Brother Ronald was their sort-of-father back then, as the real dad eventually shot through on them. Leaving one’s impoverished wife and children for dead was the height of fashion back then in our brown land.
Ronald found a job toiling as a log-splitter in the scrub: he was basically straight back then and, would you believe it, honest. He used to turn up from time to time at the Good Shepherd convent and treat his starving sisters to an entire afternoon in Collins Street. They would all walk up and down and admire the incredible array of Parisian dresses and blouses and fancy shoes that Ronald swore he would shout them when his boat came in. He treated them to piping-hot scones and jam and clotted fresh cream in the snazzy tea rooms of Collins Street and they went to the cinema together where he thieved them an ice-cream. He was kind to them and he loved them and when they got back to their room, the sisters would get out their guitars and play Ronald the latest country songs such as ‘Cool Water’.
My comprehension of Ronald Ryan’s character lit up when I first met Father John Brosnan, who once toiled as the Roman Catholic priest at Coburg Pentridge Prison; not a bad gig for a fantastical storyteller like him. He told me once that Ryan believed he owned whatever he stared at. If it were a cigarette butt consigned to the drain then he owned it and it was his, full stop. If he beheld a guy’s pushbike leaning on a barber shop door, then sorry but that was his also. A hot pie almost in the gob of another man was his. It was Ryan’s hot pie because he saw it.
He stole people’s bathers at public swimming centres and did a few leisurely laps in them and then admired his reflection in the change room, where of course he helped himself to all the spare change he encountered in men’s pants whilst they swam. It is a delusion to assume a thing is yours if you see it, so he was delusional, but then he was probably influenced by his moronic father who charged poor people half a penny to stare at a bird.
I met a man once who had been in absolute raptures with Ryan in the early 1960s in a friendly pub in Lonsdale Street. Ryan shouted the fellow several pots of full-strength and never really had a single sip of his own ale, and by degrees got the guy very drunk. When they very cheerfully parted company outside that bar, the chap felt for his wallet in his back pocket and, very naturally, it was gone forever.
‘He made me feel special, that guy Ryan did, and gee he made me laugh that day. But it had been my payday and I had to go home stony broke and confess to my wife and kids I didn’t have my pay anymore because I met someone fascinating!’
Instead of being terribly scared of all the cops after them, the fugitives loved all of the attention since they had both been bored stupid ‘inside’. Anything fantastical is better than everything abysmal.
That first night they crashed at that safe house in Flemington, it wasn’t as safe as it appeared. The two who took them in had a right old barney over being true to the criminal code or singing on them – informing, it means – and the guy wanted very much to go after the vast reward money. But the woman had had a fling once with Ronald and still had a soft spot for him, so, despite the shrieking and the wailing of the police sirens that long night, she saw to them in the ramshackle spare room and handed them some toasted Kraft cheese sandwiches with fresh chopped tomatoes on top. She handed the food to the bone-white escapees and did they hoe into them, or what? I’ll say they did!
Imagine Melbourne early the next morning, would you, with hundreds of screaming police cars pounding along every thoroughfare, and cops and special agents knocking on everyone’s door to check if there’s been a sighting. Even a vague abstract sighting, even a glimpse of their faces would do, but there was nothing of any kind. The newspapers had a field day dramatising the escape and the staff artists laughed a lot as they sketched Ronald’s so-Irish face. The Herald ran a red-hot story declaring that only a mad dog like Ryan would bash a harmless and courageous Salvation Army officer on their way out of Pentridge Prison; but the truth is that Brigadier Hewitt just somehow got in the way of Ryan and Walker as they escaped and somehow the stolen rifle of Ryan connected with Brigadier Hewitt’s jaw and he was concussed but it was not ever deliberate.
It was the conservative media that painted ever so blackly the missing and truer characters of the two men on the run. The whole lot of them chatted nonstop about how the murderers were eating custard pies in pleasant pastry rooms with nutmeg upon their eyebrows, or thieving sweet-smelling plums from suburban back gardens.
