Remember Ronald Ryan

by Barry Dickins

  You shot me five times including the shells from the fellow guards who murdered me!

  Why does everyone want to murder me!

  I was dead drunken and every other officer was dead drunken

  We made home-made Scotch in the big still on the west tower out of indolence

  Out of boredom in other words

  I know you collect words like pardon

  That’s the only word will spring you like a trapped bird my old friend

  I came at you and you couldn’t even see me in that bright morning sunlight could you Ryan?

  You said there was too much glare to see a single thing that hot morning

  But witnesses said and testified and crucified you that you shot me

  And they claimed they beheld gun smoke arrive out of the breech

  But your thieved rifle did not produce gun smoke and it didn’t work anyway

  And my fellow drunken officers murdered their fellow officer

  By shooting me into a sheet of Jarlsberg

  I didn’t think that was in excellent taste

  And I gave myself extreme unction outside jail that hot morning

  I span round and round holed with big bullets like a Jarlsberg

  And with bubbling hot bitumen all over my nice kind face I fell down quite dead in fact

  Right in front of put-out tram travellers who looked worse than what I did

  And that Ronald is saying something dear boy

  You were shrewd to escape right on Christmas and showed no initiative

  Just as you shall show none getting hung in public tomorrow like a side of beef

  I managed to whisper ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ as my eyes went out And immediately up to heaven old Georgie Boy went!

  I am very sorry I shot you George and they have made me believe that

  That I knelt and went into a kangaroo shooter position because I used to do that for a quid in the scrub

  But I never did and you never did accept my apology for the rabid public believing I did you to death

  We used to play chess in different divisions until they shoved me here in D

  And we got on and so forth and so fifth as Ian Grindlay used to say

  Our Governor who was like the brother I didn’t get in the rough and tumble of life

  He respected me and told his wife Audrey I had potential and that’s correct I have potential indeed!

  But not in the new place they shoved me in

  The Condemned Cell which is no place for Catholics

  No place for forgiveness and mercifulness or the shade of George Hodson my only friend in D.

  You were so tanked when you came out and called out for me to give myself up

  Drinking all that grog with your fellow officers in hundred-degree heat Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie!

  Why am I talking so hard?

  Why don’t I give the soliloquy away—sell it to an op shop for ten cents or something!

  But Christ Almighty makes you speak directly to his father who writes poems in His spare time!

  He personally wrote the Genesis which is my favourite poem in the whole history of poetry!

  I talk in order to understand

  Understand what the prison is doing to me in about seventy minutes or so

  Assist me to make amends upon the end of a rope for a thing I didn’t do and they all know it

  No-one here wants me to hang but it is of course a fait accomplice

  The Government intend it and they need to win the April State election by a wider margin

  The Premier Henry Bolte doesn’t care one way or another

  But the others around him salivate for me and come unbidden just for me!

  The Cabinet intend it

  The Cabinet intend it

  The Cabinet intend it

  To win the vote they are intending to kill the thing they love

  Which is me the Irish-looking guy

  The square-jawed and the boxer’s nose and the fitness like a long-distance cyclist

  Like a man

  They need to kill the last living man

  To win the election they shall kill the last living no-hoper!

  Whatever.

  It could be much worse than much worse in fact it could be terrible naturally

  Imagine if my wife saw it and then my children were made to look at it happen to their daddy

  My three daughters made to look and not in their infantile visions

  But in actuality like the actual gibbet

  The actual gibbet road-tested to hang errant Catholics still on Earth!

  My head in a basket and my kids to see that come off their daddy!

  For something I did not ever do!

  I wept blood I did when they buried you dear George!

  Nobody but the Governor understood I loved you George!

  The guards loved you the hardest and they wept without stint for your spirit!

  But I shaved my head and bowed like a true supplicant to get my prayers to you in heaven, boy!

  And you told me you liked it when George I called you boy!

  Because you were just a boy like me and we were friends in our fashion dear boy of mine!

  I got out with a man I didn’t know or like

  He was Peter Walker but I didn’t know his name when we escaped that day

  I liked his brutality and suaveness which I naturally already possessed

  He was so strong he could pulverise bluestone boulders all of the long day inside

  That’s what we called jail

  Inside

  You are inside or having another baby outside

  Which is only fair and right in suburbia

  I lived in suburbia but I didn’t pay rent and had the phone on for free

  In Richmond

  It was the terrace you have when you don’t have a hovel

  15 Cotter Street it was

  My wife Dorothy was given it by the Mayor of Brighton

  Her father George

  I was happy to shift in and we had three kids there

  Licking the last bit of myra plum jam out of the big tin of it that lasted a year easily

