Beyond the bluestone walls: Tour Melbourne's Pentridge Prison

You can now "do time" in Melbourne's historic Pentridge Prison.

I'm not a particularly ghoulish person - I don't like ghost stories, I'm not a fan of true crime. But new tours into Pentridge Prison, in Melbourne's inner north, tell stories of repentance and revenge, of rehabilitation, rebellion and regret. And that I find totally compelling.

Prison tourism isn't a new thing: think the Tower of London, San Francisco's Alcatraz, or Port Arthur in Tasmania. The Pentridge Prison tours are conducted by National Trust of Australia (Victoria), which also runs the popular Old Melbourne Gaol tours.

In 1851, HM Prison Pentridge started out as a stockade north of Melbourne on the Sydney Road, a dirt track rutted by bullock trains heading north to the gold diggings. By the 1870s, local bluestone replaced the stockade, stone turrets with Crusader-like crosses creating its formidable gates.

At any time, there were more than 1000 prisoners in nine divisions at the "Bluestone College" before it closed in 1997, including its most famous inmate, Ned Kelly, who did a three-month stint here in 1873 for stealing a horse, and was also buried here - for a second time - after the Melbourne Gaol and its graveyard closed in 1929. His remains were exhumed, again, in 2011, to be returned to his family.

After a 30-minute intro with a National Trust guide, new audio tours take visitors through Division B and the notoriously violent and secretive Division H. Listening on an iPod, the stories are triggered by a sensor as you walk into the cells. Told by former prisoners and officers, chaplains and lawyers, each shows a different face in the prison. There are stories on Indigenous prisoners and female inmates, on pastimes and punishment, as well as such historic events as the 1960s protests to end capital punishment, in which even Queen Elizabeth II weighed into.

The soundtrack includes the voices of two of its best-known attendees: Koori elder Uncle Jack Charles and Mark "Chopper" Read, both now passed away.

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Uncle Jack, who became a traditional law man in his later years, helped Indigenous prisoners transition to life outside jail, and for this project, recorded tracks in Division B before he died last year, while Chopper Read, who died in 2013, is the most ebullient voice in the so-called "Hell Division".

"This whole place was designed for combat," he says in the audio tour. "I thought, this is great. I loved it." He spent 10.5 years in Division H. In between, narrator Rachael Zoa Maza's voice shifts adroitly between firm, compassionate, reassuring and sad. Because, ultimately, most stories are tragic.

"There's no one truth about Pentridge, and no sensationalising the story," National Trust operations co-ordinator Christopher Hasdo tells me.

In one cell, the walls are covered with mugshots of female prisoners; crime matriarchs with a belligerent stare, the faces of women whose lives took a shocking turn.

Pentridge's thick stone walls were not impenetrable: Ronald Ryan, who in 1967 was the last person to be executed in Australia, ran out the front gates two years earlier, and Gregory David Roberts escaped from the prison in 1990, only to be caught, spending two of his six remaining years in solitary confinement where he began writing his bestselling novel Shantaram.

There's a dash of black humour: talk of the "black Panadol" (a warden's truncheon), the bong wrought from a Wella Balsam shampoo bottle used to inhale toilet disinfectant, the AC/DC graffiti. And plenty of tragedy: an early etching of an inmate being flogged, the hangman's noose used to execute Ryan.

Prison officer Peter Prideaux recalls how the nights in H Division would be spent listening to the prisoners calling and screaming, and the mornings spent "accounting for all bodies". Dating back to the earliest years, the spartan cell titled "Separate and Silent" is bare but for a bed roll, an enamel pannikin, a bible on a desk. Under the prevailing prison philosophy, inmates were completely isolated. There was no speech, no visual contact, their names replaced by a number. Hooded for their one hour's recreation, exercise was held in a panopticon, a circular yard split into 14 walled sectors - one man to each sector - a watchtower in the centre, seeing all. "The theory was to deprive the senses, leading to reflection and an internal reformation," explains Hasdo. The philosophy, which was abandoned in the 1920s, is far from the 1980s cell, with its kettle and radio, busty pin-up girls still on the walls - but the dimensions remain the same.

"What's horrific is the boredom," remembers one prisoner. "You've no control anymore, you're no longer a man."

In a bizarre moment of split universes, I step out of Cell Block H, head swirling with stories of hangings, hard labour and solitary confinement, only to see a young mother and her children passing with their shopping. A supermarket is built into the Pentridge precinct, quotes from Ned Kelly along the escalators. Watchtowers - now sightless - overlook drinkers in BrewDog's beer garden in E Division, office workers grabbing a flat white from the Glass Den cafe. The new Adina Apartment Hotel Pentridge tower is now open; its intimate Interlude section, which includes 19 rooms and a wine bar cut into the bluestone cells of Division B, is scheduled to open in the coming months.

Toward the end of my tour, I find myself alone in a cell entitled Last Days, where inmates waited for their execution. A red light flashes in the cell and I jump back, to see the flicker of a man in the cell behind me. It's only a life-sized video, but my heart has stopped.

The audio tour concludes, "Thank you for doing time here today."

I'm so glad I never did.

Getting there: The No 19 tram runs from Flinders St Station to Pentridge Prison, or take the Upfield train line to Batman station, eight minutes' walk from Pentridge.

Staying there: The new Adina Apartment Hotel Pentridge Melbourne is now open. See adinahotels.com

Tours: Self-guided audio tours of B or H Division take 90 minutes, from $35 per person. A combined tour of both divisions takes three hours ($60). Night tours run on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 6.30pm and 8.30pm, and are recommended for 18+ years ($45).

Explore more: pentridgeprisontours.com.au