BIOGRAPHY

CHRISTOPHER VICTOR VIVIAN PARNELL

Christopher Parnell was born in Sydney Australia in July 1953. He went to school in Brisbane, Queensland until he left at the age of 14 to become an apprentice jockey in Sydney but this was not to be his profession as he well and truly out grew the acceptable size of what is required of a Jockey. Though he remains a horseman to this day. He left Australia in 1972 at the age of 19, to work-in a logging camp in Papua New Guinea.

Only returning to Australia in 1996. After spending nearly a quarter of a century out of his Mother Country. Chris was 43 years old when he returned.

After living 25 years in Asia, he tried his hands in many businesses from Tourist Boating in Hong Kong, to Bus Treks on the hippy trail throughout India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Northern Frontier Provinces.

Parnell was in Vietnam in 1975 during the refugee evacuation of Da Nang; where he worked as a deckhand on a freelance merchant ship, The Garruby. Chris was in Afghanistan in 1979, when the Russians invaded the country, he was instrumental in helping to evacuate a number of top ranking Government and Military Officials.

During his first decade as an Australian Citizen abroad, Parnell operated a very successful equestrian centre. The Balaju Tar Riding Academy in Kathmandu , Nepal. The school catered for the children and families of diplomatic staff in the region and was, for a time profitable enough for Chris and his family to live well and employ a substantial staff.

However, hard times hit in the early 1980’s and although he was determined to remain in the area and retain his business interests, Parnell was considering returning to Australia with the urging of his wife..

Chris and his family subsequently travelled to Bali for a holiday, on route back to Australia in August 1985. The family had been in Bali barely 2 hours when the Losman (Balinese Guest House Bungalow) that had been booked for them by his wife was raided by Police who claimed to have uncovered 12.5 kg of Hashish.

This hashish was hidden in two statues cemented to the floor of the bathroom. This bathroom was in a completely different complex to the one Christopher Parnell and his family was staying. The Hashish was also found 10 months earlier… before Christopher Parnell and his family entered the country. Never the less Parnell was arrested for “Suspicion of transporting Drugs” Even though there was no physical evidence.

Over the next 11 years, Parnell unsuccessfully tried to escape , on five different occasions by such imaginative means as feigning metal illness, drugging Prison Guards, digging a tunnel and more conventionally, going over the wall.

Such efforts led him through a string of Punishment Prisons. Including a combination Leper Colony and Salt Mine. Known throughout Indonesia as the “End of the Road Prison” on Madura a remote island off Java.

Parnell had to pull on all of his skills and experiences of life in Asia to literally survive in these Indonesian Hellholes, where depravation of food, water, medicines and all human rights are the accepted thing.

He was subjected to unthinkable sessions of torture , many of these sessions were because of unimaginable bureaucratic bungles by Foreign Affairs and Australian Consulate Staff. Left to starve and fight every day for his survival, Parnell became a man forced to eat everything from cockroaches to human flesh.

Finally in 1994, he was attacked as he slept , by five Indonesian prisoners, and stabbed so ferociously that the Prison Officials took Parnell’s lifeless body to the hospital where the Indonesian Doctors pronounced him dead. He then lay in a hospital morgue for five hours before a Chinese Christian Lady who had come to prepare his body for a Christian burial, discovered that he was in fact still alive.

Parnell lost an eye, his spleen, his gall bladder, approximately one meter of his lower intestine and all the bottom half of his right lung. Subsequently he contracted Hepatitis A, B and C from the 28 contaminated bags of donated blood that was pumped into his mutilated body. The following year Parnell suffered a stroke, caused by a blood clot, a legacy left by a knife wound from that vicious attack.

His release from prison in September 1996, came in the form of a Presidential Pardon, or an exoneration of the charges that had been laid against him. The real culprit of this crime for which Parnell had been charged and convicted had come forth so Parnell was finally released after 11 years of wrongful imprisonment.

Between becoming re-accustomed to Australia, which has included learning to speak and think in the English language again, after so many years of speaking only Asian languages and dialects. Chris has attempted to form the thousands of pages of writing that he kept while incarcerated into Books. He is now the Author of 2 Published Books Hell’s Prisoner and The Sunday Smuggler. Parnell wrote 11 books whilst in Prison.

Christopher Parnell now lives in Victoria, where he prefers a life of solitude and peace. Parnell is the father of three Children and grandfather of 4. He married for the second time, to a friend of over 30 years.

Parnell was informed by his Psychiatrist (SIC Quote)

“You act too normal, you appear too normal for someone to have endured such horrendous tortures and depravations. Therefore you façade of normalcy is totally abnormal.

PSYCHIATRIC EVALUATION……. TOO NORMAL TO BE NORMAL