FIVE YEARS DOWN, 45 TO GO

The nights are the hardest to endure. From lock-down at four o'clock
each afternoon to release at 6.30 the next morning means 14 hours of
close confinement. It's a long time to be left alone with your thoughts;
too long for the gnawing loneliness that's only made worse by the 23
other bodies squeezed shoulder to shoulder beside you in the squalid,
stifling cell block.

Lying on a rough mat on the concrete floor while a single ceiling fan
chops at the relentless tropical heat, Lyle Doniger clings to the worn
and comforting strands of memory as he struggles to block out the
inescapable nightmare that stretches out to the end of his days. He
thinks of family and friends, of the space and comforts of life back in
Australia, and he tries to forget the 50-year sentence that may yet
spell death in a Thai jail.

"If it wasn't for my kids and my family, I would have checked out long
ago. There's no way I could have survived without them. They're the ones
who keep telling me to hang in there, hang in there," Doniger yells from
behind the steel-mesh cage in the visitors' section of Bangkok's
maximum-security Bang Kwang prison.

"I've been through so much pain already, to check out now would be doing
the wrong thing by them. But some days you get very low, you wonder how
you can go on."

In early 1996, Doniger and two Sydney women, Jane McKenzie and Deborah
Spinner, were arrested at Bangkok airport as they prepared to board an
Olympic Airways flight to Australia. Thai narcotics agents, working in
collaboration with Australian Federal Police, later discovered
heroin-filled condoms hidden by the three in their bodies.

When the drugs were refined to establish their purity, the combined
quantities totalled 115.4grams. On the streets of Melbourne or Sydney at
the time, that amount of heroin would probably have fetched no more than
$50,000. But under Thai law, conspiracy to export more than 100 grams of
heroin carries a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.

At the end of their trial, in March 1997, the three judges "halved" the
life sentences to 50 years, in return for pleas of guilty. Doniger was
led away in chains to Bang Kwang, the women were sent to Klong Prem -
the infamous "Bangkok Hilton".

During the court hearings, Doniger, McKenzie and Spinner told a tale all
too familiar in the world of petty drug trafficking. All three were
long-time addicts in methadone programs in Sydney and had never been out
of Australia. All three were independently recruited as "mules" by a
small-time drug syndicate that lured their naive targets with promises
of all-expenses-paid holidays in Thailand and a share of the drugs
smuggled home.

The mad adventure was doomed from the outset. It appears Australian
police were aware of the operation before the party even left Australia.
A deal between Australian and Thai police saw the three arrested in
Bangkok while the mastermind of the operation, John Charles Dodd, and
his Australian Thai accomplice, Prachaya Kavinmethavee, were allowed to
fly back to Sydney before being apprehended.

Five years on, in the cruellest of ironies, Dodd and Prachaya are free
again, while their hapless conscripts face the prospect of a lifetime
behind bars. That grim reality, and five hard years in Thai jails, has
taken a heavy toll on Doniger, McKenzie and Spinner.

Their days in the crowded, squalid prisons crawl by in a never-ending
struggle against hunger, illness and boredom. The pain of separation and
isolation is constant, compounded by the fact that they all left young
families behind in Australia. Jane McKenzie's ordeal has been made even
tougher by the death of her husband, in an apparent drug overdose, a few
months after she was sentenced.

Now the three Australians clutch at two straws of hope to preserve their
sanity and survive: the possibility that they will eventually be
released under a Thai royal pardon, or that Thailand will ratify a
treaty with Australia that would at least allow them to be transferred
to jails back in Australia. Either way, none of them believes they are
likely to win their freedom for years yet.

Doniger lodged his application for a pardon 14 months ago. But, in a
measure of how slowly the wheels of clemency turn in Thailand, his file
was only recently passed from the Corrections Department to the
Department of the Interior, where processing will begin. It could be
years more before the case reaches the palace.

Inexplicably, the women have yet to lodge their own applications for
pardons. There was speculation early last year that they could be
included in a prisoner amnesty program to mark the 72nd birthday of King
Bumibhol Adulyadev, but those hopes were dashed when authorities
excluded drug prisoners from the amnesty - a decision seen to reflect a
toughening in Thailand's response to its worsening drug crisis.

