River Murray Recovery Stories
Anthony Winter and Brenton Jinks · 50 min
Two local tradies from the SA Department of Corrections led prisoner work crews through the 2022 River Murray floods, proving that rehabilitation, community service, and disaster response can be the same job.
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Anthony Winter and Brenton Jinks are local tradies who work as community service coordinators at Cadell Prison in South Australia's Riverlands. When the 2022 River Murray floods hit, they led a crew of ten prisoners in emergency response work that few people knew how to do. With no instruction manuals, they problem-solved their way through assembling and filling thousands of flat-packed defence cells with compacted red dirt, relying on their 30 years of trade experience to figure it out as they went.
Most of the men on their crew had no work experience at all. Some had never held a shovel or used a lawnmower. Anthony and Brenton taught them everything from basic equipment operation to building and tiling skills. The work was hard, repetitive, and done in the heat, but the prisoners saw something concrete they had built with their own hands. For many, it was the first time they felt pride in finishing a real job.
After 16 years running the gang together, Anthony and Brenton learned that supervision means noticing when a man is struggling, missing his family, or falling apart inside. They learned to listen and to let someone have a day off not to slack off, but because he needed it. When one released prisoner called months later to say he had found work in shop fit-outs, they knew the program worked.
But the floods are not the Riverlands' real crisis. Grapes are worth nothing, citrus is struggling, and two years of drought have crushed dryland farming. Anthony and Brenton see tourism and the river itself as the region's best hope. They know the community is still standing, still resilient in the way country people are, but the economic pressure is relentless and unforgiving.
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