I'm Not Afraid of You

CHAPTER ONE

Journey to Hell

At six in the morning they came for me. The three-day road trip from Port Hedland to Perth was a winner, first class all the way. The cold was extreme. They must think you’re like meat, they had the air con cranked right up. This big Ames security truck was like a safe on wheels. The bench seat was too cold to lie on so I lay on the steel floor. There was a lot of anger. I didn’t know Bandyup prison existed. I cried at times; I was scared. I was curled up in the foetal position trying to keep warm. It was horrible, no smoking on that flight. Those trucks aren’t allowed to stop and let anybody out. The chemical toilet was covered by a camera. I was wearing my standard issue maroon tracksuit pants and top. There were no blankets, no pillow. I couldn’t see out; I was enclosed in a box. I couldn’t see the drivers, the passing landscape, the sky, nothing. K was up north with his dad and I was heading south. I had never felt so lonely. So alone. I felt sick with loneliness. You think any minute now someone’s going to come, at the same time you know no-one is going to come. In Greenough I thought any minute someone’s going to come and say this has been a big mistake. But no-one comes. Then you realise that no-one’s ever going to come. You feel like you’re going crazy, your thoughts spin out of control. I don’t know how they can do that to people, and they don’t care either. I travelled this way for about sixteen hundred kilometres over those three days. I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die.

It was about nine hours to Carnarvon on the first day, and when we got there, they put me in the lock-up for the night in a disgusting, smelly room on a filthy mattress with a dirty, grey blanket. It was horrific. In the same cell were all the drunks they’d picked up for the night and the smell was sickening. And it was freezing cold. No shower, only a smelly basin with some soap. I couldn’t lie on that mattress. I just sat on the concrete floor all night.

The next day I was put back in the truck and we drove to Greenough, the Geraldton prison, almost five hundred kilometres away. I shared a cell with an Aboriginal woman. We didn’t speak; I was on the top bunk, she was on the bottom. On the third day we moved on to Perth, four and a half hours away. Before I got on the truck a guard said, ‘Hey do you want a book?’ It was the Bible and he started laughing. He said, ‘Have you read this?’ I said, ‘Yeah, some poor prick dies at the end of it.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Whaat?’ I don’t normally swear but I was pretty much over it all. He just looked at me and then laughed. They thought it was funny. It wasn’t at all funny.

The trip was torture. Apart from the cold and discomfort, I wasn’t allowed to smoke, so there I was with my bottle of water, my poxy sandwich and an apple or whatever it was in a paper bag. It was total misery.

When we got to Bandyup prison, I wasn’t sure where we were. I knew it was in Perth but I couldn’t quite place it, I had no idea, I was just in this prison in Perth somewhere.

I got out of the truck and they put handcuffs on me. My hair was everywhere because I had no hairbrush or toothbrush and I’d been in the same clothes for three days. In front of me were two officers, a male and a female. One of them said, ‘Well look what we’ve got here.’ I glared at them.

I noticed that the further we got down Australia’s west coast, the worse we got treated. The Roebourne officers seemed to be more laid-back, the Greenough ones weren’t too bad, but when I got to Perth it was a nightmare. Hell on wheels. They expect you to get off the truck and when they say, ‘How’re you going, mate, how was the trip,’ you’re expected to say, ‘Yeah, not too bad.’ It’s insane. It’s inhumane. You’re supposed to be presumed innocent until you’re tried and proven guilty, but on a wilful murder charge you’re just a piece of shit to them. Nobody ever gets off that charge so in their eyes you’re guilty. They don’t have to prove you’re guilty – you must prove you’re innocent.

They took me into the administration building where they process you and do the paperwork, the same demeaning routine as Roebourne prison. I got to have a shower and they gave me the standard tracksuit, this time blue. I was given a bag of toiletries, a horrible soap, a comb, a toothbrush that looked like it had been stomped on, plus a pair of thongs for my feet.

