Barry Dickins wrote the stage play Remember Ronald Ryan for the Playbox Theatre Company, which won the Louis Esson Prize for Drama at the Victorian Premier’s Awards in 1995 as well as the Amnesty Prize For Peace Through Art in the same year.
This is the way these true events have come to life in Barry Dickins’ imagination.
I dedicate Last Words to Mrs Jan Bush, one of Ronald Ryan’s daughters, who gave me such gruelling and heartrending stories I’ve never forgotten, and to the memory of her mother Dorothy, who is the last loving word upon Ronald.
Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Afterword
Extra afterword
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
Prologue
Last Words is the story of the political hanging of Ronald Ryan on 3 February 1967 at Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison. A hanging that occurred in spite of a vigil led by Christian groups, trade unionists, law students from Monash and a vast number of ordinary families. A hanging that was the first to occur in Australia after an absence of 20 years – and that thankfully remains our last.
Ronald Ryan was found guilty of murdering Officer George Hodson on 19 December 1965 when he escaped Pentridge in the company of a fellow prisoner called Peter Walker.
But was he guilty?
I say no. Officer Hodson was shot and killed on Sydney Road, but it wasn’t Ryan who pulled the trigger. It was two gaol officers, trying to stop him in his tracks from a tower, who unfortunately weren’t too accurate: two gaol officers who later killed themselves because they felt so much guilt about having killed the wrong man.
This is the story of what happens to a condemned man before he is hanged, as well as the trauma that is endured by his family. This is a story of political opportunism – of Premier Henry Bolte’s decision to go ahead with capital punishment in order to win the upcoming Victorian election on a law-and-order ticket.
This is the story of a miscarriage of justice.
Barry Leonard Dickins
April 2016
Chapter 1
IT WAS INDEED very difficult to believe the law – and I am one who has always loved the law – could go ahead and speed the hanging of Ronald Ryan on the third of February 1967. He was supposed to have slain a prison officer called George Hodson a couple of years earlier when, in the strange company of an escapee he didn’t know, he got over Pentridge Prison’s bluestone wall. According to witnesses, he shot Officer Hodson at point blank range with a rifle he pinched from another officer.
But what exactly did these witnesses witness?
The jury at Ronald Ryan’s murder trial was told that they saw rifle smoke come out of the breech of Ryan’s carbine. But it was the sort of carbine that made no smoke. The jury was intimidated to believe what witnesses swore they saw, even though what they saw simply didn’t exist. I suppose you could call that stress.
Ryan also defied logic with his choice of escapee: a Mr Peter Walker who, at the ripe old age of 78, today resides in a much newer gaol, having got done for ice trafficking and hydroponic marijuana freelance distribution. (He got all that going at the rear of a dilapidated post office in the bush, where he paid no rental monies and just did what he liked as recently as 2015.)
Ryan apparently chose Walker, a man he barely knew, to break out with because he was as strong as an ox. Physical strength would come in handy, of course, while hopping up a vast hot bluestone wall and when one is on the run. When they managed to make it onto Champ Street, which is still there in Coburg, on that baking hot day, and shots were fired from the tower above, witnesses heard Walker cry out ‘What’s your name again?’
At the time Ryan was holding George Hodson at bay with a rifle he’d recently thieved. Walker, meanwhile, had got a rusty old Simca Aronde going by hot-wiring it; he knew the old lark of twisting some silver foil off a Cherry Ripe wrapper and, after a bit of bullshit, the Simca Aronde roared into questionable life and Walker, still not knowing Ryan’s name, cried out ‘I’ve got it going!’
Which brings us to the two good officers in the tower above Champ Street. They fired down at Ryan, as two good officers would do, but unluckily their aim was bad. Both the bullets hit Hodson and ripped right through him. He had been pleading with a sweaty Ryan at the time to ‘Give it away!’ because ‘You haven’t got a chance’; last words that proved prophetic enough because Ronald Ryan, his entire life through, never really did have a chance.
