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Clip description
Prisoner Dale has been sent to H Division for assaulting a prison officer. He is on remand, awaiting trial, but the officer in charge tells him he has no rights in prison, only those that the prison officers give him. Dale (David Field) is defiant. Three prison officers assault him, led by a senior officer, Mr Kert (Robert Morgan), assisted by Mr Berriman (Bill Hunter) and junior officer Mr Gaunt (Simon Woodward).
Curator’s notes
This is Dale’s introduction to H Division, the harshest wing of any prison in Australia at the time. The film is set in 1972, when Ray Mooney, author of the play on which the film is based, was himself a prisoner at Pentridge. Mooney spent four months in H Division. He was friends with Christopher Dale Flannery, to whom the film is dedicated.
Flannery’s reputation by the time the film came out was as a vicious hitman who had likely been murdered in Sydney in the late ‘80s. Ray Mooney’s play, and this screenplay co-written with the director, give us a different version of the man. Dale is already hardened by the time he arrives in prison, but the life in H division hardens him so much more. We are left to wonder if prison turned him into a killer.
This scene is staged as a kind of transition. We see Dale in sunlight at the doors of H Division, but from here on we rarely see daylight. The film also moves from the realism of the opening shot and the interview with the admitting officer, to a more stylised and artificial kind of light. The shadows are longer and darker, accentuated by shooting in black-and-white. Cinematographer Toby Oliver does a superb job of isolating both the prisoners and the guards from the outside world.
This is what was termed ‘a welcome bash’ in some Australian prisons in the ’70s, notably Grafton and Bathurst jails in New South Wales (see also Stir, 1980). All three prisons became the subject of royal commissions, which uncovered evidence of systematic violence against prisoners. The bash continues for much longer than we see in this clip, and it gets worse. By the end, Dale has internal injuries and has been raped by Gaunt, using his prison officer’s baton.