  The coppers had the phone tapped

  It was rather trying to get through to my wife when I was out on a job

  Ringing in from the bush

  And hearing heavy senior sergeant breathing and constable gasping

  I was a natural-born thief

  Born in the Great Depression

  A bit before in Balranald in New South Wales actually

  My old man ran a bird sanctuary and charged innocent people a halfpenny a look at bowerbirds

  He was a bowerbird himself the old cheese

  And on the side he dragged the bloated corpses of drowned cows out of water channels

  Claiming someone had to do it

  I screamed weeping blood on a dirt floor of his vile shanty

  Even when I hanged in my last dreams I never saw him not once

  Because he declined to transmit a loving signal my way

  He celebrated the here and now

  I sing to liberate my hanging man

  I sing when I wake in the Condemned Cell

  With the vigil starting up I can hear them going into ‘Holy Night’ out there in Sydney Road

  All them mothers and fathers of Melbourne who assumed it was the Swinging Sixties

  Only too real now

  Only me to front the trapdoor which opens to remembrance

  Memories of seaside holidays so brief as to be phantoms of the working classes

  Memories of hot train rides to Brighton Beach that dissolved in sugar in my prison cup

  Why did I enter that warehouse armed in the first instance I wonder?

  Like all criminals you take that which isn’t yours but you make it yours by having it!

  Good Lord I’m going to laugh!

  This is the natural criminal’s pickle, his lament, surely to gold watches!

  Some moron drops hi
s watch at the races and it’s suddenly dangling on your own arm

  The freckled one with seventeen Timex watches winking away at the pawnbroker!

  I can hear them setting up down there

  I can hear the Christians singing each to each

  I do not think that they shall sing for me

  I slept badly last night for some obscure reason which eludes me now I am fully conscious

  I must have been dreaming Pip was with me again in D Division

  Pip my favourite daughter

  She goes to Auburn Central School and told me she hit her head on her locker

  I hit it so hard dear Daddy when the Phys Ed teacher he came along the glossy corridor

  I was listening intently to your execution on radio 3DB on my transistor radio

  And the Phys Ed guy he says what are you doing Pip banging your head all the time on your school locker?

  And I says that’s my father they’re hanging in Sydney Road jail out at windy Coburg!

  He is being murdered right out there condoned by the Roman Catholic Church!

  I thought they were just and merciful but they are pagans!

  And the teacher says he didn’t know I was Ryan’s daughter or Ryan’s anything!

  My mother she changed our name by deed poll when Dad got caught up in Sydney!

  So I wanted to listen intently to the radio when the teacher he came along like that!

  I told my other sisters and all they done was produce a light sort of humming noise like purest sorrow

  Sorrow uncut

  Sorrow manifest

  Sorrow like the sound the human throat makes when your dad is murdered in Coburg!

  My sisters they produced the same humming effect

  Similar to the effect of human disbelief and inhuman hanging of your daddy in Coburg!

  They hanged my father who was in love with us sisters and his poor demented wife Dorothy Ryan!

  All them journalists watching him shoot down through time passing through the trap

  Father John giving Daddy extreme unction under the trap a second later

  The mystical miracle herb chrysm

  Father knew from his training to run it into Daddy’s nostrils and under his lovely clown’s eyes

  His eyes that were vaudeville ones somehow and made us girls giggle all the time

  Except for when I stared into the school locker and listened to the transistor radio in it

  With my dad in it somehow or other like witchcraft in the evil airwaves

  Now I can see someone coming for me

  It is my friend Officer Ken Lennard

  I heard his mother died the other day and I told him how saddened I was about that

  And Ken said I think you have enough to worry about for one day Ronald Old Bean!

  He is looking kind at me now at ten to eight on the knocker

  And ties up my continuously untied black gymnasium runner shoelace

  Which is precisely like its owner

  A hopeless case and will not come to heel no matter what anyone in authority does

  He ties it up in preparation for my hanging at eight on the dot

  I should have RSVPed

  I don’t know what’s wrong with my decorum

  Ken is frigging around with a little gas primus stove and frying me slices of fried apple from his garden where he rents in Fawkner

  And two slices of black pudding

  Can you possibly believe it!

  And two fresh-cracked eggs definitely not prison issue

  Because unlike prison they ate golden yolk like the un-yoked sun in Sydney Road

  He squats next to me because he wants to be near someone he likes and trusts

  He says like a child, ‘Enjoy your last breakfast dear Ronald. God knows you’ll need something in you to go through what’s coming to you in a minute on them gallows!’

  I said he should hop into it

  I said you need it more than me dear boy of jail

  Let’s face it I’m for the lime pit.