When you first arrive, they take you to a place called Crisis Care. It’s a bit like a hospital. It’s quiet and it’s clean. They put you in there when you first go to prison; I think it’s a precautionary thing in case you want to hurt yourself or commit suicide, and to help ease you into it. You get a better bed and a TV room and a little garden that you can go and sit in and you can also read books. It’s just a quiet place. They’d come and watch you, and you had to have a blood test to check for hepatitis, AIDS and so on, you have a medical. I wasn’t very impressed; I wasn’t in a talkative mood and I wanted to speak to K. I hadn’t spoken to him since Roebourne. I was upset, I was crying, I thought I was losing my mind.

The calls to K at Roebourne prison had been hard; it took everything I had not to break down on the phone. It was daunting and it would make me angry. The phone conversations were only allowed to be ten minutes long. They went like this:

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Mum, how are you? Where are you?’

‘I’m just, you know, I’m just in the jail.’

‘Why?’

‘Just because of what BJ did.’

‘When are you coming home?’

‘Soon, mate, soon. How’s school?’

‘Oh yeah, I did this today,’ and he’d start talking about stuff.

‘I’ve gotta go ’cos the phone’s starting to cut out.’

‘Oh. I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

‘When are you coming home?’

‘Soon.’

I’d get off the phone and I’d start yelling, ‘Fuck this!

Fuck this!’ It was draining. It was gut wrenching.

CHAPTER TWO

Becoming Murcott

My parents split up because dad would leave us for long periods. He’d say he was going to work and then he wouldn’t come back for a few months. He’d leave us without money or food. When he died, I found out I had eighteen brothers and sisters, some of them the same age as me. He had women all over the place.

His name was Taylor. He was a fencer and a roo shooter so we lived out in the bush when I was tiny, we didn’t even have a house. Mum met him when she was sixteen and had her first baby, Dianne, when she was seventeen. By the time I was born, Mum was twenty-five and my father was forty-four. There was a huge age gap between them. My mum’s parents owned a big property and her dad died when she was twelve so my grandma was left with a big property and seven kids. My dad came and worked on that property and then took my mum away, and the family didn’t see her for a long, long time, even though she had four kids. We lived in a camp situation in tents out in the bush. It wasn’t unusual for families in those days to live in the bush and follow the work around but Mum doesn’t say too much about it, just that she never had a house with him and he was always off with other women. Mum and he weren’t even married. She doesn’t remember whether she left him or he left her. She wrote a letter to him and gave it to his brother but he never contacted her.

After Mum and Dad broke up, we went to live with Mum’s brother who was a prison officer. He quit after a nervous breakdown from working in Fremantle jail, but had a mate, Mr Murcott, who met Mum through him. When Mum and Mr Murcott married, he adopted my two older sisters, Dianne and Helen, and my brother Ross and me, and so we became Murcotts. We lived in a big house in Mount Claremont. It was owned by Mr Murcott who also had custody of his kids. I was two when they married, Ross was five, my sister Helen was six, my stepbrother Ray was seven, Dianne, my eldest sister, was ten, and there were two older stepsisters, seven children in all, quite a full house. I used to get on quite well with Ray, and Ross and I were close. I was a bit of a tomboy and I’d sit out the front in my board shorts waiting for him to come home.

Ted Murcott was a big man who had no time for us at all. I feared him. He seemed huge when I was so little, and he was a big bloke anyway. He’d been in the SAS (Special Air Service) before becoming a prison officer. We lived in fear of making any noise, or going to the toilet, or sitting at the table, anything really. If Ross or I upset him, we just got a belting, we’d get the thong or a backhander. He never physically hurt my mum or my sisters, and he never laid a hand on his own children, just me and Ross.

