Men did it tough inside Pentridge. One thing made all the difference

Jethro Heller got out of prison 40 years ago. In his short film Letters from Pentridge, his three years of fear and violence in one of Australia’s toughest jails are recalled in intimate detail. But looking back now, he also remembers moments of comfort.

“Minnie Riperton: Loving You.” A beat passes. “Pardon me stumbling, but that memory just comes flooding back. To this day, that song takes me back to one very desolate night when that came over the radio.”

He was listening to 3PD, which a bloke named Sparrow broadcast from a double cell in D Division stocked with records and turntables. Loved ones would leave requests on visiting days. On a board outside, inmates would dedicate songs to each other: coded messages of support or other intentions. Pat Benatar’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Heller suggests, might flag a bit of bother.

Loving You “was a request for someone else, but I remember how it affected me that night. It’s funny. I’ve had it turn up in my dreams. Every time I hear it I get this feeling of, ‘Everything’s going to be OK. You’re not alone.’”

Across town at Footscray Records, Joshua Smith flicks through some recently acquired stock. “Yeah, here it is. Minnie Riperton: Perfect Angel, 1974.” It’s not an especially rare album, but it’s hard to put a price on this copy.

News of the Pentridge record collection came as a surprise to the store owner last year. He’s still only catalogued about half of the roughly 2000 LPs lost to memory after the prison closed in 1997.

“Heaps of stuff had been ransacked, but the record room was locked,” he says. “No one cared enough to do anything with it, so it sat in an office in Carlton for 25 years. I just got a call one day: ‘We have to move out of here. You buy records?’”

Record dealers buy old collections all the time. They value, log and price them, stick them in bins and online and off they go: libraries bonded by time and circumstance splintering in a thousand random directions. But when he mentioned this one in a Facebook post, “things went a bit silly”.

“People were fetishising the whole prison experience, and I started thinking, ‘Maybe there’s more to this.’” He emits a slightly anxious groan as he flips past Serious Young Insects to Stiff Little Fingers. “Now I’m like, ‘Maybe I’m not gonna sell it yet. Let’s just see what happens.’”

Beginning with 78rpm shellac discs of the 1940s and booming through the 1980s, the collection’s origins are tangled through decades of prison life, where memories are blurred by constantly shifting populations and conditions are further obscured by wilful forgetting.

Some were sent in by loved ones, some donated by radio stations. Dennis Bear remembers his regular drives to Mornington to collect albums from Radio 3MP as one of the highlights of his five years as activities officer.

“Billy Thomas was his name,” he recalls of the prisoner then entrusted to run the station. “He had the double cell. One side was where he slept, and the other side was the radio room.”

Eventually, Bear convinced the governor to let Thomas accompany him on collection trips. “I’m gonna do this for you, Bill,” he told him. “But I tell you what, if you ever bolt on me I’ll catch ya, and I’ll make a mess of ya.”

“We would go to a cafe down there in Mornington, have lunch … and it became a bit of a deal,” he says. “Billy and myself, we ended up forming a great relationship. I mean, he was a crim and I was an officer, but we did a lot of things together.”

Doug Morgan, who did time for bank robbery from 1979 to 1990, is unsentimental about the music. “There was a speaker up high on the wall, and it just crackled. You couldn’t tell it was good music or bad music,” he growls. “I used to wait for the 3DB greyhound racing to kick in.”

Still, he couldn’t resist a recent visit to Footscray Records. “People used to hide things,” he says. “There could be old money or messages inside record covers.” One name scrawled across a Jackson Browne LP makes him start. “Oh! I was in Jika Jika [maximum security unit] the night Colin got his throat cut.”

Connections were forged beyond the walls, too. Billy Pinnell was on air at Triple M when he began receiving letters from a prisoner he calls, for the sake of our chat, Johnny Mac.

“He wrote, ‘love your show’ and all that, and ‘actually, I’ve got a radio program I’m doing in here and I’m allowed to play some music’.” Pinnell began sending him the odd record company promo album. On a Sunday night he’d often sign off with, “Thanks to Johnny Mac and all my mates at the Coburg Hilton.”

Mac was living in the Footscray Hotel when he passed not long ago. Pinnell recalls their visits in those years with some emotion. “He loved rock ’n’ roll. He loved The Who. His mum took him to Festival Hall to see Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker … My contribution to the record collection was minor. But … it brought somebody into my life that I’ll never forget.”

Back at the shop, the surviving collection mirrors the strange democracy of prison life. Kamahl sits beside Gregory Isaacs and Gang of Four; rare Indigenous rock and country records next to op-shop filler. Punk albums conjure a rumour Smith has heard of The Clash rolling up to lob records over the prison walls.

He flicks through the dog-eared stacks like an archaeologist excavating emotional debris. Some rarities he’s set aside. There’s a live one by Rodriguez. “He actually played Pentridge one time.” Another by Melbourne rock legend Wendy Saddington. A Johnny Cash sleeve is etched with heavy biro: “I hate this place.”

For Berlin-born art historian Katrin Strohl, founder of Pentridge Voices and the Pentridge Prison Online Museum project, the records form part of a larger struggle over memory itself. “We record all these stories no one really wants to record,” she says. “Or no one thinks worth recording.”

She became fascinated with the bluestone monolith after moving to Coburg 13 years ago. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful,’ just from an architectural perspective. But I could not find much about the actual people who lived there or worked there. I was missing the human side.”

Now she fears the collection will simply dissolve into the market, “which is a shame. It should go in a museum. But unfortunately, there is no Pentridge Museum. Not yet.”

That tension hangs over every conversation surrounding the records. Smith’s custodianship is a short-term reprieve in a shaky retail economy where rare vinyl does not preserve itself free, and business depends on making way for new stock.

Dennis Bear sounds wounded by the idea of the collection disappearing piecemeal. “We were quite upset when we found out this was happening,” he says.

“It’d be sad to split it up,” Smith agrees, but “it wasn’t cheap.” What’s needed to keep it together, he says, is just an honest conversation and a realistic price. “I won’t even know what it’s worth until I finish cataloguing,” he says. But “that will be a raw vinyl price, not as a historical document”.