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A family screening of the new Netflix drama Boy Swallows Universe has potentially dug up a deeply buried family secret in one Betoota Heights household this week.
The Kenniff family had just sat down for another of the semi-autobiographical Australian TV drama, when pop revealed a little bit too much.
During the now famous prison ‘break-in’ scene, where the 12-year-old protagonist Eli Bell sneaks inside the Women’s Prison to see his mother, Pop pipes up suddenly out of nowhere.
“Haha yes the old Lebanese fruit truck. That’s probably your best bet young fella” cackles the 85-year-old Jim Kenniff.
His family sit in shock, as they stare at their cheerful grandfather – who’d previously only ever mentioned ‘living in the bush before meeting gran’
Closed in July 1992, Boggo Road Gaol was Australia’s most notorious prison. Home to some of the wildest criminals to ever put bank tellers on stress leave, alongside serial killers, domestic terrorists and repeated escapees.
Throughout it’s more than 119 years of operation, thousands of men and women did hard time in different variations of this institution – and 42 were hanged.
As a finishing school for the products of the cruel boys homes that housed the wayward sons of traumatised war veterans and Indigenous children who had been stolen from their families – Boggo Road was eventually shut down after it became clear that the prison did very little for society other than turning petty crooks into hardened crims.
To this day there are still a fair few quiet old men floating around Queensland that harbour an in-depth knowledge of the dramatic escapes, frenzied riots, hunger-strikes and roof-top protests.
It’s not certain if Pop is one of these old men, but his running commentary of Boy Swallows Universe is making a lot of his family members a bit nervous.
“Haha, yes, those old sheilahs were hard as nails. They’ll look after ya!” shouts Pop
“Wait, don’t climb that wall, that’ll take you in the mens yard haha!”
“You’re better off sliding through the bars in the medical office, that’ll take you straight into the shared visitors room!!”
