Melissa Lucashenko

But I was already a lefty.

I was a feminist and I knew how important jail is in damaging and diminishing Aboriginal lives.

So, yeah.

Went along to a house at West End, met half a dozen other women who were already doing prison activism.

Deb Kilroy had not long got out of jail and we sat down and two hours later we were sisters inside.

I think about the old Bobber Road women's jail.

My brother had been locked up in the men's, you know, done quite a long time in the men's, which was a horrific, a horrific jail, you know, very old, very...

very haunted, very gruesome.

And the women's, when I was going there, it was more modern than the male wing.

They're just going in and sitting with the lifers, the long-termers, because they were and are the women inside who get to be the committee on the inside and have some measure of control over what Sisters does.

I remember one time I went in and I was wearing these purple socks, phantom motif on them.

And one of the long-termers said, oh, I like those socks.

And so under the eyes of the guards sort of didn't scrutinize us all that much, but there were guards coming and going sort of in the distance.

And then there would have been CCTV, but we were having this meeting and throughout the course of the meeting,

I managed under the table to remove my shoes and socks and put my shoes back on and pass the socks to one of the long-termers.

So she ended up with my phantom socks.

I don't know what the penalty for smuggling phantom socks in is.

Yeah, I had no interest in leaving Brisbane.

You know, I was very much a Brizzy girl and had just met all these wonderful new friends through the Sisters Inside crew when Bill's work required us to go back to Canberra.

So we did probably three stints in Canberra over the next 15-odd years.