The hardest of the hard The open paddocks and relative freedoms of the farm were a dream compared to Goulburn Gaol – from where Dennis had been transferred. ‘It was a scary place, being only 18 years old’. He had been moved there from Long Bay, where he spent his first night in prison thinking to himself, ‘what am I doing here?’ and ‘you’re here, you gotta do the best you can’. It was the first night of a five-year sentence. He’d end up serving three-and-a-half years of it. Like Tom, Dennis felt he lucked out with his cell mate – a Scot who loved to sing. As Tom said, in the morning when the cell doors opened it was just like bein’ home. How you goin’ Bill? How you goin’ Charlie? Oh John, how long you been here? He was safer because of the blokes he knew from the outside. ‘The blokes I got round with, they were the hardest of the hardest. Neddy Smith. Bobby Chapman ... And really in a way when I look back probably knowin’ them people was a big thing in your favour’. Not that this shielded Dennis from violence, but it spared him being on the receiving end of the worst of it. ‘The things that went on it there, Emma!’, Dennis would say, shaking his head. He told me distressing stories of blokes suffering at the hands of predators and thugs. ‘You know, I seen all that. I seen all that happen. You used to feel sorry, but what could you do?’ He told me about the time he bashed a man who wanted to stab him over a disagreement about tobacco. I got wind of it that he was gonna shiv me. He got the pass to go to the toilet and they had two passes so I waited for him to get the pass and then I got the pass to go to the toilet and Ned stood outside and ah then we went into the toilet and I said to him, What’s your beef? and then just laid into him. And I picked up the tin, the tin where you throw the rubbish and I bashed him with the tin. And I remember I left him laying half in the cubicle and half not.
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