How do you face bank robbers, sex-offenders, drug traffickers, and murderers every day at work? Tasked with confining and rehabilitating some of the toughest criminals Australia has ever seen, the guards of Maitland Gaol needed to maintain their self-defence skills throughout the prison’s 150 years of operation (1848-1998). In a shooting range along the perimeter […]
It was fear that stopped Dave McGarry from re-offending when he was finally released from Maitland Gaol. Locked up from age nineteen, McGarry remembers how ‘everyone here was someone to be scared of… at least sixty per cent of the guys… all carried weapons’. Improvised stabbing weapons, known as ‘shivs’ in ‘criminal slang’ since at […]
Strip searches, ‘shut downs’ and cell raids, such as when kitchen knives went missing, frequently sparked hostility and violence among the prisoners of Maitland Gaol, interrupting the calm. As warder Keith Bush remembered: ‘… everybody’s talking, singing, yelling out, screaming at each other… People are just snarling at you, giving you filthy looks.’ In this […]
Setting out early one day in December 1840, a tall, dark-eyed Irishman named Edward Denny Day (1801-1876), the local Police Magistrate, led a police posse through the bush around Scone, not far from Maitland. They were tracking the escaped convict turned bushranger Teddy ‘Jewboy’ Davis and his gang, who for two years had been ‘terrorising’ […]
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