraction had been perpetrated a thousand times before his 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 him, 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 unholy environment, baffled in how to perform, without the harness of panoptic supervision. Unrestricted in his movements during daylight, he instinctually cleaved towards the administration block to discover a booty of staff personal effects, including "Winfield Blues," his preferred brand. Simulating uncanny biblical symmetry, on the eighth-day of his trial placement, the Bertolli bandit, 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'

Following his apocalyptic expedition inside the Clontarf hermitage, the mafaldine miscreant was approached by his Aftercare officer during morning-tea break in the Hillston dining room. “Panaia, 'me grandma' inexplicably agreed to put up with you for weekend leave,” bluntly announced Merrifield.

“Ripper, when can I go?”

“When you make Top Group for two weeks. Can your provincial personage manage that?”

Such conditions amused, as much as frustrated him. Given the right incentive, the vermicelli villager could roll over and beg like the rest of them. Addressing the intelligible part of Theo's characteristic sarcasm, he explained: “Sucking up! I can suck up, if I have to.”

A dull month of boredom ensued, relieved with occasional visits to 33, before he 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, attired in his shrinking civvies, was marched back to the 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 the day of his admission, 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 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. His presence disrupted their afternoon routine of sitting in the 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 felt deficient, as if the city had lost another heritage landmark. Across two decades, the Calabrese couple had congregated at the store front of Coles, becoming familiar with like bench squatters, seeing off bitter senescence, in the tranquilizing bustle of city life. Armed with a walking stick, more as a defensive, rather than a mobility aid, Giuseppe Cavallaro parked his hefty behind on one of the many Hay street concreted benches, crass legacies of the seventies architecture, when cement was rediscovered. He ploughed through his tobacco, content 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 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 the city mall, more often than it was patronized by the old couple. Fresh from Liverpudlian slums, the Scousers coalesced like pungent odours in the city centre. These craven packs intimidated and extorted passers-by, male and female, young and old, pursuing individuals, who dared to retaliate or resist along the mall, wielding a metal bin basket or other Perth City Council utility, not bolted down. On Saturday nights, Skinheads battled against their arch-enemy, the Rocks. Manned entirely with Italian Australians, the sole remit of the Rocks, was to seek and engage Skinheads. The enmity between these cross-cultural opponents echoed the indefatigability of the child-sacrificing Carthaginian scourge, that by all accounts, was not salted into the searing sands of Catonian oblivion. 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 and Variety 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 card, exhorting his doddering compagna, to "andiamo." Bearing Coles groceries, the wearied immigrants slowly negotiated the two-hundred-metre walk to Irwin street bus stop, to board the 306 to Midland. Always, Cavallaro's mortal dread, was missing the last bus, forcing him to stomach a terrifying alternative, the thirty-kilometre taxi fare. This Verdi tragedy happened once, when on a public holiday, Giuseppe forgot to account for the restricted evening schedule. The calamitous cost from Perth to Midland, nearly broke the shattered Alfredo. In a separate, yet no less devastating historic juncture, Giuseppe misplaced his concession card, lost between the cushions on a couch, so venerable, it may have predated the magnanimous juggernaut of Subiaco. Leaden was the Attic pathos, when Joe, in a tragic Agamemnon moment of reckoning, sacrificed, from the forces of implacable Nature, an Iphigenia of forty extra cents. Having already boarded the city bound train, Shiva's sub-continent conductor arrived to collect the toll for his folly. Inconsolable for days, he raged in Mezzogiorno dialect, “minkia minkia," his purpuric fist raised against the azurite of Atlas, of which he would have cracked asunder, had the sacrilege promised a return of the coin.

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 Australia repertoire, he had mastered since his immigration twenty-five-years earlier. Seated in the back-verandah's corner, 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?” he enjoined, promptly 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, then blurted incomprehensible dialect to Joe, who sprung from the sofa, and rushed into the kitchen.

