Transcripts | Fremantle Prison

A prisoner describes the condition of his cell in 1981 as he began his first sentence.

“Entering the Prison I just realised how big it was and obviously how old it was. The thing that was stayed in my mind the most was the look of the cells. They put me in a cell and I laid down on the bed and looked to my left. Somebody whoever had been in the cell had been picking their nose and wiping the boogies on there. There was that many of them I can literally guarantee you there was hundreds of them. Right where my head is. And I never even - I think I was in the cell for two or three days I didn’t even clean them up. You know and um I felt the cells there were quite disgusting but they weren’t in the best condition and whoever lived in the cell prior to me the cells weren’t cleaned up after that person left. He’d obviously been in there for a long time because he’d had hundreds of boogies that he’s decided to wipe on the wall. The only description of it was very disgusting.”

A prisoner reveals his first thoughts about the Prison and his first night locked up in a cell.

“Well my initial thought of the place when I got taken out of the prison van was I thought holy… and looked around a bit and all you seen was great big walls, a bit of yard, and that was it, you know. It thoroughly shook me up. I didn’t know what to do, what to think, but I’d done what I’d done so I had to pay the price, and grin and bear it. I just said about the click click and the door closing and the key turning – the first night that I was here I heard those same noses and I tell you what I cried all night. I was only a kid. I couldn’t even see out the window I was that short and it was just something that I’d never want to go through again.”

A prisoner arrives at the Reception processing area of Fremantle Prison in the 1960s.

“Well it was very alien, very very alien. Mind you I’d been in the Reception a few times. Then they take the clothes off you. You shower. I think they had some type of er stuff for tinea. You had to step into this type of bath, purpley-coloured shit, you know, stained, and then have showers and then you go through – all the underwear was second hand, never get any new underwear, everything was second hand, been washed, which was very alien at the time. You’re constantly ordered around – move, move, move and basically you’re just being done and doing what you’re told. You don’t want to get in the shit. And you’re marched off.”

A prisoner already used to detention at the Riverbank Juvenile Detention Centre, describes the experience of entering New Division in the 1960s.

“From a distance? It was scary, I mean in Riverbank Institution which was hard at the time, you know, Freo was a threat. You’re going to Freo, you’re going to jail. You know. They would do things to you in there – whoo – and all that type of crap. That was a threat so it was scary and when I came in I came into the worst Division at the time which was New Division.” Q: Why was that the worst? “Cause all the other Divisions had been established, long term prisoners were in there, these were just short termers, you know, drug slaggers as they used to call them. They would go in for three or six months, and it was filthy, it was a filthy Division. Nothing about it was nice, not that you can have nice prisons, not that you can have nice Divisions.” Q: Nice prisons? “Nice prisons, yeah, but it was filthy.”