River Murray Recovery Stories
Anthony Winter & Brenton Jinx
Two local tradies turned prison coordinators used flood crisis to teach men trades, dignity, and a path out.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Anthony Winter and Brenton Jinx are local tradies who spent 16 years running a community service program at Cadell Prison, training and supervising prisoners on work crews across the Riverlands. When the 2022 River Murray floods hit, they found themselves at the centre of an emergency response that had never been attempted before: building flood defense cells with crews of men, most of whom had never held a shovel or used basic tools in their lives.
What made the program work was simple but rare. Anthony and Brenton were locals, born and raised in the region, with 30 years of trade experience each. People knew them, trusted them, and were willing to hand over keys to their properties. Within six months of the program starting, community skepticism turned to quiet respect as word spread about the quality of work. When the floods came, that trust mattered. The two men had to problem-solve on the fly with unfamiliar technology, no clear instructions, and most of the sand filling done by hand rather than machines. They learned to read a prisoner's mood, to listen when someone was struggling, to offer a day off when needed. They taught men with no work ethic or background the difference between doing something and doing it well.
One former prisoner called years later just to say thank you. He'd landed a job doing shop fit-outs, work he learned on their crew. That call, rare as it was, carried the weight of what they'd built together. The defense cells still sit packed solid in the ground, a physical reminder of months of hard labour. But the real work was quieter: helping men see themselves as capable of building something that mattered to their community.
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