Tales from behind Mt Eden Prison walls
Mount Eden Prison is New Zealand’s most notorious gaol. Prisoners called it The Rock or Rock College, and it was they who hewed its forbidding basalt walls from the nearby quarry.
The gloomy Victorian structure has housed some of our nation’s most renowned criminals, including George Wilder. It has also accommodated conscientious objectors and political prisoners, including Rua Kenana, Tim Shadbolt and briefly, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, the French agents responsible for blowing up the Rainbow Warrior.
Now a vivid new book by historian Mark Derby, goes inside the prison walls to tell the Mount Eden story.
We asked Mark some questions:
Almost 10 years ago, in 2011, I heard that the old prison was being vacated, and its remaining inmates moved elsewhere. I thought, “I’ll bet there are plenty of weird stories to be told about that place,” and then I realised that those stories hadn’t yet been recorded anywhere.
I knew instantly that this was a strong idea for a book. I hoped it could become a sort of social history of New Zealand from the underside — an account of the people and practices that more conventional histories leave out.
The sheer scale of the subject matter was daunting. I started in 1841 with the very first Auckland jail — that meant a 170-year timeframe. Later I found it impossible to access many restricted records such as prisoners’ files. And the overwhelming bleakness of the material got me down at times.
I’m really grateful to the many exinmates who told me about their memories of the prison. I tracked down ‘Diamond Jim’ Shepherd, once part of the Mr Asia drug gang, on Queensland’s Gold Coast. We had several long phone calls about his stretches inside, which began when he was just 16 and ended with the massive prison riot in 1965.
I think the saddest discovery of all concerned the Lock Hospital, a little building that stood alongside the main prison in the 1880s. Women suspected of having contagious diseases could be held and treated there against their will. Most were sex workers with venereal diseases, and the youngest I heard of was just 10.
Col. Pita Awatere DSO MC stands out for me. He was a Ma¯ori Battalion commander, an Auckland City Councillor, a renowned expert in taiaha and other traditional arts, who could also read Latin and quote Shakespeare by the hour. He became the kauma¯tua of the prison in the 1970s, and inspired many young Ma¯ori inmates to engage with their language and culture.
One day the mayor of Invercargill, Sir Tim Shadbolt, turned up at my place and we had a great chat about his several short stretches in the prison. Sandra Coney, the feminist author and local body politician, is another ex-inmate who was very generous with her time and impressions of the place.
Absolutely. The building was a personal project of the first Inspector of Prisons, Arthur Hume, who wanted it to look like the grim, Dickensian prisons he was familiar with in the UK. That meant it was out of date and unfit for purpose even before it was finished in the early 20th century.
■ the measure of a civilised society is the way it treats its lowest-status citizens
■ poverty causes crime — always has, always will
■ behaviour that we regard as criminal in one era becomes normal in another, so we should be alert to what activity we currently regard as criminal
■ and no one likes living with a brimming chamberpot under their bed.
I end the book by setting out the various new uses people have suggested for this large, unique, publicly-owned facility which sits on the most valuable real estate in the country. Personally, I’m strongly in favour of turning at least part of the old prison into a national museum of our penal system, as other countries have done.