“It’s sort of like when you think of Atlas holding up the planet,” says Terry Irving, an Aboriginal man from north Queensland who spent four-and-a-half years in prison for a bank robbery he did not commit, and half his life trying to carry that weight on his angular shoulders.
In Greek mythology, Atlas was sentenced to hold aloft the heavens for eternity. Irving was given seven years and five months, no prospect of parole, for the robbery of $6,230 from an ANZ bank branch in Cairns in 1993. A jury took 10 minutes to find him guilty.