But Ryan and Walker had more in mind. One quiet day on the run just before New Year’s Day 1965, as Ronald chomped a stolen, lovely, piping hot, extra-large sausage roll with plenty of dead horse, he said, ‘I know a few soft banks where it is just simply a pushover to rid them of something like a hundred thousand pounds because their hearts are not in the capitalist system any more. They have studied Karl Marx’s manifesto and buy it hook, line and sinker. We should drop in on them today and unburden them early.’
Walker grabs a few big open Ansett and ANA airline bags and, together, they both step inside.
Ryan shakes a rifle at a bank teller. She’s just a teenager at the grille and her teeth are outstandingly rattling at the sight of the big rifle. She is scared, very scared, of those demented eyes of his; killer’s eyes, as the Herald says, and what the Herald says, goes.
‘Things are a bit different today, everyone. Just relax and fill up my mate’s bags!’
And the staff just about soil themselves as they place fresh notes of every denomination into every bag they can see. Though to Ryan’s incredulity, a woman in the bank goes the pash and plants a big, sloppy kiss right on his protesting lips as he pulls well away.
‘You give life!’ she yells to the stupefaction of everyone. Ryan wipes his rouged gob with a fresh handkerchief and they tear out.
Ryan and Walker are by now on everyone’s lips in Victoria, as articles come out in the papers reporting their latest outrages. A gigantic heat billows and bellows and, since newspapers are always depressing, it is in their readers’ interests to be similarly down in the dumps. The police have no idea where they are and in fact they are everywhere; it’s more a case of finding where they aren’t. People who have the ill luck to look a bit like them are hauled in and severely interviewed as to their whereabouts but the authorities draw a blank at every chance. Ryan has bought $50 worth of bodgie number plates and the two stick a new one on whatever thieved bomb vehicle they happen to be in at the time. It shouldn’t work, but it does. The two appear charmed.
They are also rich on the proceeds of the ANZ job in Ormond. With thousands of lovely bank notes on their persons, they could have a shop whenever they felt like it; even though it was shoot-to-kill, they had nothing to lose and must have from time to time wondered what was going on in Pentridge whilst they were on the loose. They wouldn’t have missed the old hellhole, not by a long chalk, but they must have recalled their fellow convicts and thought of the few they liked, including the professor guy, as he was called.
He was the one who Ronald first intended to break out with. The professor guy had the contacts and the escape plan but had at the last minute bailed out.
Walker pops into a chemist shop in a suburb and purchases hair dye and disguises his hair blond and begins to try and talk differently, which sort of works, and Ronald bets on sure things in TAB shops in Reservoir. They are all over the place and decide in the end to go to a party in St Kilda as well. The party is at the home of Christina Aitkin, a good-time girl, so they motor down there and Ronald dances the twist in his unmistakable prison-issue crew cut, with unhealed scars on the back of his head.
The party is loud and fun, with the rugs and carpets pulled up so folks can let their hair right down, and nobody recognises the two escapees. Or if they do, they don’t show it. There are filmmakers there, and documentary makers, and Greek taxi drivers, and crisps and salted peanuts in bowls. Relaxed groovers cavort away and prostitutes put on Pat Boone albums. There is dope of every kind and Carnaby Street fashion of every sort.
After a
while, at around one in the morning, they completely run out of drink and smokes and potato crisps and matches. Christina wants the good times to continue, so she asks Walker to go to a sly grog shop in Albert Park to pick some more up for her and gives him 200 bucks and a fairly big wink.
Walker has been chatting with a tow truck driver called Arthur Henderson who has no idea who he is, or who Ryan is. So Henderson goes downstairs to his tow truck parked out the front of the turn and pats his pockets for his keys.
‘Do I know you?’ he says to Walker. ‘Because you look familiar to me. Should I perhaps know your mate, as he seems really familiar to me?’
And Walker just says something to the effect that they need more drink and it is urgent to help our dear Christina, so they head to the sly grog shop on Beaconsfield Parade. Henderson goes in with Walker at that late hour and they purchase some big boxes of scotch and Coke and beers and crisps and many packets of all sorts of smokes and matches and stack them on the back of the tow truck together near a dark old public toilet right on the beach where dim wavelets roll in like warnings.
