Sometimes, religious figures can do what the prison systems can't

He's here to help them all that he can,
To make them feel wanted he's a good holy man.
Sky pilot, sky pilot, how high can you fly?
You'll never, never, never reach the sky.

The lyrics of Eric Burdon and The Animals echoed a message of hope throughout the 1960s while The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones carried a thundering vibration of social revolution into the streets.

It was an era that gave birth to the Age of Aquarius. Hippies. Free love. Flower power. And a military madness that condoned a massacre in a Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai.

In Australia the social revolution came to a grinding halt with the decision that Ronald Ryan would be another casualty of a legal system that embraced the death penalty. The controversial hanging occurred inside Pentridge Prison on 3 February, 1967.

One of the many outspoken critics of the death penalty in relation to Ryan's execution was a sky pilot, universal prison jargon for a priest, nun or chaplain. Father John Brosnan, the sky pilot of Pentridge, ministered to Ryan during his last hours.

Fr Brosnan was a prison chaplain. A man of the cloth. A sky pilot. And to all those who walked the yard in Pentridge during the 1960s he was affectionately known as Broz - the priest with compassion.

Fr Brosnan's fight against social injustice left a lasting impression inside the walls of Pentridge, as it did on the streets of Melbourne, but those impressions blended with a decade of change that ended in 1969 - the year I went to prison for armed robbery.

My reflection of the 1970s was in stark contrast to the previous decade. There was still change and upheaval but the changes were occurring behind the walls of maximum security prisons.

The NSW State Penitentiary at Long Bay, as it was known in those days, was a volatile pressure cooker waiting to explode. Prisons elsewhere had already erupted like festering boils.

Tear gas and bloodied bodies littered the exercise yards of Attica, Folsom and San Quentin in the USA. British prisons at Durham, Wormwood Scrubs and Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight had also erupted in flames.

The body count rose as the insurrection spread.

Inside Australian prisons the keepers and the kept eyed each other suspiciously waiting for some indication of the other's intentions.

Time became an acid. Slowly dripping away ...

There was only one calming effect during that turbulent period. It was the presence of two sky pilots. Two nuns dressed in their conventional "penguin suits" who regularly visited the State Penitentiary at Long Bay and radiated a serenity and peace that seemed out of place inside that seething cauldron of anger, frustration and tension. They listened to the anger of caged men. And they soothed that anger by simply listening.

The sight of those two nuns ministering to a prison population in those tense and strife-torn days was one of the rare spectacles I retained in my memory from the prison carnage of the 1970s.

During the summer of '71 I was classified as "intractable" and transferred to Grafton Jail. At the time I was serving 28 days solitary. Nothing ever changed in solitary at Grafton. Oatmeal mush for breakfast. Oatmeal mush for tea. And silence. Total silence. Punishment for breaching the silence rule was brutally extreme inside Grafton Jail.

As the days whittled away in solitary I realised it was nearly Christmas and 1972 was just around the corner. One day the screws (prison guards) opened the solitary confinement cell and a brown paper bag was thrust inside. Just as quickly as the cell door opened it was slammed shut again.

A bag of fruit with a card attached rested against the wall. I looked at the brown paper bag for what seemed like an eternity before I crawled over and read the card. The card said: "Merry Christmas from The Sisters of Mercy." It was Christmas Day 1971.

That brown paper bag filled with fruit was one of the most memorable Christmas dinners I have ever eaten in my life.

In the Spring of '75 they transferred us from the intractable section of Grafton Jail into a brand new super-max prison they called Katingal Special Security Unit; and once again it was a sky pilot who had a profound effect on the guys confined inside that concrete tomb.

Sister Julianna was a little old nun who was one of the regular visitors into the Blockhouse. She adopted as "her boys" the men a prison system had classified as no-hopers.

They eventually shut the Blockhouse in '78 and transferred us to other jails. Katingal was consigned to the pages of history as a Pavlovian experiment gone wrong but the memories of a little old nun who cared still remain.

A decade of hard time finally came to an end. I was released in 1980 to confront a strange new world outside the walls. It was nothing like the world I had left in 1969. I tentatively flirted with freedom and slowly eased back into a world I had left 11 years before but every so often the memories of prison were rekindled by a sky pilot.

Like the time in 1986 when the strained face of Father Peter Norden appeared before the television cameras outside the gates of Pentridge to tell the world that five prisoners had tragically died in a fire inside the Jika Jika maximum security block.

Or the time in 1987 when rioting prisoners inside Boggo Road Jail refused to negotiate with authorities until they could speak with the sky pilot of The Road, Sister Bernice, who climbed a ladder to speak with them as they perched on the roof in Two Jail.

In a matter of minutes Sister Bernice's negotiation with the rioting prisoners ended the confrontation and she peacefully accomplished what tear gas and the sophisticated weaponry of a prison system had failed to do.

In retrospect, it does seem ironic that those unassuming men and women of the cloth achieved more with their compassion and caring than was ever achieved by the full brutal weight of any prison system.

Perhaps that is why poignant memories of the sky pilots still linger long after the prisons have been vacated and demolished.

Sky pilot, sky pilot, how high can you fly?
You'll never, never, never reach the sky.