  He ate the black pudding and cried for me as he did so

  Then the other big officers lifted me up, they were very rough with me dare I say they hated me

  They hated that which they didn’t know

  They hated me like the Romans hated Christ my redeemer

  Who stuffed up the Romans by forgiving them

  I’m not that good nor that altruistic or nice

  They were just so rough with me and tore off all my prison clothing which is rags not fit for rats

  They weighed me buck naked and shoved rough linen on my face it was a shirt to die for

  They put on me two thick pair of special-issue underpants to collect my blood in

  Because you lose your blood when they hang you

  Then when all that calamity was over I asked them if it was alright to put oil in my hair

  And they refused me thrice since I asked them thrice

  I wanted to look good when I went through the trap

  But they wouldn’t allow the hair oil which we at prison call the Herald

  Call it a play on words

  The Hair Oiled

  It’s not funny but you make up silly little epithets out here to stay sane

  Now they are weighing me again and entering all the details in a book, a register of hangings

  Now I am ready and Father John Brosnan is speaking to thin air like Everyman

  He is going to convert me back to a Catholic

  Which is what Governor Ian Grindlay is

  I asked for it and Ian said, ‘It’s like re-registering a car, Ronald, think of all the unnecessary paperwork you’re putting me to!’

  I nearly laughed at that joke and I know it was a bit rude of me not to do so

  I suppose I’m preoccupied

  I suppose I’m a mortal ghost in D Division

  I suppose everyone in the State hates me

  Except those in the street singing for me the holy songs of hope and more hope

  I know you were frightened when they shot you dear Georgie Porgie!

  The guards shot you and two of the poor frightened things committed suicide because they did it

  I want to pace and I want to sit

  Sit or pace which is it?

  See you again my mother in Balranald where the river made sense

  And the magpies knew my name and my friend’s nicknames by the un-minding river there at night

  Where I was taught how to cut rivergums down and cut them into railway sleepers

  And at night I rewarded my fellow toilers by cheating them at poker by the camp fire

  I’m bad

  And they deserve to murder a sinner like me for being bad

  And cheating drunkards in pubs of their hard-thieved income

  Father John likes me because I make him laugh and usually it’s only whiskey that does that

  He walked my old mum all the way up Bourke Street to visit Henry Bolte our Premier

  In an effort to spare the rope and me

  But they cancelled them both and they had to accept that as their due

  I never met a Liberal Premier I didn’t like

  Now it is now as opposed to modern history and modern punishment

  And I am strangely like a child as Patrick Tennison writes for the Herald

  I keep seeing our escape vehicle that Walker intellectually hot-wired

  We didn’t know each other but somehow got over the big wall together

  Trying to hopelessly flag down a lift in Sydney Road together

  Joined at the point of horror together like twin monsters

  And A Greek guy driving a Mr Whippy van trying hard to run us over

  And shots ringing out and then George pointing his waddy at me

  ‘Give it away Ryan you haven’t got a chance in hell!’

  Well Georgie now I’m there alright

  I’m sorry George can you ever really forgive me?

  I never even shot you
/>   I always liked you and wanted to have a beer with you in the next life if there is one

  Now the press are shown through and RSVP like gentlemen do in times like these

  And the television journalists from Channel Nine are dead drunk I can see that right away

  Kevin Sanders is tanked but trying to do shorthand of it but fumbles his notebook and biro

  The ABC are there so their descriptions ought to be elegant even eulogies or epitaphs

  Standing there the twelve honest men

  My disciples

  My redeemers

  But Christ is with them although standing a trifle apart for judgement reasons

  I have always loved Christ

  And I know in my cups He has always loved me even on the gallows

  Especially on them because He was always on them in the old days

  I bought a limousine off Kevin Dennis after we escaped Coburg

  A brand new limo in which to hit Sydney Town!

  Me and Peter hit Sydney big-time

  I stole an MG sports car the minute we lobbed

  As a sign of allegiance

  And we had ourselves photographed as bank robbers—Bonnie and Clyde!

  With a few local molls to give it panache

  Back in Melbourne the Government put out a big bounty of me

  The edict was shoot to kill

  Not that I cared about anything at that stage of the game

  The public thought I was the worst murderer who ever lived

  Which was the Police’s intention

  I lie here in the Condemned Cell and review all that’s gone before

  I lie here and am still capable of peace

  I lie here and beg Jesus Christ to pardon me because the cops won’t

  I lie here and remember the taste of thieved fruit as a boy in the bush

  I lie here and wish I’d never pinched a sultana grape let alone cash

  I lie here on the skinny bunk and wish you were here with me my mother

  I lie here and Christ Almighty allows that to happen to me

  I lie here and the restlessness is done

  I lie here and my mother is singing to me in the remarkable countryside of Balranald

  I lie here and she is cooking something delicious like scones from damper

  I lie here and it never happened

  I never killed anyone and we’re all in the old shack like nothing bad ever happened

  And the singing birds forgive me and George forgives me and my mother forgives me

  But the night itself never forgives me

  Last night never did and I dreamt George was alive and there was no trouble