“You mean fridge!” said Frankie, as he watched Joe open the fridge door through the 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 he sought, or was offered refrigerated sustenance, he would have to beat the geezer-goombah to the fridge. Joe’s stinginess, and his efforts to avoid expense, derided by the entire clan, was comical. Frankie suspected that, during the decade the couple had lived on Byers road, their redback-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 mornings.

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 a coughing paroxysm. 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, yielded zucchinis, olives, lemons, figs, mandarins, oranges, persimmons, pomegranates, tomatoes, lettuces, broccoli, artichokes, locusts, beans, peas, tea and a magus' manna in herbs. At the 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, his 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 rotten molars, into her defacto's sunflower bed. She then shuffled into the cucina to prepare dinner. Dinner was Southern Italian, insignificant in size and variety, unlike the main course at midday. Rosa served up two fried eggs awash in a pool of olive oil, inviting the nipote to mop the plate dry with crusty lumps of pane. Joe was typically presented with pranzo 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 head-spinning stations. It was barely eight-thirty, when Joe, yawning ominously in the background, communicated his intention to retire the household. “Dormire dormire,” insisted Joe abruptly, switching off the TV. He 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 he soon understood, it was the consumption of metered electric power.

Joe seated on his ancient couch on back veranda

An unfulfilled Frankie sat on the 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, he heard only the deep rattle of snoring from the master bedroom and the surreptitious scurrying of mice in the room, which also doubled as the 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 "telescreen" enchantment 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. He 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 i tre sat on the back veranda, winding themselves up for the day, and importantly, the pasta pranza. Lunch was followed with smokes in the TV room. During this activity, Giuseppe and grandma dozed in their recliners, with the guinea geezer managing to keep an eye open, surveilling the guinea guest. Around one o'clock, Joe rose in routine panic, pulling 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. Here on out the post meridiem itinerary typically alternated from hosting la puttana Fama at a casa del cugina or promenade through a "Butcher's Apron's" murder of craven colonists, providentially covered with a sable patina of poop. Invariably though, the peragration ended at the storefront of Coles New World and Variety.

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

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

“You can’t talk you fucking Polish...Polish prick,” dickhead ding once traded with Kaycinski, during a common truck in ethnic epithets.

“At least I’m not a greaseball wog cunt,” Kaycinski effortlessly countered jab.

Greaseball thought furiously for a moment, before reciprocating, perpetuating a dialectic, often leading to fisticuffs, “get fucked you poxy Polish.... You.... ah fuck!” That Richard's exotic ethnicity and unpronounceable surname were impossible to rhyme or blend with swear words, more pissed off the wog cunt.

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

Merrifield met Frankie that same week, proposing yet another Aftercare escapade. “Hillston House needs another body pronto, you interested charlie?” he flatly asked, referring to one of the three staff houses, spaced along the driveway entrance. In another Skinner madcap manoeuver, Hillston House became a second Silver City, separated from the oppressive compound in distance only. Two of the staff houses remained tenanted with Roersma occupying the furthest, and Bowyer the nearest. Between these two, stood Hillston House. Encompassed by bush, it was still a four-hundred-meter stroll through a sun-sprinkled rose-lined meadow to reach the compound. In the mornings, House residents, escorted by the onsite 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. Eddie was a repeat offender.

“Yep sure Mr Merrifield.”

On the same afternoon, a bewildered bruschetta was transferred to Hillston House, just in time for dinner with Edward and groupworker Schorer. When he understood Edward was alone, he thought he unravelled 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 demiurgic Rainbow Serpent (or Waugal,) with Occidental and Oriental (Kemetic, Hellenic, 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.

1 of 3 Hillston staff houses.

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. Both 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 Nyx of Her shadow imperium of wraiths. Wrestling with their culturally confected bogeymen, the Wog and the Wongi wriggled 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 Eddie, fleeing the spectral horror harrowing him. 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, then bolted towards the road.

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

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

“Fuck that was no nightmare Mr Schorer. Jesus fucking Christ. Fuck, he fucking jumped six feet into 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, 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 the linguini libertine 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 yesterday?"

