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this Toby was the designated unit brewer of “lunatic soup”. Lunatic soup is the home brew that is cooked up by prisoners within the jail. This was one way he could ingratiate himself with the other prisoners.
    Bearing in mind that we were in maximum security, protection from protection, it never ceased to amaze me how slack the prison officers were and how easy it was for Toby to brew up a batch of lunatic soup.
    The only equipment required was a large plastic empty tomato sauce bottle with half gallon capacity. The crucial ingredient was bread, which has some live yeast remaining in it even after cooking and is enough to get a fermentation happening. The brewer would soak the bread until fermentation began, then cram it into the neck of the bottle together with whatever sliced fruit was available – usually oranges and orange peel – add sugar and water, and put the lid on. The favourite place to hide the bottle while the brew was taking place was in one of the large plastic rubbish bins in the unit. Twice a day, the bin billet responsible takes the liner full of rubbish out of the bin and replaces it with a fresh liner. The first time I was the bin billet I noticed the tomato sauce bottle and was told in no uncertain terms that it was not to be touched. The procedure was merely to put a fresh liner in the bin over the bottle and leave it alone. This I did. I don’t know how long the brew took, but it certainly wasn’t long, because a little while later there was quite some excitement in the unit as the word got around that the brew was ready.
    I was sitting in my cell when Toby lurched in holding his china cup and asked me if I wanted a drink. The smell was putrid. It was like that of a fermenting compost heap and when I looked in the cup I saw a milky-grey liquid. Toby was clearly drunk, as was just about everybody else in the unit. He strongly recommended the drink, adding “Have a look how much alcohol’s in it!” With that, he pulled out his cigarette lighter and held it near the top of the cup. Immediately a blue flame burst forth from the cup. I couldn’t believe my eyes. These blokes were drinking a very, very powerful brew, strong enough to keep most of the unit pissed for a couple of days. And to think: the screws were watching the whole time as somebody walked around with a large tomato sauce bottle full of liquid. How that happened and nobody asked what was in it, I do not know. I don’t mind enjoying the odd glass of red, as I am now while I write this book, but this stuff was beyond the pale … and I didn’t need the dose of the trots that always followed a good dose of lunatic soup! So I never touched the stuff.
    The lunatic soup was a big hit – and boy, did it ever turn the partakers into lunatics. There were blokes falling over, blokes asleep and blokes hardly able to stand up on muster. All this happening in a maximum security prison!
    Toby was sharing a cell with another youngster called Chris Reynolds. Chris’s claim to fame was that he, like Toby, clearly liked playing with fire as he had fatally incinerated a homeless person on the banks of the Murray River at Mildura.
    Chris had never been in jail before and was not coping at all well – that’s why he was placed in a protected unit, and placed in with Toby. They were left well alone so that they could do the brew, because everybody wanted a drink.
    Anyone who was young was constantly being harassed by older prisoners for sex. Unfortunately one young bloke was out in the yard with the rest of us one day, assembling Dynabolts, when he was grabbed by an older prisoner who was in jail for rape. He was dragged into the toilet in the workroom where he was bashed and his anus slit open with a razor blade, then he was raped in full view of everybody else.
    How does this happen in a maximum security prison? Well, let me explain the layout of Sirius East (with apologies to those who have read