People waiting for the Flinders Street tram at the Sydney Road tram stop on that sweltering day saw Officer Hodson reel back after being struck hard with two bullets coming from the direction of the tower. They saw him spin in a very rapid-fire way in a series of unsteady circles. As well as being obese, he was drunk from the Christmas booze-up that all the officers on the towers were engaged in. (That’s another reason why Ryan picked the nineteenth of December to get out on: he thought that most of the guards would be drunk. And he was right, they were right out of it.)
Officer Hodson, fatally shot and just about dead, swung that obese body around for the time, and crashed to his doom right in front of Flinders Street tram travellers. And, believe me when I tell you, they weren’t just shocked by the assassination and all the screaming of witnesses – and Walker savagely tooting the horn of the pinched Simca Aronde escape vehicle – and also the nauseating repeat horn sound of the Mr Whippy van as its driver tried to run over both prisoners. The other emotion experienced by those conservative tram travellers was annoyance at being made late.
Hell hath no fury like a righteous prig on public transport. Our kind will not be held up by anything, least of all a murder.
It was perfect and complete chaos at the tram stop 100 yards away, with people just doing their thing as they waited for a tram. They can be notoriously slow on the Coburg line, of course, and you need the patience of a saint to just stand there and philosophically fry in the sun and hope and pray that a city one turns up before you melt. But can you picture the scene as though you were also observing an overweight, boozed-up and blood-splattered prison officer as he swirled to his death on the molten tar? The day was over 107 degrees in the old imperial measurement of heat. The asphalt was so hot it was liquefying.
When I was researching a play on Ronald Ryan back in 1992, I was given a large, crystal-clear, black-and-white photo of Hodson as he lay hunched on the bubbling hot tar. And in a way I wish I hadn’t been, as it has haunted me ever since. It depicts his horrified expression: terrified eyes staring, prison-issue cap still on. A police photographer, instantaneously there on the scene, had snapped it for the record, then filed it away, and in the end a nice lady from Police Homicide gave it to me to assist me, and encourage me with my studies, for the sake of the stage play.
I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at that grisly photograph and wondered what it must have felt like to be poor George Hodson, who was a most friendly, genial sort of gentleman and used to play checkers with Ronald Ryan before the great escape.
It was an iconic escape but a bungled one too. They really oughtn’t to have done it. It was considered impossible to get through all the incredible obstacles, such as razor-sharp chicken wire and tetanus-embedded shards of filthy glass that were specially designed to snag the si
nning ankles of any would-be escaper. But Ryan and Walker did it. They scrambled like rats across what inmates called ‘No Man’s Land’.
It was also considered impossible to clamber up, over and down the great big blocks of bluestone; the kinds of boulders drunkards see as they hit the deck in gutters the city over and that kids enjoy drawing on with brilliant Picasso-like cartoon drawings and playing skippy on when it ceases to rain. But clamber over them the two escapees did – hoisting their sensationally fit bodies over a series of seemingly impenetrable 50-foot walls. Then scrambling across nasty, baffling and dangerous surfaces, employing such devices as thieved dressing gown cords tied up together.
And bits of dangerous wire secreted up their bottoms.
And bits of rag, tied and tortured into longer lengths.
And no escape plan, as such.
Ryan did have a list of so-called safe houses where the pair could hit the deck while things were hot – a terribly important list that sat scrunched beside the wire in his anus. But he lost that list, let’s not wonder how, and must have tried pretty hard to recall the street names and numbers he’d scribbled on it as he scrambled.
It is so hot people are fainting indiscriminately on the reeking asphalt.
But those still conscious hear shots ring out.
Ronald Ryan is still wearing his prison garb: crude pants and an even cruder shirt, with black arrows running up and down. What does he look like, standing near the corpse of Officer Hodson, when he whines to furious, putout motorists. ‘Give me a go! Give me a go, would you?’ he shouts. Meaning ‘How about a ride out of here? How about a lift?’