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 again 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, 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 everlasting, flitting above Mary's glaciers and Silvaplana steine, to the score of wailing Valkyries; if ever a heart was ruptured by another homo!) the moment to quicken the canter of the equestrian 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 quartus: 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 Menippean laughter. Ovine man does not collapse with an inaudible Turin whimper, rather a "transhumanist" syncope, to a symphony of guffaws. Thus, in a contrariwise Cygnus aria, the august nepot did edict: "Plaudite, comoedia finita est."

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

“Panaia!”

A stunned greaseball rolled 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...Dad says he will pay for your ticket to Roma, if Hillston allow you leave...

Re-reading the letter in making sure he was not mistaken in the offer of travel and ultimately freedom, the delighted "ding-a-ling," as 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,” contributed Lee Furey two cells along. Lee was a puerile shit, the wing ding had come to blows with on occasion.

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

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. 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 the youth with bird-like eyes, while they horse played around. During ablutions, he seemed especially tolerant, permitting his pubescent prisoners marathon-long showers during the winter months. Anticipating the 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 uninterrupted panorama of the shower stalls. Many years passed since his discharge as a prisoner Ward, before dimwit dago understood Henderson’s indulgence in the shower block, was really a disguise for pederastic voyeurism.

At Hillston, Hendo’s private life was steeped in intrigue. It was rumoured, after his wife’s death, he shacked up with a hot eighteen-year-old Oriental. It was further gossiped, 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 in Hillston’s carpark, though, there was no sighting of the famed nymph, whose stimulative Venusian illusion had the Wards, including wog dog, panting harder than a rapacious Pavlovian cur.

Pariah Panaia sat down and skimmed over the letter again, noting this time, the unusual softness of Maria's composition. She had been regularly writing him since his first imprisonment in the Mount Lawley (aka Walcott) Reception Centre, cultivating a sibling bond non-existent in freedom. Until now, the letters were ruminations on the solemnity of life, interspersed with sombre 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 bocconcini, as a bowl of minestrone to the bitch Sheba.

He studied his father’s letter, unable to progress 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 troia. Sooner or later I gonna be rescued.” Alas, Orestes, and a sister to electrify his fortitude, would not pay tribute to the cursed House of Atreus. Since the 'aggressive onset' of antinomic postmodernity, inviolate Clytemnestras, Phaedras and Medeas, benchmark the involute point of irredeemability. Re-adoption of the first-born 'sun' in gynocentric propiation to the curved "triple-goddess," relativistically must be included in the next feculent Foucauldian wave. When Protagoras' man becomes consummate woman, and 'men' are measured for their debauched fluidity then: quod expandit contrahi debet.

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

“I’m not sure, but it could be a while yet. There is a lot of paperwork to be processed, for example, we need to get you a passport, 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, hmm? 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 First Group.”

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

Hillston cell (aka cabin) interior:

Concrete bars behind window removed, floorboards vinyled.

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 Anglophone 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. Ergo, the foot transit from bus to library and back, was a 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 sit-down, discussing his Via Appia to freedom. He was undecided in the plan, 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 dago,” offered Geoff, without cause.

“Ah 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 dog," when 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 the otherwise chicken cacciatore, who lunged at Geoff, jabbing his face three times with his elbow. Geoff was stunned momentarily, shocked, as was the attacker, with the rare display of ferocity. He struck back sending the "greaseball" sliding along the aisle, crashing against legs and boots. Fettuccini Frankie tried to quickly raise himself, aware of his vulnerable position, but was immediately floored by the boots of jeering boys. David Coutts, the tallest groupworker he ever encountered, pulled him to safety, onto to the seat next to Geoff. “Both of you just won yourselves three days,” grunted the gigantic Coutts. Three days' L.O.P. divested the greasy ding of the weekend-leave privilege, being also plunged to Third 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 pesto pariah's passage to Italy, Coutts and Edwards lunched together at the Bottom Group table. Coutts’ Frankenstein’s monster torso necessitated multiple repeats. Third Group boys observed with jealous hunger, as the Polyphemus caricature devoured serving after serving. Edwards, also on L.O.P., whispered his disgust to the boy seated beside him, violating the prohibited privilege of speech.

