The tragedy of the 1986 hanging of Kevin John Barlow and Brian Geoffrey Chambers behind the imposing concrete walls of Malaysia's Pudu Prison, was for me, not the death of the 2 men I had come to know, but in the victims it left behind.
I remember my 1st meeting with the 2 men inside the Penang Prison, a relic of the British Colonial justice system, built in the 1850s to house 350 prisoners but by November 1983, when Barlow and Chambers were arrested, stuffed to overflowing with some 2000 inmates.
Despite the crowded conditions, they were in good spirits. They shared a cell. The prison was old but kept meticulously clean by a tough but fair-minded prison warden of the old school. They were allowed the luxury of Western food and time to exercise and sit outside in the sunlight.
They had made a pact, they said, "not to get their families involved".
After all, it was only a "matter of time before things would be sorted, bribes paid and they we will be back in Oz again".
They had no sense of their plight - seemingly oblivious to the fact the Malaysian Government, in an attempt to crack down on a blossoming and insidious drug trade taking hold of the country, had recently introduced new laws making the death penalty mandatory for any one in possession of just 15g of a banned narcotic.
Barlow and Chambers had been arrested with 179g of low-grade heroin hidden in a suitcase - detained by an "observant policeman" who noticed Barlow's nervous demeanour as they tried to check in at the Malaysia Airlines 1st-class counter for a flight to Kuala Lumpur and a connection to Sydney.
I remember, too, just 18 months later - when their trial began on July 17, 1985 - that Barlow and Chambers would no longer look each other in the eye. They hardly spoke.
The local lawyer, Rasiah Rajahsingham, who had initially been engaged to represent both men, had quickly determined that given the evidence against them, he could at best save only one.
Now they would be represented by individual counsel - Barlow by charismatic political opposition figure and lawyer Karpal Singh, while Rajahsingham chose to stay with Chambers.
No one could possibly imagine the anguish of a last goodbye to a son or a brother, knowing that in the morning they will be taken out and killed at dawn.
They turned on each other. The parents and family members who Barlow and Chambers had early agreed to "keep out of it" now watched on helplessly from the court gallery, as each man tried to implicate the other in a desperate gambit that at best would send 1 man to the gallows while the other walked free.
Source: Herald Sun, February 20, 2015
