Prison chaplain

From a convent to a classroom to a prison, Sister Zita Barron has dedicated her life to teaching, listening and helping those who need her.

Judgment is not a word Sister Zita Barron has much time for. At 79, she has only just retired from her chaplaincy work at one of Australia’s maximum-security prisons, but still takes time to visit the men she says are often forgotten on the outside. Almost every Tuesday, she leaves the comfort of her retirement village in Sydney’s Maroubra to enter a world most people wouldn’t even like to imagine, let alone experience. To many on the outside, Long Bay Correction Complex in Sydney’s Malabar is a frightening place filled with dangerous criminals. To Sister Zita, it’s a community filled with real people who need her. She greets them, talks to them, laughs with them, counsels and listens to them. It can be heartbreaking, it can be inspiring and it can sometimes take all the strength, faith and courage this one woman can muster.

6am: After she has showered and made her bed, Sister Zita starts her day in prayer as she has done ever since she became a nun at the age of 18. “I carry out what we call a Christian meditation, where I use a mantra to empty my mind of the material world,” she explains. “I ask for guidance at times to help me help the people inside the prison because sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to say or be able to do for them.”

7am: Sister Zita has breakfast of cereal and toast in the kitchen of her self-contained apartment and packs her lunch for her visit to the gaol. By 8.15am she’s on the road making the short journey from Maroubra to the next suburb of Malabar.

8.30am: Arriving at the Long Bay car park boom gate, Sister Zita shows her ID card, parks her car and walks into the prison, where she’s greeted by Corrective Services officers. She still remembers her first day at the prison seven years ago.

“I’d had no experience of gaols apart from one in my hometown of Cooma when I was a child, and I’d always rush past the gate in case anyone tried to grab me!” she laughs.
“I was like most people then and prejudged the fellows inside, but life has taught me not to judge people, so I honestly wasn’t afraid of what I’d find inside Long Bay.” Instead, Sister Zita says she was nervous about how the inmates would accept her.

“I wondered whether they’d even want to talk to me or if I’d be any help to them at all,” she smiles. To her relief, the welcome she received from the inmates was more than she could have expected. “Shortly after I started at Long Bay, a chaplain suggested I bring four sisters from the convent to the prison with me. We were taken to an area where the inmates were suffering from hepatitis C. A few of the men had made a beautiful morning tea for us and they honestly treated us like royalty,” she says.

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