Murcott was a bully. Mum wasn’t allowed to have much and he’d give her fifty dollars a week to buy food for a household of nine, which didn’t go far. He was the money earner. He wasn’t very nice to Mum or us, which I was aware of from a very early age. At Christmas time his kids would get lots of presents and we’d get one each. He was nice to his own kids. They were aware of it too. Because Mr Murcott used to belt Ross and me around quite a bit, I never liked to be with him on my own, I never felt comfortable or safe.

Ross remembers when I was about two or three and I wouldn’t eat my dinner. Murcott kicked the highchair out from under me and I slammed onto the ground, and then he force-fed me. I was crying and gagging. It was distressing for Ross to watch.

Murcott would also pick me up in my highchair, put me out in the laundry and turn the lights out. He’d smack the shit out of me with a thong, trying to force-feed me. He continued doing it as we got older, and when we were little tots he’d make the two of us go out in the laundry with the dog and would make us eat our dinner out there.

It brings back bad memories when we talk about it and Ross gets angry. I’ve been a bit angry too lately. It’s hard, I’ve spent many years trying to forget it and push it away, but it’s always there. He used to bash me when I was so little. I was a vent for his rage.

Ross used to wet the bed a lot and my stepdad would pull him out of bed and beat the crap out of him, then make him stand in the toilet until he went again, which he couldn’t do because he’d already done it. He used to frequently hit Ross. He would hit us with a belt on our backs, or the back of our legs. One of his favourite things when we were little was to grab us and hold us up off the ground and smack the crap out of us. He’d say, ‘I’ll give you something to cry about.’ Now when I think about it, I think: settle down. I could almost laugh, although it’s not at all funny. I suspect that now you could go to jail for something like that. For some reason, most of the doors in that house had locks on the outside so he could lock you inside your bedroom or other rooms.

His mother lived there too. They both used to drink all night and she’d piss herself at the dining room table. They’d sit there and drink king browns¹ and when they got drunk they’d get into punch-ups. If you made a noise, he’d get up and give you a flogging. Having said that, he could be nice at times, but only if he’d been drinking. More often he was nasty and cruel. The best rule was always to stay out of his way. I was always frightened of him. He’s on his death bed now and wants to see us to say sorry, but there’s no way. We were in fear of him, and being kids, we had nowhere to hide, nowhere to go.

We were sent outside most of the time, which suited us. I was always an outdoor kid. I played with my brother, playing with train sets, making cars, climbing on the roof, just boy stuff. We used to make flying foxes, and go down to the local lake and look for golf balls, or go to the beach and play on skateboards, or build pushbikes and just hang out with mates. We played with the neighbour’s kids and we got up to a bit of mischief, like making chlorine water bombs, just stuff that would annoy the neighbours, but we had no trouble with the police or anything. We were too scared of what Mr Murcott might do if he found out, and all the neighbours knew us, the kids from Rochdale Road. There was always something going on, which made those parts of life enjoyable. We had a lot of friends around that neighbourhood, and there were always lots of people at the house. Remember, there were seven kids, so if we all had a friend over that was fourteen kids! It was flat out. I have to laugh, when I think about it I feel sorry for my mum.

Five o’clock was dinnertime and if you were late you knew you’d get a smack, and if you did anything wrong you’d get clouted by Murcott. If Ross or I didn’t eat our dinner, he’d make us sit there at the kitchen table until ten thirty at night. We couldn’t move until we ate it. So, five hours later we’d be sitting eating cold potato or whatever it was that we didn’t like. Or sometimes I’d get up to get a drink of water after I’d stuffed the food into my cup and then I’d get rid of it down the sink.

There were lots of things we couldn’t do. If you farted in the lounge room you didn’t dare look at your brother – this is a funny thing when you’re little, but if you sniggered at it you’d be banned from the lounge room and from watching TV for a week. Stupid stuff, but I can laugh at it now, it was just so ridiculous. The fact that I can laugh is a bit sad, I think. If it was pouring with rain he might, when I was older, offer me a lift to the shops or my friend’s place, but I