Shortcut: Inside Pentridge Prison with Ray Mooney

**Meshel Laurie** (0:03)
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie.
For most of Ray Mooney's life, he has been a celebrated author, lecturer and playwright. In his early life, though, he was an inmate at the notorious Pentridge Prison. Inside he became a spokesperson for prisoner rights and became close to some of Australia's most notorious career criminals, including Christopher Dale Flannery, aka Mr. Rent-a-Kill. Ray found himself inside Pentridge because he was convicted of rape when he was 19 years old, a fact of his life that he never shies away from. He's since lectured to young students about the importance of understanding consent. Ray joins us to discuss this period of his life and his experiences inside the College of Knowledge, Pentridge Prison. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.
There's not many blokes who, even if they've changed their way of thinking about sexuality and about what constitutes rape, would own up to it and want to talk to people about it. I've never known anyone else who's wanted to do that.

**Ray Mooney** (1:18)
Well, it's the worst crime you can ever admit to.
And that's why everyone claims that they're innocent. And I did the same thing when I was caught. I claimed I was innocent, tried every trick in the book to get out of it. And I was guilty of rape in 1967, served seven and a half years for it, and deserved every day. But I sort of looked at it properly and tried to understand myself, my own background, my antecedents, to see if there were any things other than the fact that I just made terrible decisions in the moment that were responsible. And it's easy to justify your own situation, but the truth, the real truth was no, I made bad decisions in the moment. No matter what situations existed as antecedents, they were never ever justifiable to try and diminish my own responsibility.
And I came to terms with that.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:14)
Part of what you did in prison was to sort of come out yourself as a writer and as an academic, isn't it? I mean, tell us about that. How did all of that come about in jail, in Pentridge of all places, which at that time in the 70s, was an incredibly brutal place.

**Ray Mooney** (2:31)
That came about over a long, I was there for seven and a half years and that was like osmosis. It took a long time. It didn't happen overnight.
It happened because of my involvement with certain people who I liked and who I respected. It happened because of what I saw happening, or what I heard about happening to other prisoners. That's the violence you talk about, which was hidden from the mainstream of Pentridge, by the way. Not all Pentridge was violent and not all Pentridge was terrible. Some of the best times I've ever spent in my life were spent in Pentridge. Unquestionably.

**Meshel Laurie** (3:07)
I've never heard anyone say that before.

**Ray Mooney** (3:09)
I was the first Australian prisoner to start and complete a degree while they were in prison. There was a reason behind that. I knew the day I went into prison that I was going to be there for a long time. I knew that when the time came, I would be assessed of what I had done while I was in prison as to whether or not I would have been given parole when I was due for it.
I also knew, and I worked this out straight away, that the only way that people can be assessed is through what they have done, either through their wrong doings or their right doings. So I set out to set myself up to achieve as much as I could in prison, so that when the time came for assessment for parole, I would have been given parole, and that's exactly what I did. So I straight away got into study.

**Meshel Laurie** (4:02)
Because there were also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think during that period, what year did you go in?

**Ray Mooney** (4:07)
I went in in 68

**Meshel Laurie** (4:09)
I think during that period, weren't there some old crooks as well? So it was a very sort of old, old school, between the older screws and the older crooks. There was a real set of rules that had been set up. And along with everyone else in the late 60s and early 70s, you younger blokes were all about change, revolution.