Enter the gates of ‘Hell’: Pentridge prison opens for public tours

Key points

• Pentridge is opening its gates for public tours from March 1.
• Tours cost $35 and include access to Pentridge’s B division and the notorious H or “Hell” division. 
• The tours have been created by National Trust Victoria and Art Processors, which is the design technology company behind tours at Alcatraz in San Francisco. 

Pentridge prison is unlocking its gates to the public with the launch of tours around the infamous H or “Hell” division and former B division.

The confronting experience will retell the stories of inmates including bushranger Ned Kelly, armed robber Mark “Chopper” Read and Shantaram author Gregory David Roberts. But rather than glorifying them, the tours seek to detail Pentridge’s brutal history from 1851 to its closure in 1997.

Tour operator Robert Kercher says the prison trips do not shy away from Pentridge’s brutal past.Credit:Jason South

First-hand accounts from inmates and prison officers will feature in audiovisual tours that are part of the Shayher group’s $1 billion redevelopment of the former prison site.

The tours have been created by the National Trust Victoria and Art Processors – the design technology company behind tours at Alcatraz in San Francisco and MONA in Tasmania.

Visitors on the $35 tours, starting in March, will be guided around Pentridge in groups of 20 and can walk through largely untouched cells complete with inmate graffiti, observation cells and bluestone rock-breaking yards.

The 90-minute tours – narrated by the late Uncle Jack Charles, a former inmate of Pentridge, and Indigenous actress and director Rachael Maza – also highlight the brutal lived experience of the prison’s former inhabitants and the disproportionate impact on First Nations people.

Ray Mooney, who served almost eight years from 1968 at Pentridge for rape, said while his time there was harrowing, he was relieved the prison’s history was being retained.

Mooney was the first person to start and complete a degree in an Australian prison.

“I was in H division when exam time came and they stripped me naked to sit the exams in my cell, even though it was the middle of winter,” he said.

“There were 12 labour yards at Pentridge and the worst screams always came from the ones at the far end.”

Mooney, who is now a playwright, is disappointed that parts of the prison have been demolished in the redevelopment to build a brewery, shops, a cinema and apartments.

“I did not want one brick demolished,” he said. “I wanted it kept so the world has a record of what we are capable of, otherwise we sanitise our history.”

Mooney said that in B division there was still a dungeon where prisoners were once strung upside down by their feet and two cells where prisoners were kept without light.

“Both those cells contain concrete boxes built into the floors for extra-special punishment,” he said. “There are similar dungeons under A division. You won’t read of those concrete boxes in any of the literature about Pentridge because the real truth is unpalatable. The real truth will not encourage tenants.”

Former Pentridge inmate Ray Mooney, who is now a playwright, says his time in the prison was harrowing. Credit:Jason South

National Trust of Victoria chief executive Simon Ambrose said it was important to find ways to reinterpret and reuse heritage places such as Pentridge.

“The diversity of commercial activity being developed at the complex is really great because it will bring in a lot of different people,” he said. “We are really encouraged to see the heritage properties reused and redesigned and redeveloped in appropriate ways and [it] also gives us an opportunity to really tell a very interesting story that has nearly 150 years … of history.”

Ambrose said the National Trust did not want to glorify prisoners’ stories but instead make sure they were told in an appropriate way. “There’s lots of people who are infamous, but there are also lots of people who are unknown and the stories are just as important to be told as well.”

He said details of the National Trust’s investment in the tours and its payment were commercial in confidence.

Inside one of the cells at Pentridge, where an inmate has scratched into a writing board the number of months or years he has left to serve.Credit:Justin McManus

Tour operator Robert Kercher said the visits would be confronting experiences that did not shy away from Pentridge’s brutal past. “There is no one truth of Pentridge,” he said. “You hear it from different voices and it leaves you to make up your own mind.”

Kercher said visitors would see the wall Shantaram author Roberts scaled to escape Pentridge before fleeing to India, only to be recaptured 10 years later.

“Everyone loves a good escape story,” he said. “We found an old jacket from the 1870s and that was hidden in the ceiling of B division.

“The only reason we could imagine that would be there was for a prison escape. There are a lot of mysteries at Pentridge and mysteries remain still to this day.”

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