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

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.