Both chaps have had quite a lot of alcohol to imbibe and Henderson is getting on Walker’s wick a bit, asking far too many questions. Walker is joking and trying to distract the line of drunken questioning and talking about anything but who they are. All he says about his friend Ryan is that he’s a country fellow – a shearer, something like that – but Henderson, as he stands together with Walker on the gigantic dirty big concrete platform, pissing, just won’t let the matter rest.
He says something like ‘He’s Ronald Ryan, that mate of yours back at Christina’s, and you are his mate, aren’t you? You’re that Peter Walker character aren’t you, you filthy dirty jailbird. You just got over the wall, didn’t you? You’re the matinee idol, aren’t you?’
And Walker laughs and tries to calm him down a trifle, telling Henderson he is confused.
As they attempt to exit the awful toilet, Henderson says ‘I’ve got a brand new two-way radio on my rig and we can cash him in, that friend of yours, to the cops because his neck is worth 10,000 bucks. We can go half each, mate!’
Henderson is far drunker than Walker and after a few more moments of shillyshallying, he sits on the toilet and has a fag. Trying hard to be less drunk, he keeps on waving at Walker with his glimmering truck ignition keys, trying to tempt him to think his offer through.
Walker shoots him right through his brain.
He leaves Henderson on the bowl with blood everywhere.
Taking some of the scotch and beer back to Christina’s, he gives her the change and says to Ronald, who is coming on to a girl on the sofa at the time, ‘You’ve done one. I’ve done one.’ The girl hasn’t the foggiest what Walker is saying but Ronald does and whispers ‘Boys will be boys’ and pours Peter a scotch from the big new bottle. Someone passes him a joint, which he takes a luxuriant long toke on, and then passes to Walker, who doesn’t know how to smoke it.
They are now beyond the pale and they know it. There can be no hope for them after the assassination of the tow truck driver in the Middle Park toilet, icy cool Walker having left him there with his snazzy two-way radio and stupid tow truck. The papers come out the next morning with the atrocious news that the brutal shooting in Middle Park is linked to the infamous escapees who are holding the law up to perfect ridicule. If it was Walker and Ryan, that is, but the opinion writers say that it must be. Who else could it be with mayhem perfected like that?
They are now at the top of their form, their trade, their profession. In motels and private guest houses down Sandringham way, they laugh on their beds as they view the newspapers and TV news shows that depict them as mad dogs, or worse.
‘He’s nothing like you!’ chuckles Walker at an absurdly retouched portrait of Ryan with an entirely new brand of black bushy eyebrows and barred fangs drooling blood all about.
‘There’s no dignity, is there?’ sniggers Ronald as he rolls another joint on the end of his motel bed and smiles wickedly at one of the stuffed-full Ansett bags containing thousands of quid. They are planning a trip up to Sydney in the limo they purchased directly from Kevin Dennis himself but for the moment they chuckle at their images on the motel television set and dine out at pubs with pictures of themselves everywhere.
They chew delicious steak, cooked ever so differently from the sludge dished up at Pentridge, and they chuckle again at the remembrance of all that blackened burnt porridge that got served up at six in the morning before each day’s bashing of bluestone. Ryan rubs soft and comforting ointment into his sore calluses.
In the new morning, he shaves his face and prepares for Sydney. They feel a need to get away from it all, what with thousands of cop cars after them and many a fellow criminal desperate to dob them in. They have never trusted anyone before, so why start now? They put on impressively expensive-looking sunglasses and Ryan disguises himself as a bookie at some imaginary racetrack, complete with binoculars round his thick leathery neck. He looks good in a tweed jacket, tweed pants and brilliant white business shirt, not to mention that nice bulbous gent’s tie with the Windsor knot.
Walker is disguised as Ryan’s chauffeur and looks the part, with peroxided hair and eyebrows to match and a pretty nice jacket on his wiry body.
They motor in the most laid-back fashion towards the beginning of the Hume Highway in Broadmeadows. Whether or not Ryan is guilty of murder, he is certainly guilty of avarice: money, tons and tons of it, has gone to what’s left of his head. What his incredibly young family thinks of him, he doesn’t really care, because clearly, this is the life. All he has to do is rob banks.
