On Thursday mornings, Andrea Durbach went shopping for the 25 prisoners, at a supermarket near the jail. Their weekly list of groceries included soap, soft drinks, hair product and matches. Boxes and boxes of matches.
It was 1989 and South Africa was still divided over the dying apartheid system. Four years earlier in Upington, a remote inland town in the country's north-west, bordering the Kalahari Desert, a black policeman was beaten to death and his body set alight after he fired on people protesting against racial segregation, injuring a small boy.
![Andrea Durbach with the model boat built for her by 25 convicted murderers in South Africa.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170612134812im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/6/r/0/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gw9xbp.png/1496243005286.jpg)
Twenty-two black men and three black women were found guilty of the murder under the controversial legal principle of "common purpose" – for being part of the crowd that threw stones at the policeman's home before he fled and was killed.
Among the Upington 25 was a nurse, an artist, an elderly railway worker and an illiterate grandmother. Durbach, a young solicitor in her first murder case, was trying to save them from a death sentence.
![Human rights lawyer Andrea Durbach and members of the Upington 25, on the day their murder convictions were quashed in 1991.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170612134812im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/a/1/z/x/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gw9xbp.png/1496243005286.jpg)
Each week, she also brought her clients different items they missed in prison. Between jokes about wanting girlfriends and litres of whisky, they always asked for matches. She wondered why they needed so many.
Then, one morning they entered the courtroom singing a freedom song and holding aloft a large model boat. It was made of some 14,000 burnt matchsticks stuck together to make a vessel four storeys high, with smoke stacks, propellers and port holes made from plastic drink bottles. Arranged on the decks were paper picnic tables and paddle pop stick banana lounges.
Attached to the masts was a banner bearing Durbach's name in bold blue ink. "I was standing at the bar table, ready to greet the judge. And they handed it down to me from the dock," she says. "I was blown away by it. It was such a beautiful and magnanimous gift."
The matchstick model was a gesture of their gratitude but something more. "It was a fantasy for them, a way of getting out of Upington, which is completely land-locked," she says. "The boat represented for them a sense of exiting the awful lives they led in apartheid South Africa. It was a manifestation of that desire for freedom."
That same boat is on show in Sydney for the exhibition A working model of the world, which explores the way such replicas are used to create and share knowledge. Also on show at UNSW Galleries are seashells shaped into the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge, a chronological collection of the city's tallest buildings since 1788 and a late artist's 3-D silver reproduction of her breast cancer tumour, modelled from an MRI scan.
"All human beings make models in order to understand the world better," says co-curator Lizzie Muller. "The human impulse to make models to get to grips with the world is as true for children working with Lego, as it is for people modelling climate change and economic policy."
Durbach, director of the Australian Human Rights Centre, at UNSW, says she encouraged her clients to make more models for an exhibition, to raise money for their children. They built cruise ships and paddle steamers, ocean liners and fishing trawlers. "In one, they put pictures of people's faces, including my own, in the portholes as passengers," she says.
"There was a chief matchstick model maker and instructors, to help others learn the art while they were in prison. They were very innovative and creative. And also I think they were going slightly mad in prison. This was a way of helping them make something with some purpose in mind."
Fourteen of the Upington 25 were sentenced to death in May 1989. That same year, Durbach's barrister in the case was assassinated. Soon after, she left South Africa for Australia, packing the model boat carefully in a shipping container bound for Sydney. But she continued working to free her clients.
"The injustice of it was so enormous. How can 25 people be convicted of the murder of one man? There was a couple in their 60s, including an arthritic domestic worker with heart disease. They could never have been guilty of the murder of any person."
In 1991, South Africa's highest court overturned 21 of the 25 murder convictions. The remaining convicts served brief prison terms.
One is now a solicitor. Another a social anthropologist. They're proud to see their craft on show in Sydney, Durbach says. Her matchstick boat usually sits on a bookshelf in her home. "I fret when it leaves home because it's so precious and so important," she says.
There is something almost transcendent about model making, she says. "It feels like such an ancient art because everything is so digitalised now. But models bring all these cultures together. This boat drew in a whole community around the making of it," she says.
"For me, it pays tribute to the Upington guys – it is their story and their work."
A working model of the world is at UNSW Galleries, Paddington, until July 22