An Italian chap driving a Mr Whippy van drives straight at him to make a big name of himself but fortunately misses. Or perhaps unfortunately is a better word. The Mr Whippy man himself takes the stand during the first-degree murder trial and gives sworn evidence he saw smoke issue out of Ryan’s stolen carbine, even though it’s a type of gun that doesn’t make smoke.
Out of the crazy chaos comes a moment’s respite, as Walker picks him up then screeches away in the hot-wired Simca Aronde, which was parked near Pentridge Prison, and contained just a gallon of petrol. He violently does a U-turn and heads north up Bell Street, in the fool belief some of those safe houses are located in Preston, until Ryan screeches at him that they are heading in the wrong direction and ought to be travelling south. The pair end up in Flemington, near the gigantic flour mill, at a safe house near the foul creek. They fight over the steering wheel, arguing who should be driving, and police sirens are everywhere, all night long.
Few criminals in the rotten history of Coburg Gaol have gotten out. And I don’t just mean via No Man’s Land, I mean in any kind of a way, be it in disguise or through a tunnel or over or through a wall. Death is the easiest way out, your body delivered quick-smart to a cut-price mortuary. Proper funerals for criminals are out of the question and out of the budget of any criminal’s scrounging family of nobodies.
Premier Henry Bolte issues an edict that both prisoners are not to be fetched in alive.
Nothing like this has ever happened in Melbourne, least of all in the Swinging Sixties. This was not the Melbourne of the Melbourne Film Festival and Jean Shrimpton’s mini-skirt, the city where it was possible to read The Group by Mary McCarthy or groove along to the Seekers at the Myer Music Bowl in a crowd of 100,000 or more. It is a time when Bob Dylan’s defiant and poetic songs are ringing out the chimes of liberty and Lolita is being devoured on trams, a time when new theatres like the Pram Factory brim with new political resentments, and local literature booms in every which way.
The mood of Melbourne at the time of the escape is something like terminal terror. Nice, clean, honest citizens can clearly visualise both Walker and Ryan getting over the back fence and knocking off their pumpkins and ripe tomatoes and many a person swears to their local cops that they just saw Peter Walker getting stuck into a malted milk on Cuthbert Avenue, and he had that prisoner look alright and never paid for his milk. Or that they saw definitely Ronald Ryan purchasing a Cadillac off Kevin Dennis at his Regent car yard next to dusty, dangerous Reservoir where lots of blokes look a lot like Ryan and Walker, as it turns out. (Though they really did see Ronald Ryan buy a limo off Kevin Dennis in Regent. He paid in cash for it; cash he had thieved the day before from an ANZ branch.)
One afternoon a few days into the manhunt, Ryan and Walker traipsed into the boiling bar of Young and Jackson’s hotel in order to shout themselves a fair few foaming jars. And there in livid broad daylight, the pair of escaped criminals beheld themselves upon the telly overhead and through the roaring noise that bars make they charged one another’s pots of full-strength beer, despite the high likelihood of being shot dead. The fame is the adrenalin and the fear is the charge they require to tease the cops and be outlandish to spite them. But no one in the crowded pub realised who they were.
That same night, a clerk with the Gas and Fuel people got picked up by frantic fat cops on Princes Bridge. They beat the crap out of him alright and turfed him into the back of a police van just because he happened to look like Ronald Ryan. They knew he wasn’t Ryan but they still put the boots in, or at least that’s what some say.
At the end of that night, 19 December 1965, the two criminals on the run knocked hard on the door of a tiny cottage right near the ancient flour mill in Flemington. A couple let them in for the night, on the strict proviso they beat it in the new morning; but it must have been pretty frightening and ever so distressful for the couple, who heard nothing but heavy police sirens all through the sweaty night as they scoured Flemington and Tottenham and Footscray. And even from paddocks, they heard cops panting and running, and foaming-mouthed German shepherds swearing through long barred fangs the loathed words ‘Ryan’ and ‘Walker’. Their notorious names became a chant in no time, even though, in some small segments of society, they were seen as heroic. But for the straight and narrow devourer of the Holy Bible, the suburban honest lawn mower and conscientious hedge trimmer, they were murderers, and thou shalt not kill.
