daring escape of 28 January 1940, he slipped finally through the wire mesh of the brush shop to find his escape kit.
Slim had patience even in those early days, before his longest stretches in Black Peter. He took his time fixing his escape kit between the watchful patrols of workshop guards because time was all he had plenty of. He relished the planning, he found succour in the sneaky adrenaline-filled creativity of a quest for liberty. The secret making and storing of escape tools brought him joy and focus in an otherwise dreary prison world. Between the watchful stares of workshop guards, Slim had spent months fashioning an escape rope, nine metres in length, made of plaited coir, the stuff they made the mats with in the prison carpet-weaving shop, the stuff they made the mat with that Slim laid upon in the cold, damp and dark Black Peter. Every half a metre or so along this rope he double-knotted it to form footholds. Inside his escape kit was a second rope, three metres in length, and two wooden hammock sticks bound together to form a cross that he tied to the nine-metre rope.
With his escape kit in hand, he climbed to the ceiling of the brush shop and cut his way through the mesh of a fanlight ceiling window and found himself, once more, standing atop the workshop rooftop, this time in a position invisible to tower guards, the prison’s Achilles heel, a perfect blind spot that Slim had deduced through patient hour after hour after hour of walking the prison yard with his head held skyward sketching rough geometry drawings in his mind between variables of the guard towers, the workshop roof and freedom.
He used his shorter rope to slip down off the workshop roof, suffering rope burns to his hands on his way down. Now back on the inner track running around the prison perimeter, he looked up at the daunting rise of Boggo Road’s eight-metre brick penitentiary wall. He pulled his bound hammock cross-sticks from his escape kit. What he held in his hands was a grappling hook tied to a nine-metre rope with footholds. And he steadied himself for a throw.
Timing, planning, luck, belief. For weeks in his solitary prison cell, Slim had studied the science and technique required to lodge a grappling hook against a high wall. Along the top of the Boggo Road prison wall were corners where smaller sections of the wall met higher sections. Slim spent weeks throwing two bound matchsticks fixed into a cross and attached to string over a rough scale model of the Boggo Road penitentiary wall. He threw the hook over the wall and he worked the weighted rope along the wall top until it wedged into the corner of a small step where a smaller section of the wall met a higher section. And he told me how it felt when he pulled that rope taut into that corner and the hook stuck firm. Slim said it felt like one Christmas morning he had in the old Church of England orphanage in Carlingford when the housemaster told all those spindly orphans they were having warm plum pudding and custard for dessert at Christmas lunch. And that’s what liberty tastes like, Slim said: warm plum pudding and custard. He hauled himself up that rope, his hands and feet gripping for life on the double-knotted footholds, until he sat perched high up on the prison wall, unseen in his beautiful blind spot, one side of his view from the top way up there to the blooming gardens set beyond the walls of Number 1 yard, the other side of his view the rambling brick prison that was really the only permanent home – the one and only fixed address – he had ever had in his life. He breathed that air up there deep inside him and he reversed the hook so it lodged this time into the prison side of the wall corner that would become known as ‘Halliday’s Leap’ and he climbed on down to freedom.
*
Four floors to freedom for me. I press the button for ‘Ground’ in the hospital elevator. The first thing Slim did after he scrambled his way through the gardens to surrounding Annerley Road as a fugitive was to slip out of his prison clothes. Around 4.10 p.m., about when the prison wardens were calling his name at the afternoon prison muster, Slim was jumping fences through suburban Brisbane, stealing a new