One of Australia’s worst sex offenders who tortured young females has made an extraordinary bid to try and have his restrictions behind bars eased. 

Serial rapist Graham Loughlan Harrison recently wrote a 237-page affidavit pleading improved entitlements.

In early March, he outlined a summary of his demands in the NSW Supreme Court before Registrar Jennifer Hedge, Radio 2GB reported, including an objection to his prison classification as an ‘Extreme High Security’ inmate, and a plan to transfer him to Lithgow jail.

A reporter for Ben Fordham‘s 2GB breakfast program said Harrison’s bid via videolink from Goulburn maximum security prison took up a significant amount of court time and the diagnosed sexual deviant came across as ‘a clean cut, normal suburban dude’.  

Harrison, was ‘very smart and knew exactly what he wanted’, which included applying to have a current ban on visitors against him lifted.

Now aged in his mid-50s, the serial rapist appeared in good health, and only complaining about ‘disability in my hands’ and the lack of access in jail to computers to prepare and research his case.

Harrison is currently serving more than 36 years for his sex offences, with an earliest release date of 2040. 

His offending history includes kidnapping young women, who he bound, tied and tortured by placing plastic bags over their heads and threatening to mutilate their genitals with a knife.

Harrison was convicted of filming himself tying up and raping women while threatening to rape their daughters if they didn’t comply.

He once told a victim, ‘you have no idea what I’d do to have sex with little girls, that’s my thing’ and is known to try and manipulate female prison staff to get his way. 

Psychiatrists have described him as having ‘recurrent and increasingly elaborate’ plans for the ‘sadistic capture, control and infliction of pain and humiliation on females’.

He is resisting a proposed transfer from Goulburn to Lithgow, and told the court on  that although the NSW Commissioner for Corrective Services wanted to move him there was a ‘temporary stay holding off on that change which I’m grateful for’.

Over the years, Harrison has been released from jail only to reoffend.

In 1988, aged 19, Harrison was handed his first sentence – 18 months’ probation – for false pretences and stealing.

In 1991, he picked up two girls who were hitchhiking on the Pacific Highway near Coolangatta and drove them to a secluded track at Wooyung, a beach town near Byron Bay in northern NSW.

There he put string around one girl’s throat. He asked the other girl if she would like to hurt the first, who escaped after stabbing him with a pen knife.

His next offence involved Harrison picking up a 17-year-old hitchhiker known as ‘TJK’ in northern NSW.

He told TJK he would mutilate her so she couldn’t have children, threatened to throw her over a cliff, and dug a 1.5m grave in which he said he would bury her. 

He repeatedly made her perform sex acts as he ran a knife blade along her neck and scalp, cutting off strands of hair.

Harrison was previously sentenced to 16 years’ prison and released in December 2007 on an extended supervision order (ESO) for up to five years and ordered to wear a GPS tracking device.

But under supervision, he raped two women, used an eight-year-old girl to produce child pornography and kept a large collection of shocking videos and images.

He also illegally ran the Paradise Thai Massage brothel at Drummoyne in inner-west Sydney while wearing a satellite tracking anklet.

In prison files, Harrison was said to continue offendering because of his  ‘arousal to pain, suffering, humiliation, capture, asphyxia and control’.

In 2020, from inside his Goulburn jail cell, Harrison operated an online friendship page.

The page, which suggested interested ‘new friends’ contact him but did not mention his criminal history, featured his prison drawings for sale as ‘bespoke greeting cards for birthdays, Mothers and Fathers days, baby births and other special occasions’. 

Signed off with ‘TTFN (ta ta for now) Graham’, Harrison included a biography that mentioned his two sons and said: ‘not being there for (the younger one) (and to help mum) kills me, and I try to do all I can whenever I can.’