Goulburn Gaol, opened in 1884, seen here in 1887. Photo: Aussiemobs.
When the new Goulburn Gaol was under construction in 1881, it was reported that escape by a prisoner would be impossible.
The Southern Argus, which made the claim, noted the elaborate care taken by government architects using all the latest improvements to bars and bolts would indeed ensure the safekeeping of prisoners.
Escapes from the gaol, before the new construction, were common, and all manner of methods were employed to remove oneself from the confines of the prison walls.
In 1881, as the new gaol was being built, inmate George Smith made one such attempt in an escape labelled daring and courageous by The Sydney Daily Telegraph. Smith removed the bricks surrounding his window, which allowed the crossbars to come out. He squeezed through the 23 x 30 centimetre gap he created, shimmied the 2.4 metres to the ground and used a rope knotted together from towels to scale the outer walls.
Removable crossbars were an obvious flaw to the prison design and was to be resolved with the building of the new prison, but it turns out, it wasn’t enough. Goulburn’s new, supposedly inescapable prison was seemingly as flawed as the previous edition, and over the next 100 years or so, dozens of prisoners, in styles often reminiscent of Hollywood movies, removed themselves from the secure facility in an often short-lived bid for freedom.
Opened in 1884, the new Goulburn Gaol was reported to be inescapable. Photo: NSW Government.
In 1942, an inmate tested those very bars and managed to cut out the ones in his cell, allowing him to scale the outer wall of the prison.
Despite the bars not being as indestructible as hoped, most escapees were creative enough to save the physical exertion of cutting them.
One of the most imaginative attempts occurred in 1893, only nine years after the new prison opened, when a prisoner named Stirling, who worked as a tailor in the prison shop, used all the tools he had at his disposal. Stirling fashioned himself a warden’s uniform, a task he was employed to do, and crafted a huge moustache from hair taken out of a broom. Fixing the moustache to his face with wax, he mounted a messenger’s horse and rode along the inner wall to the back of the gaol, passing a number of wardens on the way.
Young Stirling never made it outside of the prison walls, but certainly earns extra points on his scorecard for ingenuity.
For the less-talented members of the prison population, the standard method of escape was to slip the warden when on work duties outside the wall.
One such attempt occurred in 1905, with the Goulburn Evening Penny Post reporting on the escape of inmate Roy Wood, an American chap on a three-year sentence, who fled down the Mulwaree River and broke into a house in Towrang for a change of clothes, only to be captured a week later in Buxton. As he had previously been involved in a shootout with police, officers expected a lively encounter upon Wood’s recapture, but it didn’t come to pass.
While Wood’s freedom lasted a number of days, some escapes were extremely short-lived. A 1947 effort, which consisted of inmates forcing their way out of a skylight in a storage room and a six-metre jump off the roof, led to a bid for freedom that lasted one hour and 20 minutes.
The gaol’s radial plan, centred on the chapel, was thought to increase its strength. Photo: NSW Government.
At times, the escapes sound like a Laurel and Hardy physical comedy, like the 1956 duo who used an iron hook and rope made of sheets to scale the walls, but as one inmate was within arm’s reach of the top of the wall, the other panicked and joined the climb, causing the hook to dislodge and both inmates to fall in a heap in the concrete courtyard.
There were, of course, many failed attempts. Sometimes the old trick of being admitted into the infirmary for an easier escape didn’t go as planned, as was discovered by one young man who swallowed a needle to be admitted, rallied a fellow inmate suffering measles, donked a warden on the head, removed the tiles on the ceiling and plopped down into the prison courtyard, all to no avail.
There were also escapes that no-one really cared about, such as the 18-year-old who, in 1915, scaled a five-metre wall to gain freedom, to only receive two sentences in The Sydney Morning Herald, which was clearly nonplussed about his efforts.
And then there were the escapes that never made it past paper, like the letter smuggled by a crooked prison warden in 1933. The gaol governor, who gave evidence in the trial of the warden, was reported as stating that the intercepted letter might have led to one of the most sensational escapes on record.
Thankfully, prison technology has improved significantly since 1881, and the addition of Goulburn Supermax in 2001 has lived up to its promise as the most secure jail in NSW.
The last high-profile escape that didn’t involve simply walking from an unsecured work area of the facility now known as the Goulburn Correctional Centre occurred in 2015. Armed robber Stephen Jamieson managed to escape maximum security, proving that while times had moved on, a bedsheet is still your best tool in scaling a prison wall.