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

Edwards stared blankly at Coutts.

“Well?”

Edwards' pupils dilated, intensifying an unblinking savage stare. The murderous build-up palpable to all, except the freak of ferine nature.

“I’m speaking to you sport, so answer me, and in the queen's english!”

In a blast of fury, Edwards whipped his plastic chair from under him, and swung the solid metal legs high, aiming for Coutts' cyclopean dome. Amazingly the ogrish Coutts reacted just as fast, raising his chair 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 dalliance with forbearing Tellus, likely awed Anubis, from his chutzpah to thrash in the mercurial waters for as long as he did.

“He’s off," someone remarked from the ranks, as he 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. 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, confident he could anticipate the wog's next move.

"Pinhead Panaia" 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 a passion not unnoticed by the runaway.

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

“Anywhere you’re going cobber.”

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

“Uh its okay thanks, I’ll walk.”

Beads of forehead sweat slid down the motorist's slimy chops. "Call me -azza -obber," he 'cooed' incoherently, repeating his offer, the voice desperate.

“Nah thanks,” said the carbonara cobber.

“Ah come on. What’s the matter, you’ll be okay matey,” and saying so, stretched over towards the stripling hitchhiker, who studied the leathery arm hanging off 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 amalgam of urine, excrement, buggery and most putrescence of all, 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 for unsuspecting youth, entangling 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 vernacular. Unluckily for matey, the Gods never once stalked him for his bastard youth; no, his would-be abductors were of another indelible tyrian pedigree, lower than the curs crawling the intestinal fouled 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 dago blurted aloud in frustration. He then spotted the solution to his dilemma. A Charlie Carters supermarket lay ahead of him like the proverbial desert oasis. He sauntered in, accosting the first floppy housewife spotted.

“Excuse me Missus, I’ve lost me bus money, can you lend us twenty cents?” he pleaded in a sickly Twist mimicry. The terribly oppressed victim of a ruthless raging patriarchy, 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, next to a bulging purse.

“Sure,” she said, then reached for her equally oppressed purse, pregnant with her oppressor's earnings. “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 impulse to fly 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 testosterone tyrannized shopper, and headed to the nearest bus stand.

20 dollar note

Ugly green concrete bus shelters were unique to Perth where the working classes atrophied in wait, cursing, spitting, vilifying, urinating and worse, 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, barrelling along Great Eastern Highway towards his position. Bowyer whipped by, missing his chance of checkmating the unwanted wanted wog.

“Whoa just in time. Fuck!” he exclaimed. He peered around the wall to see the receding rear of Bowyer’s vehicle. He waited. Triple zero buses thundered past for 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 pulled up. He boarded, greatly relieved.

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

Before answering, "laddie" inspected the cabin, designed to convey sixty-nine souls, and was dismayed to see it empty.

“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 in a strained manner. The solo passenger seated himself in the back row, thinking the driver eyed him in similar fashion to that perspiratory poofter, who offered him a 'lift.'

Perth metropolitan bus 1970s and 80s

“Damn it! They must have taken the six o’clock,” groaned the greasy 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.

“Uh 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, the ravioli runaway passed the days pleasantly until Monday morning, when he was forced to leave, because his hosts refused to be bluffed with more claims of stellar borstal behaviour and perpetual extended leave. Before quitting the casa though, the rigatoni rogue sneakily unlatched the storeroom window to then bade the couple, a robust arrividici. 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 previous weekend-leave, when abandoning Joe and grandma at their city post, explored the nearby arcades.

Today, the 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. He flicked through the sheets, scanning for the highest priced. The sheila studied her moisturized cuticles, expertly balancing the phone handset between her powdered face and padded shoulder. “Tony 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 woolly 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, evacuating the bathroom-sized 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 the telephone conversation. Soon after, he clumped noisily through the main shopping aisle of Coles, 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 Jimboots.

