The day I got out of prison, I walked through those gates with a clear plastic bag full of scrappy paperwork, clothes hanging off me. I shuffled across the carpark to where my son was waiting, elbow resting on the car window, a gentle breeze cooling the warm day. My shackle clanged clumsily against my ankle bone with every step. I’d been approved for home detention – it was not quite freedom, but the air still smelt sweeter outside the razor wire. I threw my bag in the back, climbed in and exhaled for what felt like the first time in almost 2 years. This moment had been a long time coming. My son smiled and started the car.

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I put the window down, and the wind rushed through my hair, and, as if by magical happenstance, How to Make Gravy came on the radio. His voice rolled out like it was coming from someone familiar, telling the story of Joe, writing home from prison before Christmas. Joe spoke of all the people he loved, naming them one by one, imagining the Christmas table without him there, the food, the music, the kids running around. It’s so ordinary, but that’s the cruelty: the ordinariness you’re locked out of and kept away from. And, underneath every verse, you can hear the ache of someone marking time: counting the days already stolen, measuring the distance still to go, rehearsing every absence in their head while trying to pretend they’re not.

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I felt the heaviness of that ache and the buzz of excitement all at once. I was heading home, not for Christmas but for good. In that moment, that song became my soundtrack to freedom, my reminder of going home, of fighting to be with my kids again.

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Every time I heard it since that date, I thought about the letter I never wrote, the family scenes I replayed while pacing the yard, the smell of food cooking in a kitchen I couldn’t reach and the kids growing up and doing life, while I was not beside them.

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But coming home wasn’t all unicorns and rainbows. When you’re inside, you think the answer to all your problems is just walking through that gate. But I came home to nothing. No job, no belongings, no money … nothing but the oversized clothes on my back and a garbage bag full of useless papers.

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On reflection, in some ways, those early days of my re-entry were the best of times and, in other ways, the hardest. Thin second-hand mattresses on the lounge-room floor. Watching old SpongeBob DVDs on repeat because that’s all we had. Simple dinners from whatever we could get at Foodbank – pasta with nothing but sauce, rice stretched to fill every plate. Trying to catch up on the months and years I’d missed and working out where I fit into my kids’ lives now.

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And, all the while, living under another kind of captivity. My home detention conditions meant I couldn’t take my daughter to the playground. Couldn’t walk her to school. Couldn’t even pop down to the shop for milk. I was “free” but not allowed to live like it. The walls had followed me home.

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Inside, I used to think about freedom a lot – I mean, we all do, right? We dream about the outside, about all the good things that aren’t allowed in. But I also thought a lot about captivity. Not just the big obvious things but the small daily rituals of being caged.

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I’d watch the women circle the prison yard over and over and over again, the same loop every day, wearing out the dirt under their shoes like lions pacing in the zoo. Their faces blank, but their bodies restless, trapped in motion with nowhere to go. It wasn’t exercise; it was survival, a way of pushing back the madness of stillness, of concrete and razor wire closing in.

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Every part of the system feels inhumane. Being called by your prison number instead of your name. Lights that never go fully dark, so even sleep belongs to someone else. The sound of keys and boots in the corridor that remind you, every minute of every day, that you are always watched, never alone, never safe.

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And then Paul Kelly killed Joe.

Nestled on page 33 of the newspaper The Age, the notice read like any other obituary: Paul Kelly had published a death notice for “Joe” – the guy in prison from his 1996 song How to Make Gravy – saying he’d died of “sudden misadventure”.

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When I read that, I sat for a long while thinking, “Did Joe ever make it home? Or was he like so many of our mob who never get to walk out of those gates?” Because, in this country, Aboriginal people don’t just “do time”; too many of us don’t make it home. Some lose their lives inside, others lose their hope, and, either way, it’s a kind of ending.

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Inside, when we were feeling low, the women would say, “Don’t worry, love, they can’t keep you here forever.” They said it with good intentions, but it wasn’t actually true. Some people (too many people) never make it home. Sometimes through circumstance, sometimes through despair, sometimes through the slow erasure that captivity brings.

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Now when I hear How to Make Gravy I don’t just hear my freedom moment. I think about Joe. I don’t care what crime he committed. I just want to know – did he make it home to his wife, Rita? Did he get his moment, lying on a mattress with the kids, watching DVDs, yarning about old times? Or was Joe, like too many others, a story left unfinished, a reminder of how hard it can be to find your way home once the system has taken hold of you?

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Because here’s the truth: prisons take more than time.

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They take families, futures and the chance of a moment like mine. And, in this country, it is still mostly Aboriginal people, my brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles, who are held the longest and who face the hardest road home.

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So, when they killed Joe, even if he was only a song, it stayed with me, because every Joe I’ve known deserved to make it home.