His family lives in the hope that he will give himself up. They pray for him to arrive at his lost senses and they light pretty candles and remember him as kind. Dorothy, his wife, is out of her mind with worry that her relatively young husband shall be shot dead by police. But she tries to put a good face on it: getting the kids to school on time and cutting their white bread sandwiches properly and adding cut ham and tomato. Lemon cordial goes into the girls’ cordial flasks too, even though the police are hounding her all the time and the phone is tapped and her nerves are packing up at a remarkable rate. Ronald writes to her a fair bit, posting her his letters from suburban post offices.
Why are they so cocksure? No one really knows. After getting onto the Hume Highway at the big Ford car factory and making sure that their tank’s full of juice, they amble up the highway in no particular hurry, even though there are swarms of border patrols and police pursuit vehicles everywhere. The strange luck is with them and they never once get pulled up, let alone asked who they are.
At Albury, however, they do get picked up. But the country cops believe Walker when he says he’s a chauffeur and they also believe Ryan when he says he’s a professional punter, heading for the Rose Hill racetrack in Sydney. With field glasses round his neck, he looks the part anyway and the cops let them go.
It is astonishing that cops and other authorities didn’t recognise them in all those small country towns, but they didn’t and didn’t again.
It seems a blessing, or at least a reward for all the beatings they’ve received in the various dark, dangerous gaol divisions they’ve known. Like H Division, where choking is a popular nightly reward for sleepless jailbirds laying on their hard bunks, or where guards bash up young inmates for attempting to sing, or going to the toilet in the middle of the night. Walker and Ryan were regularly roughed up for any old reason and when their photos were taken, the reason their faces displayed hate was because hate had been put right in to them. With such extremely long sentences, they had nothing to lose but their lives.
Chapter 3
IT IS AN improvised escape, with suspicion at every door and potential betrayal behind every window, but at least now they are out of heatwave Melbourne, where Ronald once ran his miserable fruit shop. He used to travel by tram to Camberwell, where every other fruiterer was Maltese, and thieve mould-infested fruit off the flea-infested foo
tpaths. He would stuff his bag full of grapefruit and melons, write the words ‘Not Bad!’ on mangoes, and wait for the comfy middle-class shoppers to come to Ryan’s Fruit Palace.
His daughter Pip told me once that her dad would have been perfectly content to just spend his life wandering around his eccentric fruit emporium readjusting sprouts here, grapes there and spuds over there, and fiddling with the scales and weights. But often as not, he simply couldn’t help himself, and rigged those scales so that they depicted an incorrect weight whenever the pumpkins went on them.
Pip said Ronald liked to wander round in the altogether if it were warmish and even whistle, if he was in the mood. He was a marvellous whistler, an uncanny warbler, and, as soon as customers turned up in his crooked old fruit shop, he had them terribly amused and relaxed whilst he sold them bad figs.
His wife polished the bright green Granny Smith apples till they positively gleamed, and stacked them in great, grand canyons. She was gifted at stacking the bananas too and making enchanting small talk with hesitant purchasers of silverbeet.
Ronald and Dorothy were quite a team. She was from the upper classes of Hawthorn, where her dad was the mayor, as well as running a brisk business building wooden hearses. Young Dorothy was swept right off her feet by a young chap with nothing in his pocket but an overdraft in sheer confidence. They were never closer than when rigging the vegetable and fresh fruit scales at Ryan’s Fruit Palace in Camberwell.
Walker’s background is more shrouded in mystery. The product of plenty of home abuse, and perpetual back-handers from parents in England, he arrived in Australia as unloved as breakfast at Pentridge. Like Ryan, he was keen on instantaneous riches, especially hot roast spuds. He liked to pinch them from rotisseries whenever he went in search of something for nothing, such as nice food or a fascinating new shirt. He thieved a plastic comb a day in order to do his hair just like Elvis and in his way he became his own turn-on; his own invented pin-up boy. Many a prison guard I chatted with displayed a degree of pity or even sympathy for Ronald Ryan and some officers even liked him. But those same guards had nothing but contempt for Walker – and they weren’t the only ones.
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