Then he found a job with the New South Wales Prison Services near a small town being settled four hours away. He wasn’t going to work in the jail- he was going to help build it.

Because a prison was soon to loom on the town’s outskirts, an unkind publication in Sydney dubbed the settlement (in which my father was to grow up) the least desirable place to live in New South Wales.

The road entered town on a descent, and as my grandparents drove in, they saw the foundations of the penitentiary on top of a hill. Set amid huge, mute trees, that half-built prison looked to my grandmother to be half demolished, and the thought struck her as an unpleasant omen. It strikes me as one too, considering that my grandfather moved to this town to build a prison and I am now writing from one. The past is truly an inoperable tumor that spreads to the present.

They moved into a boxy, weatherboard house, and the following day, while my grandmother explored the town, inadvertently frightening the residents with her aura of the survivor, my grandfather began his new job. I’m not exactly sure what role he had, but apparently for the next several months he spoke incessantly of locked doors, cold halls, cell measurements, and grilled windows. As the building neared completion, he became obsessed with everything to do with prisons, even checking out books from the newly established local library on their construction and history. At the same time, my grandmother put as much energy into learning English, and this was the beginning of a new catastrophe. As her understanding of the English language grew, she began to understand her husband.