My Time in the Clink

Sharing a Cell with Jim and Pete

It’s amazing the famous people you end up getting to know when you’re stuck in the Slammer.

I mean, not just in the same Clink – but in the same cell.

Jailbirds seem pretty ordinary when they’re behind bars in the Lock-up.

But, once they become fugitives from justice and re-enter the world outside the Cage … well, you just never know where they’re gonna end up.

Look at what happened to two of my cell-mates when they finally got out of the Nick on October 14 1980.

By then they were both in their late 20s.

For privacy reasons, let’s call them Jim and Pete … well, in fact, their real names are Jim and Pete.

Within two decades of being put away, Jim and Pete were a famous duo … holding, at the same time, the two most powerful political positions in Queensland (the second biggest state in Australia).

As one of them later said to me: “The inmates are now running the prison!”

Jim went on to become the Lord Mayor of Brisbane – elected in a vote of the entire capital of Queensland. (Brisbane in the 1920s amalgamated local councils to create the third-largest Council area in the world.)

And in a vote by more than two million Queenslanders, my cell-mate Pete was elected the Premier of Queensland.

Both these former inmates were elected representing the same party – the trade-union-based Labor Party.

Yet when we were all in the Pokey together, Jim was still a suburban Brisbane Catholic priest doling out dispensations, forgivenesses, and penance to the faithful.

Pete was the lowly secretary of the Stationmasters’ Union …  representing all those people making incomprehensible announcements over loud-speakers at railway stations.

It seemed surreal to me that my two cell-mates – both up on the same charge as me – should be ruling my city and my state.

It also put me firmly on the horns of a dilemma.

Sallyanne Kerr 1962

When the 1991 Brisbane Council election came around, the sitting Lord Mayor of Brisbane was Sallyanne Atkinson (née Kerr).

Thirty years before, we were both Brisbane cadet journalists and I’d been madly in love with her … from afar.

She always brought to my mind Lord Byron’s poem:

“She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes…”

Now, instead of me standing against her … it was Father Jim, my old cell-mate, who was standing against her at the upcoming election.

Who should I vote for?

My cell-mate, or my soul mate?

These Brisbane Lord Mayoral elections seemed to throw up difficult voting challenges to wrestle with.

Though I admired his style, the city’s most successful Lord Mayor, Clem Jones, had once caught me out because of his ridiculously retentive memory.

He invited me to his famous annual Christmas party at his home at the top of Camp Hill, but — because I’d rather play tennis on a Sunday — I put in an appearance and quickly made an excuse.

I had to drive my wife to work.

Disconcertingly, Clem insisted on seeing me to the door where he said: “But you’ll be back won’t you?”

Not expecting this cross-examination, I lied and said I would.

It was three years before I met Lord Mayor Jones again and he began the conversation: “You said you’d be back!”

After Clem Jones, Brisbane had a Lord Mayor who was a veteran from World War II: “Sandbank” Frank Sleeman.

During Sandbank’s term, a Japanese city sent a delegation to create a sister-city relationship with our burgeoning town.

“Have you ever been to beautiful Japan your Worship Lord Mayor?” asked the Japanese Ambassador on arrival at City Hall.

“Yes,” replied Sandbank. “As a Prisoner of War!”

That was the end of that.

When I went to interview the next Lord Mayor, Roy Harvey, at his surprisingly modest suburban home there was a sign at the entrance to answer the inevitable question … before I could ask it.

The sign said merely: “It’ll Do”.

The reason I’d shared a jail cell with Lord Mayor-to-be Jim Soorley and Premier-to-be Peter Beattie was that we were each charged with being “prisoners of conscience”.

In 1980, I’d joined Amnesty International after reading it was formed in London in 1961 when three young men were jailed in Portugal for drinking “a toast to freedom!”

So Amnesty’s mission was to act on behalf of anyone jailed for religious or political beliefs.

In other words, Prisoners of Conscience.

At my first Amnesty meeting, a lawyer complained that the Australian media wouldn’t give them any publicity.

I’d been a journalist for 20 years, so piped up: “If you want to make news then you have to do all the work for the media: present them with something to film, something to photograph, some well-known personalities.”

Like what?

“Well, you’re trying to highlight people being wrongly jailed, so build a jail in Brisbane’s King George Square outside the City Hall where people congregate at lunchtime … and put some prisoners in it.

“To illustrate what you’re campaigning against, put signs on them to show why they’ve been unjustly locked up.”

The lawyer immediately grabbed a sheet of A4, scribbled “I wrote the WRONG STORY” … and I was shanghaied.

Arriving at King George Square we exchanged pleasantries until the Screw hung different signs around our necks with cords, and ordered us into the Cage.

My fellow prisoners were Liberal politician Rosemary Kyburz “I was in the WRONG PARTY”; poet Jena Woodhouse “I was in the WRONG ETHNIC GROUP”; lawyer Phillip Tahmindjis “I defended the WRONG PERSON”; and a child “My parents had the WRONG BELIEFS”.

Then I recognised Jim and Pete at either end of the queue.

They seemed to be standing as far apart as our cell would allow.

Father Jim Soorley — with a beard and his collar on back-the-front — was “the WRONG RELIGION”.

So I was very tempted to say “Soorley you’re not serious!”

A mustachioed Peter Beattie stood grim-faced with arms folded under his sign: “I was in the WRONG TRADE UNION”.

The photo of the inmates ran big in the local Courier-Mail and on TV: but it didn’t end there.

You might think that Jim and Pete – both having been in the Clink together and both having taken the Labor Party to the top of the tree at the same time – would have grown closer together over the years.

But, according to the Courier, they “indulged in some of those spats which make Labor’s internal dynamics so entertaining”.

One report referred to “the stench between them”.

I found this a bit difficult to believe … until many years later when the Courier re-printed the picture of us in the King George Square penitentiary.

The following week, Premier Pete launched a book by Dr Ross Fitzgerald at Parliament House.

When Pete saw me there, he rushed over and asked enthusiastically: “Hey! Did you see the photo in the Courier? They reprinted the one of us in the Amnesty jail!”

Which reminded me of the poet Milton’s line on what spurs people to seek fame: “That last infirmity of noble minds”.

“But Hugh,” Pete added, “tell me one thing: do you remember Jim Soorley being in there with us? I don’t.”

That night I was collecting my mail at the local St Lucia shops when Lord Mayor Jim got up from his café table where he was enjoying dinner with his family and bustled over.

“Did you see the photo of us in the Amnesty jail … in the Courier the other day?’

Yes.

“Now Hugh, I was surprised … do you remember Peter Beattie being in that jail with us?”

Suddenly I realised just what strangers my two cell-mates had become on the outside.

Jim shook his head in sad surprise when I affirmed that Premier Pete had indeed been incarcerated with us … and he headed morosely back to his table.

But, at the last possible moment, Jim turned — darted back — and with a huge smile on his dial, eagerly declared:

“Well … at least the inmates are now running the prison”.