RELEASED FROM PRISON

Evening Star, Issue 22818, 29 November 1937, Page 2

RELEASED FROM PRISON

AFTER SIXTEEN YEARS NOW SEEKS PEACE AND QUIET Sixteen years ago, Frederick Carmody, a young man of 33, went to gaol as a “ lifer.’” The world closed its doors to him. Time stopped. Recently the precious minutes began to tick again for the same Frederick Carmody in his fiftieth year. He is a free man, frightened at freedom! He had become so attuned to the bush silence at the Bombala afforestation camp that when called before the officer in charge and told of his liberty he could not accept it. His mind absolutely baulked at the idea. Big, square-jawed, and. sun-tanned, he stood awkwardly fumbling with his cabbage-tree hat, and gulped: “ I’ll believe it when I see it in writing, sir,” he said bluntly, labouring with the hope beaten back so often by the “ lifer.” And even when his incredulity was removed by the production of the document which opened the world to him again, he could form no picture whatever of the future. “ Things have been changing since I first came to gaol not long after the end of the Great War,” he said reflectively, folding a‘ paper. “ I’ll be pretty frightened of people and things particularly trams,” he added with emphasis. Trams, naturally, don’t harmonise with pine trees, kookaburras, the cackle of hens, and the lazy grunt of pigs, and Carmody said so with a far-away look more eloquent than words. And then he showed how really frightened ho was. “ I reckon I’ll go to Tennant Creek,” he said, shifting the weight from one foot to the other. “ I think there might be good opportunities up there—and it’ll be quiet.” “ They’re going to give me a suit of clothes to-day, before I leave,” ho said, and as a sober afterthought added: “That means a collar, too! That’s going to take a lot of gettin’ used to, that collar!” Involuntarily, ho felt his weatherbrowned neck.

. Carmody said he expected he would “ thaw out,” as time went on, but at present he could not anticipate any form of reaction to freedom. “ When I get back among people and see the shops, and the bright lights I might get pretty excited,” he said, like a Rip Van Winkle. The tragedy of this changed man, however, is that he probably went to gaol in 1921 for another man’s wrong. “ I never fired that shot for which I was charged,” he said straight-for-wardly, “ and I don’t think anyone except the jury thought I did.” He shrugged. “ But that’s the world, isn’t it? You have to take it, and I reckon that’s not a bad motto for young chaps starting out like I was in 1921—take the good with the bad.” Carmody was asked if he felt any resentment. “ Not on your life,” he said, anxious to counter any suggestion. “ I’m lucky to be, getting out, and I’m grateful to the Minister. I think he’s a white man, whose sympathy gets the very best out of men. Carmody chuckled over a thought. “ Funny "thing,” he said, “ I had to learn to walk all over again at this camp. In gaols, although you look pretty fit, your average daily walking distance is not more than one or’ two hundred yards. Certain leg muscles tend to get out of use. To walk a couple of miles at a camp after a fairly long time in gaol, therefore, makes you wonder whatft wrong. “ One man ended a two-mile walk with complete collapse, and I myself was so wobbly that I thought my end had come.” The long routine of 16 prison years has nob given Carmody a philosophy except, perhaps, that of pure fatalism. In fact, he shares with Voltaire the belief that “ All is for the best.” Carmody has remained throughout strong, obedient, hopeful, and trusted; excellent qualities for a fatalist. He was allowed to go away all day among newly-planted pines, to burn firebreaks.

“ And you never wanted to run away?” he was asked. “ No. Never wanted to; never thought about it,” he replied, simply. Carmody’s parents are living in another State, and he said that he was wondering what they were like. “ I never had a girl,” he said, a little embarrassed at haying volunteered the remark, “ and it’s certainly a bit late to bo talking like that now. But you never know. I’ve got a lot to live down, and I’ll be all at sea for a long time.” His brother, who held a Government position in another State, was calling to take him away from his pine forest to the city, but Carraody had no fixed desire as a first taste of freedom. “ I reckon I’ll just sit quietly beside him, probably wanting like mad off my collar, and try to forget.” “ I’ll be starting all oyer again from exactly where I left off in 1921. \ou don’t get any newspapers in gaol, although a kind of filtered trickle of socalled outside happenings sometimes reaches you. “ But when I first came to this camp three years ago and was allowed to read the papers, I realised that I bad been as out of things as a corpse. It was all like a dream and entirely meaningless, I’ll be that much better off, anyway, when I move into the new world.” . ~ Carmody said he would receive a bonus on his release. Although he had decided on Tennant Creek, he reckoned at all events he would go somewhere where “ tho alarm clock did not go off at 6 o’clock his punctual rising time for the past 16 years. . . _ , But wherever it is that Carmody opens his new life in his fiftieth year, you’ll be sure to find a neat little row of pine trees running around the house and almost certainly the homely, rural noises of chickens and pigs in a traraless thoroughfare.