Source : Perth Now news
The Hakea prison greens were never supposed to leave the prison. Somehow, Struan Morrison walked out with them.
He does not remember exactly how. He remembers plenty about the week he spent wearing them.
Morrison was psychotic, almost blind and locked in isolation at Hakea Prison when his life was spiralling out of control in October 2023.
Now the 31-year-old is technically homeless, cannot drive because of severe vision loss and spends much of his week back in a boxing gym in Midland.
The greens turned up recently while he was clearing through his belongings.
On a whim, he put them on Facebook Marketplace.
People wanted to buy them. One mate told him he could get at least $1000.
Morrison wasn’t interested.
“I can’t put a price on ‘em,” he says. “For me and all I went through. That journey to hell.”
The clothes are the same ones he says were issued to him at Hakea.
He says he was only there for about a week, transferred there after a period of increasingly bizarre behaviour, police encounters and repeated attempts by his family to get him into psychiatric care.
He was not in his right mind.
He says he was almost completely blind and deeply psychotic. And he was confined to a cell.
He remembers being allowed out to shower only every few days.
Then there was the toilet. Morrison says he stood in the cell and repeatedly flushed it, flooding the toilet and eventually the corridor.
He says he later slept in the water.
When he asked for a blanket, he recalls being told: “You made the mess now you can sleep in it.”
“All but blind. Psychotic. Locked inside a box,” he says. “That place was the definition of the deepest darkest part of hell.”
Morrison’s descent had started well before Hakea.
He had been pushing himself physically and mentally, trying to become comfortable with being uncomfortable as he prepared for a boxing fight.
He began talking about war.
He says he became consumed by the idea that he was fighting evil and eventually believed he had seen “the ruler of this world”.
He declared war on the devil. He would take him off his throne, he believed.
His family called police. He was taken repeatedly to St John of God Midland Hospital, according to Morrison, but says he was discharged or not admitted.
Eventually came Perth Watch House. Then Hakea. Then more mental health care.
Body-worn camera footage from an October 6, 2023, police intervention shows Morrison in the street as officers approach him.
He is animated and talking as police keep their distance.
An officer draws a yellow Taser and points it towards him.
Morrison remains standing before the confrontation escalates, he is Tasered and eventually goes to the ground.
Officers move in and restrain him before taking him to a police vehicle.
For Morrison, this episode was just one part of a period in which almost everything he had disappeared.
He says he lost his home, savings, cat and much of his independence.
His eyesight had already been badly damaged during an earlier psychotic episode.
In 2023, he says, he deliberately stared directly at the sun for hours over several days.
Going blind was his biggest fear. So he decided to conquer it.
He says he burnt his retinas and was left with vision measured at 2/60 in one eye and 5/60 in the other.
He cannot drive. He struggles to read and watch movies. But he can still box.
His life has been punctuated by periods of homelessness, hospitalisation and crisis.
In 2025, he says another psychotic episode followed after which he spent about three months at Bentley Hospital.
He says there were times he did not think he would see the end of 2026.
He is now training again, at least four days a week, sometimes more.
Back at Geracitano Boxing in Midland, the gym formerly known as 5six Boxing, he has found something he says gives him structure.
He won Silver Gloves in September 2020 in the super-heavyweight 91kg-plus division, stopping his opponent at the end of the second round.
The title itself is not what matters most to him. The fight against himself is.
“My enemy is never my opponent,” Morrison says. “It’s me and conquering myself. That’s the real fight for me.”
He still wants to fight. An Australian title would be “mint”, he says.
But he knows his mind can be unpredictable. He knows he could end up back in a ward. He knows the war is not over.
Morrison grew up around Midland and says the 6056 area remains home.
He has been moving between friends, family and bush camps and is on the Department of Housing waiting list.
He says the boxing gym and the people around it have helped keep him going.
“Give me a gym. Some gloves and me family and I’m content,” he says.
The Hakea greens are now stored safely with close family because Morrison does not have a place of his own.
He says he could sell them. He has had people ask him to name a price. He won’t.
Because to anyone else they are prison clothes.
To Morrison they are something else.
“They represent a trip to hell and back,” he says. “And then some, figuratively and literally.”
He has another description for them.
“After all I have been through in regards and the road there and back are they prison clothes?
“Or are they the hell walkers clothing of a man that learnt to no longer be a prisoner to his own mind.”
For now, the greens remain folded away and the boxing gloves are back on.
And every morning, Morrison says, the fight starts again.
“Every morning I still wake up and the war starts again — anxiety, depression, everything I’ve dealt with most of my life.
“The difference now is I’m able to fight again.”
