“You got nothing to worry about. All we’re interested in doing is running an orderly division. It’ll be up to you what you make of it.”

– Warden

The international joke about Australia is that it’s an island of convicts, as if the 18th century English settlement of the country was a drop-off playground for ruffians running wild. The reality, of course, was an island of prisons, colonial government and cops.

In my hometown of Fremantle, for instance, the colonial prison stands as the lynchpin of the town. Built by convict labor, and pretty much the first major building built in the settlement, it sits on top of the hill and all roads deviate around it.  After a massive prison riot in the late eighties and a farce of an investigation, the prison was finally closed in 1991. Fremantle Prison is now the town’s major tourist attraction (and it’s not cheap to visit). It’s host to school excursions designed to scare kids with history and occasional spooky night ghost tours.

Australia’s a nation of rules. Despite whatever lackadaisical sense of ease the nation tries to project, the defining sense of nationality is ultimately  the definition of rules and structures. The birth of the Australian nation wasn’t by way of war or revolution, it was a purely bureaucratic process; a regulated nation.

The early seventies is approximately when Australian film and TV started to emphasize Australian identity, separate from their English social roots. One of Australia’s most famous popular prime time soaps in the late seventies and eighties was Prisoner (known as Prisoner: Cell Block H in the United Kingdom and United States, and Caged Women in Canada). Strikingly bleak for a soap opera, it focused on power struggles between prisoners and officers, sexual domination, and institutional grief. For some reason it was popularly syndicated worldwide. Ghosts of the Civil Dead is a landmark Australian film from that same period about the Australian prison as a hopeless place of institutional violence (it kickstarted director John Hillcoat’s career and Nick Cave’s acting career).

So the prison looms large as a pop culture fixture in Australia. If in the USA, prison is a location of fear, punishment, and the hope of escape, in Australian pop culture prison tends to exist as a location of government brutality. There’s not a lot of difference there on the surface, but look closely and the difference is inherent. Fear, punishment and hope are emotional states. Institutional brutality is pragmatic.

Everynight… Everynight came in 1994 on the wake of these stories mentioned above, though it was based on a 1977 play about the notorious H Division in Pentridge Prison. H Division was the feared site of the “high security, discipline, and protection” cells. The play was written by Ray Mooney, a former prisoner of H Division and focuses on a vaguely fictionalized version of his friend Christopher Dale Flannery, one of the more notorious criminals of the seventies and eighties who earned himself the nickname “Mr. Rent-a-Kill.”

Everynight… Everynight details the cruel punishments of a solitary confinement wing where prisoners were subject to excessive labour and cruelty: regular beatings, days spent breaking rocks, psychological torture, etc. H Division in Everynight… Everynight is where prisoners are subject to unreasonable rules, and beatings are the inevitable result of infractions.

Everynight… Everynight is a prison movie by way of Kafka and Foucault. Bodies are fed into H Division and worked upon to the breaking point. It begins with a rough 15-minute scene where our protagonist, a newly admitted inmate, is subjected to torturous violence, rape, and mind games from the guards until he understands his role as a submissive prisoner. It’s a grueling scene, but it’s also immersive. You feel witness to the abuse and are left to wonder why it’s possible.

From there we are with our protagonist as he is forced to comply with bizarre demands from the guards for military discipline, such as saluting the guards at every turn, beginning each corridor walk with the left foot, and cleaning shit off toilet doors with his tongue. Eventually, our protagonist leads the prisoners of H Division on an existential strike, refusing the psychological torture with the statement “I’ve resigned from this life,” which spreads through the population of cellmates. They refuse to care and the guards have no answer for that.

“You can’t charge me. I’m no longer part of this world. I’m resigned.”

– Flannery

Made for a scant $28,000 Everynight… Everynight achieves a lot with very little. Shot in deep-contrast black & white, it recalls expressionist cinema by way of Orson Welles – see the shadows of the bars on the wall, the silhouetted bodies, the immense fear of a slowly opening door. It’s an intense cinematic effect. Meanwhile, the score written by Paul Kelly starts with a timeless folk style that draws a connection between the colonial era and the modern day. As the film goes on the score becomes more urgent and electrified, bringing us into the present and raising our hackles. The film’s overall effect is of systemic brutality that drags the viewer in and provides no exits. But for all that, the character actors are doing the work to make your time spent as intriguing as possible.

If you look online there’s a fair amount of conjecture about whether the film is factually true, but from this vantage that barely matters. The film is set in 1972, and by 1974 there was a governmental inquiry into the conditions in H Division (The Jenkinson Report, 1973-74, the government-commissioned inquiry into the prisoners’ allegations of brutality, ill treatment and poor conditions of H.M.Pentridge H Division). The report detailed all the brutality contained within the film. The actions are true even if the story conflates characters.

Everynight… Everynight was made at time when police corruption was a huge political issue. In 1994, just as America was consumed with OJ, Australia was all about police corruption. Queensland’s Fitzgerald Enquiry, 1987-89, brought down a state government and found corruption from street level right up to the parliament and Police Commissioner. Multiple ministers were jailed. The New South Wales’ Wood Royal Commission, 1994-95, proved corruption was pervasive throughout the entirety of the police force.

These were nuclear, Watergate-level political disruptions that showed little had changed, systemically, since colonial settlement. The cops and governors were in charge of the law, the execution, the graft and the vice. This sense of institutional inevitability pervades Everynight… Everynight and allows it to stand alongside Kafka’s writings as a product of existential horror.

Obviously, such a small-scale film only had a limited release. There was a brief DVD release but that’s long out of print. You can watch the entire film on YouTube here: