I don’t know what time Richard wakes up. But each morning, there he is in the common room, sitting quietly on one of the brightly-coloured torn and tattered cheap yellow sofa seats, red melamine mug of tea in his hand.

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He politely bids me good morning as I take my own equally-worn sofa seat next to him. We briefly discuss the predicted temperature for the day, whether it rained last night, and what will be on today’s food menu.

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Everything goes silent for a few moments until Richard gets up reluctantly from his sofa seat and trudges to the kitchenette.

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There, he prepares bread and jam for the colourful rosellas, the honey-eaters and the large black currawongs who are perched on imperceptible branches, hidden within nearby trees, awaiting their breakfast.

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Richard smears sticky-sweet apricot jam upon small, soft fragments of white bread which have been left over from last evening’s bread ration.

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Carefully, he then wedges the broken sweet fragments into the diamond-shaped fenestrations of the metallic security grill which is fixed firmly just beyond our open window. If there is enough jam, Richard will position an entire small plastic jam holder, crumpled with its thin plastic covering peeled back, in a few adjacent fenestrations.

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The watchful birds will then swoop deftly, as if from nowhere, onto the security grill. The rosellas are always the first to arrive, and they scoop up the bread, or the jam, in the narrow sharp end of their stout ivory-coloured beaks. Repeatedly, and nervously, they devour these early morning delights, ever-aware of the presence of nearby competitors and green-clad humans. Every so often, the jostling for bread or jam becomes intense, and some birds will attempt to defend their territory on the security grill, or simply detach themselves from the grill and fly swiftly to a nearby tree branch. We call old Richard “The Birdman”, and most of us regard the birds who come each morning as Richard’s hungry, chirping children.

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Richard is one of two sweepers (cleaners) for our hut. His younger companion is Rex. Both have a number of daily, mundane tasks to carry out, and they provide a source of cheap prison labour for jobs that the guards regard as being below them. Sweepers are paid about $30 per week, and both Richard and young Rex need the money, mostly to supplement their meagre prison rations with a few simple buy-up items once weekly. One of Richard’s early morning jobs is to mop the faded and torn blue-grey linoleum floor in our common room and kitchenette. He also cleans the rusting silver toaster, and scrubs the hot plates with warm soapy water while the rest of us are banished to the exercise yard for 40 minutes each morning. For his part, Rex cleans the communal bathroom, showers and toilets.

Most of the inmates question whether Richard, at 80 years of age, is up to the job. He often leaves the mopped linoleum floor wet, and overlooks cleaning the corners of the common room floor. As he scrubs the hot plates, he stops momentarily to tell me what a thankless job it is to be a sweeper.

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He then resumes his scrubbing. All I can do is to let him know that he is doing a good job.

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Just before lunch and dinner times, Richard and Rex will be summoned over the loudspeaker to come to collect the meal rations for the inmates in our hut.

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Both sweepers will walk purposefully across the expanse of grey concrete yard, out beyond the tall wire perimeter fence, then up a dozen brightly-painted yellow steps to the Compound gate.

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There, in pairs, each team of sweepers will collect individual food parcels in shiny, thin aluminium trays from the guards, and carry them back to the hut upon coloured, wide, firm plastic pallets.

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The weight of the pallets is a daily challenge for Richard who will often need other inmates to help him to negotiate the dozen steps that he needs to descend, as well as the final entry through the narrow blue entrance door into the hut.

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Once inside, Richard and Rex distribute the shiny food rations to each inmate. But, many of the men will curse the rations that they receive, and complain to the sweepers to stop handing them food unfit even for dogs. Another thankless job.

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Richard is a lonely man whose daily existence brims with regret and boredom. He has been in gaol now for about 18 months. I have never heard Richard being called over the yard loudspeakers for a visit on the weekends; nor have I ever seen him receive a letter in the mail when letters are handed out by the sullen guards at the 7am muster. He rarely goes out into the exercise yard, except for the compulsory musters six times each day. Richard tells me that he has a brother-in-law who sometimes puts money into his prison account so that he can buy a few simple buy-up items, or make an occasional telephone call.

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But Richard rarely talks about a family, and he keeps to himself, as all inmates are instructed to do. If he has a family somewhere, I think that they have disowned him. His one interest seems to be horse racing, and we often meet in front of the library door at 10.20am with a few others so that we will have the best chance of reading the latest newspapers when the library door is unlocked at 10.30am by one of the guards. But, this is his life.

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Richard will be released in October – six months from now. But, he has no idea where he will go; the chaplain and the welfare officer are looking for suitable accommodation for him. Richard thinks that he may be relocated to a half-way house run by Correctional Services for a month or two – then to a boarding house in some sordid suburban location if he can find a room to rent cheaply. But, in six months time, Richard will need to confront his freedom: the freedom from his feeding the birds, his freedom from the daily cleaning and meal routines, his freedom from the enforced early morning camaraderie and the silence which sustains us.

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Richard will have gained his freedom from the daily visits to the library, and wondering when the guard will ever open the entry door to let us in. It makes me wonder whether Richard’s new-found “freedom” will be just another word, or perhaps, a new-found sentence.