Melbourne was paranormal.
Chapter 2
SO WHO WAS this Ryan anyway?
He was a man who had been sentenced to nineteen years’ hard labour for being discovered armed in a warehouse. Since he was armed and had previous convictions it was chocolates for him, as the old saying goes: ‘chocolates’ meaning the absolute end of liberty or any chance of good behaviour bond. Nineteen years’ hard labour meant that each morning at dawn he had to confront big, bad blocks of bluestone boulders and have into them with a pick until they cracked somewhat and then fell apart and crumbled up on him and it was just so meaningless, that is all.
At first, he was of the view that the bashed blocks would be used for a footpath, or something else along practical lines. But it wasn’t long before officers leered at him and, in their cups, informed him that the pulverised blocks had no meaning, bar one. The only point to their perpetual bashing was the perpetual bashing of each prisoner. It was about breaking spirits, not big bits of stone.
It’s little wonder, then, that he decided to escape. He knew all of the gaol divisions (they are all called that, divisions: A Division and H Division and D Division), and all of the rodent nooks and foul boiler rooms that drove the clinical depression and high anxiety of prisoners. He knew each officer’s voice off by heart and he knew not to laugh because prisoners were not allowed to laugh, under punishment of whatever horror a prison officer felt like bestowing. He knew what it felt like to be pounded by a baton, or to have a telephone book thrust on your stomach and then punched for hours so no bruises are detected.
A decent chuckle would have to come at a premium in Pentridge Prison at Coburg, a place where red-headed sons of convicts got shot dead or hanged in front of their mates. Hundreds of children got hanged there too and now it’s apartments for the upwardly mobile; the whole mile of it has become brain-dead flats for mostly Chinese IT businessmen and their honest families with no concept of what a b
loodthirsty horror house it was not long back.
One wonders why it was that a non-violent person who was once the modest proprietor of a Camberwell fruit shop called Ryan’s Fruit Palace would swiftly blossom into a fully fledged and most dangerous armed robber. Ryan wasn’t a criminal and then he was, when he was sprung tip-toeing through a considerably rich warehouse armed with a shotgun and that is a fairly large slip for someone like him, the unluckiest petty criminal there ever was.
When he was young, he endured his alcoholic no-hoper father, a man who threw fits upon an uneven dirt floor. That was pretty much all he ever did, throw fits out the back of Balranald in the scrub. Though the other skill he had was to toil for Balranald Council, hauling in the corpses of koalas from the countryside’s horrid water channels, not to mention a few wallabies as well.
Pa Ryan also ran a rather desultory bird keep where impoverished families bored stupid in the grasp of the Great Depression could for a shilling watch birds until such time as they got sick of doing it. Finches, mostly. That sort of hopped about if you were fortunate. It was a cheap bird keep where Pa Ryan charged families in desperate requirement of distraction a small sum to see birds do their stuff and then an extra halfpenny each for a hot cup of tea.
As a boy, Ronald had to endure this hopeless role model, just watch this parasitical, egomaniacal bludger do fits on the dirt mound in the tin hut where his poor young mother Cecelia read by the light of the smouldering hay that was jammed into the tin vase on the wall.
Ryan’s three sisters formed a band and played country music together and made a coin that way in the Great Depression. In the war years, during what was called ‘The Black Out’, they lived at the Good Shepherd, a convent by the Yarra in Abbotsford. There could be no discernible light shining in Melbourne – and especially not in convents – so the Japanese invaders of our city would not be able to make the city out. Entire suburbs were perpetually invisible in a vast wall of blackness and life was pretty tough, alright, because the nuns demanded that the sisters labour in the laundries: vast boilers where billions of sheets got scrubbed and pillow cases de-flead. In short, it was horrifying there.
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