Ubiquitous Australian Jimboot.

Grandmas and Joe's house, West Midland, 

where Author released to on "weekend-leave." 

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 Cimmerian thousand blows.

Through the grimy window, Joe, with Rosa waddling behind, appeared in view. He 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 migrated to the TV room. Joe switched on the light, forcing Frankie to squeeze deeper into the gap behind a corner chair. Across the room, the hide of Joe’s culo barely graced 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. Giuseppe took the intrusion more seriously than Frankie bargained, hustling off to the neighbours, to phone for the police. Cursing again Tyche's handiwork, he promptly took leave, walking off into the night, clutching the philatelic loot.

Joe's vegetable garden. Grandma pictured.

“Oi rise and shine sleeping beauty.”

Then the horizontal hooligan heard, “kick his wog ass that will wake the shite.”

Two constables were standing over a curled-up "shite" on a cold train station bench.

Nursing a swollen lip compliments of Midland's 'finest,' the captured cassata 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 repulsive cleaning duties, when La Puma had him scrubbing the ablution commodes with a toothbrush. Such demeaning drudgery really tickled La Puma, who occasionally neglected his supervisory duties, to humiliate his solitary prisoner.

“After you finish the shitters Paaneeha, 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 spots 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.”

He considered his options, the worse indeterminate, scrubbing toilet bowls or massaging Binnie’s ego. Both equally shitty.

“Where did these come from?”

“What?”

Binnie picked up the sheets of stamps from among the superfluous "Rorschach" clutter on the 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, 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 confession, including a commitment to personally restore the swag to its owner.

West Australia Police Headquarters & Lockup

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

The following morning, Binnie led a morally intoxicated and apologetic sfogliatella shoplifter back to the shop. The merchant, unaware of the theft, received the stamps with speechless indignation. On Binnie’s bidding, the philatelist agreed not to involve the law.

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 adjudged, was lost; the stamps and worse, his bellicose reputation, rarely compromised, forfeited in a moment of moralisation and mangiare. Existentially, this was a crisis, 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 categorical: unvirtuous men were re-cast by Pyrrha into women. And whence the light of Io purloined!

Following his rationed lunch, the more distasteful from his psychological defeat, he directed a verbal assault against his favourite Anglican, vomiting venom, until re-accommodated inside 33.

“Put these clothes on mungbean,” 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 advised.

Mungbean mortadella jumped into his civvies, relieved to regain dignity and warmth, albeit for a break long enough, to shoot a passport photo.

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

“Seems so slick,” confirmed Merrifield matter-of-factly, who personally couldn't give two grasso polpette, whether the "problem prisoner" was shot into Saturn's hexagon, or just shot.

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 a slippery silence on the cell bed, unconvinced his imminent discharge was rigdy didge, worried it was a meticulously contrived "Sokel Hoax," by La Puma, who delighted in orchestrating sham clemencies, from punishment pardons to the wretched extreme of immediate release. La Puma elaborated such charades to the point of escorting the dressed-up detainee to the carpark, only to pirouette, laughing into the child's crushed eyes. Being 'toyed' by La Puma, was the nearest selected Wards got to 'fiddle' with toys. Plastic Junoesque toys, as had confected candy, personified the greased gnocchi's nirvana, until Pymander's 'Arjuna,' scythed a cumulonimbus of Kilkenny hubris. Toys, reminded the Saharian Termaximus, 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 back to the homestead hamlet following an a la carte colazione, to strip and clean his charming chalet, a pre-release ceremony practiced universally, he allowed himself to openly rejoice in his upcoming liberation.

