The biggest slap in my five months of house arrest came not at the start when the magistrate said he wanted to make it “as much like jail” as he could. It came only days from the end, at the hands of an elderly hospital volunteer, on one of my rare excursions into the real world.
As I walked into the foyer of the Austin Hospital for a check-up to see how my newly transplanted liver was behaving, the beaming, bespectacled old-timer asked how I was doing.
I said: “I feel great. Only 12 more days and I’m out of jail.” His mocking, condescending reply: “You weren’t in jail.” I felt like saying: “You try it, sunshine.”
How bad could it be merely being locked up for a few months in your own apartment? If you feel that way I suggest you try if for a week. Let alone 153 days. Which is more than 3500 hours. Nearly 250,000 minutes. More than 13 million seconds.
But who’s counting? As everybody who was not locked up told me: “Don’t worry, it will go quickly.” It didn’t. The waking hours in each day did, the months did not. They dragged. The only time I felt encouraged was when they put a countdown clock on my website and I could see the last weeks ticking away.
But the cumbersome electronic ankle bracelet was a constant bedtime reminder when it bit into a scrawny ankle. And if you still think it was a holiday at home, just consider not being able to earn a living for almost half a year. Not being able to go to the supermarket or step on the street without permission for a medical appointment. Not being allowed to use the internet, send emails, use Twitter or Facebook. I wasn’t even allowed to advertise my Human Headlines book on 3AW in the lead-up to Father’s Day - even though it had been written and printed long before my sentencing.
The magistrate, Charles Rozencwajg, cleverly ordered restrictions that turned me into a non-person. On my brief, sanctioned, morning walks around the apartment block courtyard I felt like Rudolf Hess, the last man in Spandau Prison.There were many other reminders: like a surprise visit from Department of Corrections staff at 9.15 one night for an unscheduled breath test. Unless your name was George Best I’d be surprised if anybody would blow over 0.00 within weeks of having a liver transplant.
I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong when I point out these restrictions. It was meant to be like jail. I broke the law. I was guilty of breaching court suppression orders concerning two of this country’s worst serial sex offenders against children at a Name Them and Shame Them public rally on the steps of Parliament House. And I had “priors”.
I had been to jail in the 1980s for naming that notorious Melbourne paedophile priest Michael Glennon. The fact that it was a bad law doesn’t carry much weight in the confines of a courtroom. What frustrated me most during my isolation - and that’s why the magistrate made the punishment fit the crime - was being gagged. Especially when things were being said or written about me that were not true.
It started in the courtroom during Mr Rozencwajg’s own judgment. He made me sound like a self-serving hypocrite. He said from the bench: “It was on the basis of your medical condition, that you asked I impose a form of a suspended sentence of imprisonment.”
That wasn’t true. I did not ask. I know exactly what I said because at a previous hearing I actually handed a copy of my pre-sentencing comments to the magistrate and the prosecutors. I was specific. I stressed: “Do the crime, do the time.”
I could not accept a suspended sentence because I have said so many times that a suspended sentence is no sentence at all. All a person with a suspended sentence has to do is behave like every other law-abiding citizen for a certain length of time.
To have that public stance and then ask for a Get Out of Jail Free card for myself would shriek of hypocrisy. Another time I would have liked to speak out was when Herald Sun columnist Steve Price suggested I didn’t deserve a donated organ for liver cancer because of my past drinking.
He conveniently omitted that cancerous tumours, rather than cirrhosis, had given me a death sentence. I guess what niggled me most about the column was the last paragraph. In a sanctimonious line, which he repeated on Channel 10’s 7pm Project, Price said: “Good luck, Derryn, and for God’s sake keep off the grog.”
That, aimed at an atheist who had stopped drinking five years earlier and had never had a .05 conviction. Unlike Price. And had I been allowed on Twitter during the gay marriage debate at the ALP conference, I would have taken aim at another Herald Sun columnist, Andrew Bolt, and his dire “where will this all lead to?” line of opposing argument. My tweet would have said something like: “Yep, Andrew. They let the blacks ride up the front of the bus and now one’s in the White House.”
One of the ironies of being gagged at this time was watching, mute, as the same Department of Justice that took me to court for breaching suppression orders over paedophiles was itself in court trying to get a notorious child abuser’s suppression order lifted.
So how did a silenced man spend the five months? I had heaps of books to read and DVDs to watch and didn’t read or see hardly any of them. I did watch Killing Time, based on the rise andfall of coke-head lawyer Andrew Fraser. It’s one of the best local series for yonks. David Wenham is brilliant and a free-to-air network should run it next year. I watched a lot of TV news and discovered how much repetitive rubbish comes out of the mouths of the leaders of both parties.
I wrote about 100,000 words of a new book with the tentative sub-title A tale of life, death, hope and house arrest and I reverted to an old habit of cooking Chinese stir fries. I had a daily love-hate relationship with the exercise treadmill. It got me out of the apartment for an hour and, after five months, I’m doing 2km in 20 minutes at 5.5km/h. A big improvement on the day I went to court to be sentenced and sat there with miracle medical man Bob Jones taking my pulse as I struggled to breathe.
I look at the front page pic from the Herald Sun from that time in which I look deader than Mao Tse Tung and think of how lucky I am. So lucky that somebody’s family, in their grief, agreed to let their loved one be an organ donor. And lucky we have men like Jones and his team at the Austin Liver Transplant Unit to give new life to hundreds like me. I also think of people who were not so lucky.
We’re only a couple of days away from Christmas - a Christmas that six months ago I didn’t think I’d be alive to celebrate. I didn’t fear death at all but am glad I am still here to cherish this Christmas and cherish Chanel, who was thrust into private and public roles she never expected.
It sounds trite to say it, but live every day as if it were your last because it could be. I know. I came close. I still have a lot to do in the bonus years I have left. Some causes to fight.
My dear old grandmother, who lived to 96, once told me: “It’s not what happens to you in life that matters. It’s how you handle it.”
Nanna, I hope, as you used to say, I’m doing you proud.
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