Pentridge prison Melbourne record collection
Jethro Heller was released from prison 40 years ago. In his short film Letters from PentridgeThe three years of fear and violence he spent in one of Australia’s toughest prisons are described in full detail. But now, when he looks back, he also remembers the moments when he felt relieved.
“Minnie Riperton: I love you.” A beat passes. “Sorry to stumble, but that memory comes flooding back. Even today, this song takes me back to a very lonely night when it was played on the radio.”
He was listening to 3PD, which a man named Sparrow was broadcasting from a double cell filled with records and turntables in Section D. Our loved ones would leave their wishes on visiting days. On a billboard outside, prisoners were dedicating songs to each other: coded messages of support or other intentions. Pat Benatar Hit Me With Your Best ShotHeller suggests that this might be a bit disturbing.
I love you “It was a request made for someone else, but I remember how it affected me that night. It’s funny. This request also appeared in my dreams. Every time I hear it, I get the feeling: ‘Everything will be okay. You are not alone.'”
Across town at Footscray Records, Joshua Smith examines some recently purchased stock. “Yes, here it is. Minnie Riperton: Perfect Angel1974.” It’s not a very 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 cataloged only half of the nearly 2,000 LPs that faded into memory after the prison closed in 1997.
“A lot of stuff was looted, but the records room was locked,” he says. “Nobody cared enough to do anything with it, so it sat in an office in Carlton for 25 years. One day I got a call: ‘We’ve got to move out of here. Are you buying records?'”
Record dealers buy old collections all the time. They value them, they register and price them, they throw them in the bins and they are online and they are gone: libraries bound by time and circumstance disperse in a thousand random directions. But “things got a little ridiculous” when he mentioned it in a Facebook post.
“People were fetishizing the whole prison experience, and I started thinking, ‘Maybe there’s more to this.’” He lets out a slightly anxious groan as he moves past Serious Young Bugs to Tough Little Fingers. “Now I’m thinking, ‘Maybe I won’t sell it yet. Let’s see what happens.'”
The origins of the collection, which began with the 78 rpm shellac discs of the 1940s and exploded into the 1980s, become entwined over decades of prison life, where memories were blurred by an ever-changing population and conditions were further obscured by willful forgetting.
Some were sent by loved ones, and some were donated by radio stations. Dennis Bear remembers his regular trips to Mornington to collect albums from Radio 3MP as one of the highlights of his five years as operations manager.
“His name was Billy Thomas,” he recalls of the prisoner who was later assigned to run the station. “He had a double cell. One side was where he slept and the other side was the radio room.”
Eventually, Bear convinced the governor to allow Thomas to accompany him on collecting trips. “I’ll do this for you, Bill,” she told him. “But let me tell you this, if you attack me, I will catch you and destroy you.”
“We would go to a cafe in Mornington, have lunch… and it kind of turned into an arrangement,” he says. “Billy and I ended up having a great relationship. I mean, he was a criminal and I was an officer, but we did a lot of things together.”
Doug Morgan, who served time for bank robbery from 1979 to 1990, is unsentimental about music. “There was a speaker up on the wall and it crackled. You couldn’t tell if it was good music or bad music,” he grumbled. “I would wait for the 3DB greyhound race to start.”
Still, he couldn’t resist a recent visit to Footscray Records. “People would hide things,” he says. “There may be old money or messages inside the record covers.” A name scrawled across a Jackson Browne LP sets him off. “Ah! I was at Jika Jika [maximum security unit] The night Colin’s throat was slit.”
Connections were also created beyond walls. While Billy Pinnell was on the air on Triple M, he started receiving letters from a prisoner, Johnny Mac, whom he called for the sake of our conversation.
“He wrote, ‘I love your show’ and stuff like that, and ‘there’s actually a radio show I do here and I’m allowed to play some music’.” Pinnell began sending him the promotional album from his strange label. On Sunday nights he would often sign off with the words: “Thanks Johnny Mac and all my friends at the Coburg Hilton.”
Mac was living in the Footscray Hotel when he passed away recently. Pinnell recalls his visits during those years with some emotion. “He loved rock’n’roll. He loved The Who. His mother took him to the Festival Hall to see Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker… My contribution to his record collection was small. But… he brought someone into my life that I will never forget.”
The collection that survives in the store reflects the strange democracy of prison life. Kamahl sits alongside Gregory Isaacs and the Gang of Four; rare Native rock and country records alongside op-shop filler. Punk albums evoke a rumor Smith heard about The Clash throwing records over prison walls.
He wanders through the angular piles like an archaeologist digging up emotional debris. He set aside some rare things. Rodriguez has a lively song. “He actually played Pentridge once.” Another is from Melbourne rock legend Wendy Saddington. Johnny Cash has a thick pen etched into his arm: “I hate this place.”
According to Berlin-born art historian Katrin Strohl, founder of Pentridge Voices and the Pentridge Prison Online Museum project, the recordings form part of a larger struggle about memory itself. “We’re recording all these stories that no one wants to record,” he says. “Or no one thinks it’s noteworthy.”
He 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 standpoint. But I couldn’t find much about the actual people who lived or worked there. I was missing the human side.”
He now fears the collection will languish on the market, “which is a shame. It should go to the museum. But unfortunately there is no Pentridge Museum. Not yet.”
This tension hangs over every conversation about records. Smith’s custodial assignment is a short-term reprieve in a shaky retail economy where rare vinyl can’t hold itself back for free and business depends on making room for new stock.
Dennis Bear seems to be wounded by the idea of the collection disappearing piece by piece. “We were very upset when we found out this had happened,” he says.
Smith agrees: “It would have been a shame to split it, but it wasn’t cheap.” All it takes to keep it together, he says, is an honest conversation and a realistic price. “I won’t even know what it’s worth until we finish cataloguing it,” he says. But “this will be a raw vinyl price, not a historical document”.
