Darcy Dugan (1920 – 1991) was an Australian criminal who gained notoriety for his many daring escapes. This song is a paraphrase of his evidence before a Royal Commission into the brutal treatment of prisoners at Grafton Jail.

DARCY DUGAN

~ Bob Campbell ~

Trad Tune : Jim Jones at Botany Bay

My name is Darcy Dugan, I’ve spent 40 years inside
I’ve never robbed the needy man, my record testifies
Non-violent escapeologist, in the papers I’ve been named
Despite my reputation, my pride I’ve still maintained.

I’d like to tell you people what it’s like in Grafton Gaol
The screws they beat you day and night, they’re brutes that never fail
They aim to break your spirit and they torture just for fun
They’re the dregs of all humanity, the warders with the guns.

I won’t forget the night they threw hot water on my back
The scalding raised up blisters, but I vowed that I’d never crack
They beat me in the morning; it was freezing cold at night
But I won’t look down for any screw, I’ll not give up the fight.

They beat me 10 nights in a row, but they couldn’t make me break
I looked each warder in the eye and that’s the thing that they hate
I tried to keep my sanity, the hardships to endure
Though my body was in agony, my heart took 10 times more.

They killed off Kevin Simmonds, in the passion for revenge
He made them look like fools, although they caught him in the end
They hated how the working people cheered him down the road
That awful day in Kurri Kurri, Kevin proudly strode.***

The prison’s burnt at Bathurst and there’s more of that to come
For liberty and justice words, can still stir a spark up in some!
The sadists in their uniforms are worse than any crim
But! The bastards who have put them there, are even worse than them.

*** the Kevin Simmonds story : http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/simmonds-kevin-john-11690


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRGKjvpPVUI&t=184s
DARCY DUGAN sung by Bob Campbell
SAME SONG, THOUGH WITH SOME DIFFERENCES (+ more pics on HR clip) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bJ_6dJKYhA    Darcy Dugan sung Bob Campbell with Home Rule

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dugan-darcy-ezekiel-25998    Darcy Dugan’s bio
http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AltCrimJl/1978/1.pdf    The Royal Commission reports


THE LEGEND OF DARCY DUGAN
http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65338
Bernie Mathews

Born to a world of prisons
outliving a life of strife,
They called him gunman
and gangster
and labels equally concise.

In a world of grog shops
and bookies
with cockatoos on the fence* -
his pockets overflowed
with pounds, shillings and pence*.

There were trams
And Trocaderos*
and shootings up the Cross;
when the Darlo beak* full-stopped him
and hit him with the lot*.

He escaped the tram
And the cells
And the prison on the Bay*.
Then they moved him up to Grafton*
and bashed his sins away.

With spirit unbroken
he led the riot of sixty-three
then tried to do a runner
but they smashed him
to his knees.

Served up with batons*,
and boiling water too,
he took his lumps
without a whimper
as they flogged him black and blue.

I miss the old man
and our walks upon the yard
it was there,
deference got paid,
to the hardest of the hard.

A success among failures,
in that place of the living dead.
His caged memories,
stifle reality,
in a seventy-five-year head.

A decade has passed
since they put him in the ground
but the legend that is Dugan,
now roams freely,
all the prisons of this land.


• *the Darlo beak is NSW prison jargon for a judge at Darlinghurst Criminal Court in Sydney, NSW, Australia.
• *the lot is NSW prison jargon for a life sentence.
• *the Bay is the former Long Bay State Penitentiary in Sydney, NSW, Australia.
• *cockatoos on the fence is prison jargon for somebody who is the lookout.
• *pounds, shillings and pence was Australian pre-decimal currency.
• *The Trocadero was a Sydney dance hall circa 1940s & 1950s.
• *Grafton Jail was the Alcatraz of the NSW prison system 1943-1976.
• *Served up with batons is NSW prison jargon for a baton-whipping by prison guards.


“Darcy Ezekial** Dugan was a Sydney bank robber and jail-breaker. He was the last man sentenced to death in NSW after being convicted of shooting a bank manager during the armed robbery of the Ultimo Commonwealth Bank in 1950. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment and he served over 30 years inside NSW prisons.

[He] was a serial jail-breaker who escaped from the prison tram, escort vans and NSW prisons. He was sent to The Alcatraz of the NSW prison system at Grafton during the 1960s where he was brutalised by prison guards for his repeated escapes. He led a mutiny inside Grafton Jail and tried to escape from the jail. Dugan suffered a stroke in 1987 and was released from prison.

Darcy Dugan died in a nursing home in August 1991 [with Parkinson’s Disease]. He is buried in Sydney’s Rookwood cemetery.”
http://www.prisontalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65338

N.B. This fascinating site reveals things that thankfully, most of us will likely never experience, but, also things we will rarely be allowed to know of, particularly if you live in the sunny, secretive state of Queensland (who said JOH was dead??)

** EZEKIAL is a Hebrew name meaning “God’s strength” – and how he needed it, to survive the brutal and corrupt prison system for so long! viz https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/hard-man-tamed-by-poetry-and-time-20120803-23khh.html

“BLOODHOUSE : Darcy Dugan (1920-1991) with Michael Tatlow” – published posthumously in 2012.
'Mike, a lot, sometimes rot, has been written about me. Please hold this, my real story, to edit and present to a new generation, after I and the crooks we've exposed have turned to dust.' Darcy Dugan

"Written in secret during his long years in jail and smuggled out to keep it safe from his enemies until now, Bloodhouse is Darcy Dugan's brutally honest and gripping story of his extraordinary life and times."


R-J