Predator Puma could have been the double incarnate of Ephesus' shaitan twins, villainous demigod scumbags, roaming Heraklean antiquity, lying, defrauding 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 prismatic prima matera woven into the existential 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 cabalist patronymic, if not Distractor? Without man-made distraction through antinomy, Maya Herself, becomes the illusion. Consumed first into child care, then customer care, coronary care, aged care and perhaps palliative care. Beneath the grey sterile shawl, veiling the hastening drip, do children, career and car 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, Rhea's polished arbor. When from one man, another man is pointed to the rainbow, he sees clouds, the contempt of the Ages, appears itself 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. The time to dig, from irrepressible instinct, for aurum in the atrium. But the shovel is not swung, because the philanthropic Landlord (always the cowled philanthropist or entrepreneur,) convinces by a million distractive ways, none is to be excavated in a mundus of incidental randomness. That we 'cleverest moderns' are generationally educated to disdainfully repudiate purposive phenomena, revealed everywhere in everything of everything, is our most deleterious and diabolical defeat. Here the 'matter lies,' because the Groupworker yet watches.

Parable Pseudonymous

Camouflaged within a bewildering media of fog, Zoloch the arborist roamed again freely, inside a dysphoric wood of oaks, gums, birches, pines, maples. Sturdy and straight, yet somewhat blighted, most upwards reached, many fallen. These profane wiota and weod, thought the partially visible arborist, must be replaced with our superior species; the blessed azidic perennial. Beneath Zoloch's rueful gaze, the condemned genera, although phylogenically infinitely inferior, are too manifold, bearing timber too hardened, to be singly felled from the conspicuous chop of a barking blade. He recalled an ancient practice passed along epochs, when six wandering ancestors first purged the vulgar olive grove. Infusing toxins slowly downward into the rooted trunk had always been the chosen, though as yet, impermanent panacea, against the multiplying feral species. Zoloch prepared their tools of the trade, rehearsing the barka wisdom of their exiled elders: "remember my sons, when exterminating pestilent plant life, always, always approach with a plaintive voice of the victimized woodsman, gently stroking boughs, gradually extirpating roots, iterating: it is for the good of you and your community of darling saplings."

In the days leading up to this final flight to freedom, Hillston’s inhabitants enthusiastically 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 still, a handful of groupworkers requested he send postcards of "bella Roma," while the more deluded recommending, he give a token in appreciation for the farm-stay 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 leave behind a present.

“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,” instructed a noticeably flat Scottie.

“Yeah.”

“What Panaia?”

“Yes Mr Scott.”

“Watch it sonny jim," he reprimanded, his sadistic zest returning, "you’re still on Hillston time boyo!”

“Yes sir.”

“That’s better. When you finish cleaning your cabin and changed into your civvies, report front and centre to the dutyroom.”

“Yes Mr Scott.”

He peeled off a work sock, and in one foul motion transacted the sum total of his appreciation for Hillston and Department of Community Welfare. “Here’s my Greco Gift 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 ding was munching his way through a third bag of complimentary nuts between sips of coke. Frank Panaia marvelled how yesterday, he was confined in the cold comfort of cell 33, and today, reclined in the cool comfort of seat 34c. His one regret being, he would never again get to enjoy the slapstick society of Lesley Schultz. "That Blackfella was so bloody happy-go-lucky, he could 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****

Notes

1. With the possible exception of commentary praising the Island of Blight, nothing outside the Hillston narrative proper, is precedent or original viz., unauthorized. The marginal banter on traditionalism and mythology etc, is NOT original; comprising interpretations and extrapolations [probably erroneous] gleaned entirely from a extant canon in the "public domain." These texts can mostly be freely accessed from archive.org. Nothing posted above therefore, is (or will be) published in contravention to convention.

2. Excepting the narrative proper, the remainder / marginalia can be classified satirical ramblings, containing little to no veritas. 

3. Pretentious, verbose and Paracelsusian (bombastic) 'English' is intentional. Simply a matter of turning their promiscuous venereal tongue (Germanic, Gallic and Latinic etymologically penetrated and pounded) against the -lacuna- themselves; mangling the copycat vocabulary is likewise a pleasure. Even the Lilith language is "bloody" pilfered! Only the "bloody Brits," could adopt an adjective for sangue, as a nationalised exclamation for exasperation. The bloody bloodlust runs deep!

