Kerryn McGlone spent much of her youth living at Dhurringile Prison and still remembers it fondly as her ‘happy place’, which is probably not the answer you’d expect if you asked anyone their favourite childhood haunt.
Her father, Laurie Jensen, a senior prison officer, was sent to the site in 1965 along with another senior prison officer, Don McLennan, when the government purchased it to begin the process of turning it into a prison.
Mrs McGlone recalls fondly celebrating her sixth birthday with a candlelit cake in “this huge old kitchen” at the site, surrounded by her father and Mr McLennan, mother Margaret and siblings Peter and Maureen singing Happy Birthday to her.
The family lived in the little white house known as the gatekeeper’s cottage for five years before Mr Jensen transferred to Ararat.
He would later return to Dhurringile as governor after the prison’s first governor, Bill Bell, retired.
“The building itself hadn’t been used in a few years when we arrived, so we walked into it in its natural state,” Mrs McGlone said.
“I remember it really clearly; the sweeping staircases and the beautiful stained glass windows and Dad’s office, when he was governor, was really ornate, and the dungeons downstairs where I thought they would put all the prisoners who misbehaved.”
Mrs McGlone said despite growing up in prisons, she was never fearful of her environment, even when there were a couple of escapes at Dhurringile.
“Dad would just laugh and say, ‘Well, the last place they’re going to come to is the governor’s residence’,” she said.
“It wasn’t scary at all; we were kids, so we didn’t really know any different until we got a bit older.
“We didn’t know anything of the ‘really bad men’; we just knew they were locked away, did their time and off they went.”
Mrs McGlone said the family was assigned a prisoner to work around the house at every prison house they lived in.
“Mum was an avid gardener, so she’d tell him where to dig and what to put in,” she said.
“He’d do our school shoes and cut the wood and things like that.
“It was a coveted role in terms of jobs you could get as a prisoner in prisons because it was cruisy.”
Dhurringile Prison was a working farm right from the beginning, so every afternoon, one of the Jensen kids would fetch milk from the dairy in a billy for afternoon tea.
“We would just amble around the grounds,” Mrs McGlone said.
“We always had to tell Mum where we were going, but in our child’s eyes we just felt we had free roam.
“We’d wander up to Dad — Mum may have rang him and said ‘incoming children’ just to make sure we got there — up the little dirt road between the gatehouse and the mansion, but we were in and out of the orchard. I am sure there were officers on alert.”
Being a low-security prison, there was a bit more trust afforded to inmates, who were part of district cricket teams and put on annual concerts, where Mrs McGlone said they predictably and amusingly performed Please Release Me every year while her mother played along on the piano.
“They obviously couldn’t go out of the prison to play cricket, but they would host games and there was a little old shed where they would serve morning tea; Mum would make scones,” Mrs McGlone said.
“People from around the farming district would come for the Christmas concert, so it wasn’t a doom and gloom place that you would imagine.”
Mrs McGlone said it was the “most magical place to grow up”, citing Ararat and other prisons as far less appealing to her than Dhurringile was.
“I had such a connection to it, particularly the little white house, because that was home for quite a number of years,” she said.
“Dad moved around Victoria to different prisons, getting promotions, but always wanted to go back to Dhurringile for a few reasons.
“It was Mum’s favourite place, but sadly Mum died when we were really young and never made it back.”
The family moved back in 1974, when Mr Jensen spent four to five years governing the prison before returning to Pentridge Prison in Melbourne.
His two daughters remained in the area and Mrs McGlone trained to become a nurse.
She met her Melbourne-born and -raised husband in Albury after graduating there, and together, they spent 30 years living in Bendigo raising their family before retiring in Portarlington.
Mrs McGlone visits the Dhurringile and Tatura areas regularly to see some of the families she grew up with and nurses she worked with at the Mooroopna hospital.
She said she was shocked to hear the prison was closing and even more so with how soon that would happen after the announcement was made.
In 2013, she organised a private site tour for herself and her siblings — who live in Queensland and Western Australia — and would love to return for one more look. However, she fears that might not be possible with the future of it unknown.
When asked her opinion on what she thought the site should be transformed into once it was decommissioned after August, she had a few ideas.
“Bail instead of jail,” she said, suggesting that people let out on bail could spend some time at the grounds milking some cows and learning how to do something practical outside of cities.
“Bendigo did a fab job with their old prison, turning it into a theatre,” Mrs McGlone said.
“Most of it was sadly knocked down, but they did incorporate the really important bits that you imagine for a jail; the turrets and the big iron doors that the prisoners were led through; they really were sympathetic to it.
“And we’ve been through Pentridge because Dad was governor there twice, and again, saving the space because of what it looked like and what it was made of is a good idea.”
While she understands reinventing the site would be expensive, Mrs McGlone can also visualise the Dhurringile grounds as a stay-and-play experience-based accommodation venue with a convention centre, maybe a little like Werribee Mansion and what the old Castlemaine jail developers tried to achieve.
“It would require a lot of money and someone with deep pockets to reimagine,” she said.
“But the mansion shows a time when people on the land were able to put a stamp of wealth that was in the area.
“For people to be able to come and visit it, it would be ideal if the money was there and there was someone to take it on, turn it into accommodation, keep the mansion in a state that you could actually visit for tours, have concerts on the grounds.
“Tat and Dhurringile have such great weather.”
And while that’s hard to agree with when we’re deep in the throes of a frosty Goulburn Valley winter, we need to keep in mind Mrs McGlone lives near Mt Duneed Estate, a winery that hosts many music festivals.
“The poor loves have nearly drowned the last couple of concerts,” she said with a laugh.
“You wouldn’t have that in gorgeous Dhurringile with its beautiful views and warm summer nights.
“It’s easy to say when you don’t have to foot the bill, but I think they should think long and hard about its future and hopefully listen to the people who’ve been in and around it for its time.”
The prison will close on August 31. The site’s future is yet to be decided.