After years of haggling between the Federal Government and the states
and territories, legislation is now in place to allow Australians
serving sentences in foreign prisons to be transferred home, but a
treaty that would enable the 12 Australians jailed in Thailand to be
considered for transfer is still being negotiated. While Australian
officials remain optimistic about reaching agreement, there has been
little progress for months, and the matter has been further complicated
by the recent change of government in Thailand.

Lyle Doniger does not ask or look for sympathy. He openly concedes the
stupidity and petty venality that has wrecked his life. His plea is only
for fair treatment for the crime he committed. There's no doubt that had
he, too, been allowed to fly back to Australia before being arrested, he
would have completed his jail term months if not years ago.

"I'd never been in prison before. I had no drug convictions. I may not
even have been sent to jail in Australia," he says. "This was no master
drug syndicate, just a bunch of stupid amateurs.

"I was carrying just 34 grams - that's about the size of your thumb.
It's a standing joke among the other prisoners that I got done for so
little. The next smallest case in here was 1.4kilograms."

Doniger is a gaunt and greying shadow of the stocky 45-year-old arrested
in 1996. He suffers from hepatitis C - the legacy of a 20-year heroin
addiction - kidney problems and back pain. His eyesight is also
deteriorating.

His days are spent "scrounging" food, washing clothes and writing
letters. An Australian prisoner loan allowance provides money for
essentials, while occasional food parcels from Australia supplement the
almost inedible rice gruel supplied by the prison.

Life has got tougher for Doniger since he lost his two closest friends -
one was sent to solitary confinement, the other transferred out of Bang
Kwang. The three had formed a "food group" to arrange daily meals, share
the cooking and look out for each other against theft and assault.

"I'm pretty much on my own now, which makes it very hard. I worry that
if I get sick there'll be no one to help and protect me.

"There's no one I can really talk to or confide in any more. You've got
to be very careful about opening up and showing your emotions. You don't
want to show any weak points. Some of the people in here are not very
nice people. There's a lot of junkies, but some of the big dealers in
here are real animals."

The long nights in the cramped five-metre-by-10-metre cell are a battle
of endurance.

"You can sleep on your back, sort of, but you're shoulder to shoulder
with all the others. It's so crowded. We're like sardines. Every time
someone rolls over or gets up to use the toilet, you're woken up.

"There's a fan, but it's very hot. At least we've fixed it up a bit.
When I first arrived it was absolutely filthy in there, you wouldn't
believe it. The toilet had a big hole in it and all sorts of critters
used to come out of there."

Doniger and other prisoners scratched together some money to fit a new
squat toilet and build a screen for privacy.

Apart from regular consular calls, it can be months between visitors.
Once a year prisoners are allowed a two-hour contact visit with their
families. Each year Doniger's son Troy flies up from Sydney to see his
father.

"When I see him my head goes blank. I just stare at him. It's such an
emotional time. The whole place is just a sea of red eyes and the
hardest part is when he's walking away. I know I won't see him again for
a year. It rips your heart out and it's not just me: all the foreigners
are the same."

Doniger has not seen his two youngest children, Simon, 13, and Hayley,
12 - both of whom have serious medical conditions - since he left
Sydney. The argument that he be allowed to go home and help care for
them is the basis of his case for a pardon. Failing that, he believes an
eventual transfer to an Australian jail would make a huge difference to
his life.

"I arrived here on April Fool's Day 1997 and it's been hell every day
since then. If I could get back to Australia it wouldn't matter how many
years I had to do. At least I could see my kids. My kids are my life.
Without them, I have nothing."

His greatest fear is that neither option will eventuate.

"I keep hoping that one day I'll get out of here, but my nightmare is
that my pardon will be rejected. I don't think I could cope with that.
I've seen how after eight to 10 years in here the foreigners hit the
wall. Some become junkies, some start chasing the katoys
(transvestites), some just go plain crazy. I've been in prison five
years now and I can see the danger that lies ahead."