4. Giovanni (John) Florio, the contemporaneous "greasy guido" expatriate, is discreetly regarded as the authentic Playwright. Consider the empirical [indisputable] data: the ear-ringed flunky 'flourished' in a turnip-bogged Hamlet, having absolutely no connection to Latinized Europe viz. Italy. Beyond husbandry in turnip cultivation, there exists no record (excluding the sowing of desperate conjecture and unverifiable probability) of Ciceronian schooling in a thatched Academia, while instruction in equivalent primary education, is also doubtful. The "Cymbeline" [sibylline!] clodhopper never roamed far from the parochial Hamlet, let alone to Cumae Campania, Rom Aeternus, or indeed anywhere in post-Renaissance Italy. Thus, his miraculous genius to channel Roman patricians and Etruscan nobles, lyricising abstruse nuances and obscure trivia unique to the vernacular, culture and history of Machiavelli's fractured Peninsula, warrants astronomical credulity. It's the same species of manufactured faith required to accept two silvery stones, fantastically flattened a reserve of ten wigwams.

5. Free-Will unhitched from tradition and religion, whether polytheism, monotheism etc, has one trajectory. In other words, FW unhinged from the portal separating traditionalism and relativism (narcissism, nihilism, hedonism, gynocentrism, transgenderism, transhumanism, atheism, globalism and so on) likely completes the Cycle, or rather, collapses the Spiral. Nature's prerogative, nonetheless. Antinomy - its practice / projection, by the "Chosen Ones" (likely self-appointed,) is evidently an enduring and expediting strategy towards the Prerogative. Nothing is to be done, but perhaps stand aside, watch, and guffaw in Harmony with le stelle and erratica.

6. Should a curious Reader query the strategic objective, then this benighted bucatini confesses profane nescience. A forgivable defect perhaps, when mitigated from the circumstance, this dago-dodo achieved a qualitative and quantitative schooling, comparable to aforesaid Stratford sod. 

7. "The Way." The Daoist canon overflows with exquisite parables, for example: the man who sits gracefully before the mountain (not atop!) to endlessly regale in a monogamous "Mountain and I" romance.  A more recondite fable unfolds with a venerable shepherd dressed in a potato sack, confronted by a buffed and pumped warrior prowling for jade (as frisky fellas are wont to do). Says the Mogul, "peasant I believe you don't capish, I can cut you down in a blink of an eye." With neither fear nor fatalism, the herdsman replies: "master Mogul, it is you who does not capish, for in the same eye blink, I am ready to bend for the blow." Apparently, Mr Mogul folds in undying reverence. A common transcendentalist theme shared across cultures, with the husbandman typifying the sagacious white-beard trope. The implied skill-set of the 'wizen' man is, Adept or at the very least, Initiate. Nevertheless, the lesson is rarely explicated beyond a cliched correlation between wisdom and geriatrical geezers. There is of course, a lesson - the potato sacked prole knows something, others don't. Perhaps, the best theriac for self-conscious mortality (cf. the tumid kaulderwelsch painfully expelled by the straining Heidegger, whose solution to Parmenidean "beingness," was to be "unveiled" or "revealed" or decoded etc., in the thereness functionality and isness of the carpenter's hammer; dummkopf! 'being' too generous,) was all along Natural knowledge (cf. da Vinci's 'immortal' exhortation). There be Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre scholars out there, "eyes de-scaled," foppishly regurgitating chunks from their existentialist chumps, akin to a Harry Pywell "chundering" scripture, (naturally, inane or insane parrotism [not far from parasitism] has become an end unto itself - similar perhaps to Anglophone epistemic pursuits of "train and plane watching" and their 'cultured' cataloging). The insipid existentiality of these pedantic parrots will unlikely be "quickened;" an epistemological telos even nihilistic Nietzsche, the self-loathing and repressed Romanticist, prioritized.

8.

9.

X.