Only two paces up and three paces across, the cell is, and the screws can see right into it. He is alone and never alone – deprived of company, but denied solitude – though at least now he can’t do any more damage. He can pace, or sit, or squat, or talk aloud, his only audience what is left of himself; but it is probable that he receives transmissions of his romantic courtship and fairytale honeymoon in his brain to spite the grim awfulness of his tomb of a room. Being a prisoner is no fun, and fun is still what he is after; fun is what makes the world go around.
So he sullenly paces and willfully misremembers his marriage and the way he gave in to the High Church of England family that Dorothy belonged to down in leafy privileged Hawthorn. It left his Catholic mother Cecelia dry-mouthed, aghast that he would turn his back on a God who was more or less the only thing she had ever believed in.
He probably thinks of things like the blossom in Dorothy’s hair and the way his uncle Wingy shouted him a nice new suit in which to be married at the altar. He probably sees things like Dorothy’s stunning white silken dress and the almond decorations in her white veil. Her red-faced and unhappy rich parents trying to put on a happy face. The friendly guests slapping him on his shoulders. The remarkable mouth-watering catering and the almost frozen Champagne and the giddying toasts to their marriage and their future bliss and future happiness. He probably even remembers some brilliant play of sunshine on the surface of the lake, whether or not there was a lake there at all.
And then comes the clanging and clanking of the ironclad gaol door. A barked command and a baton over his shoulder for being temporarily distracted by that dream of his wedding day; something that he thought would never happen when he slept at the West Footscray boarding house with all the other losers snoring away, in desperate need of attention for adenoids.
Hodson and Henderson have had their funeral services by now, and been screamed and wept over by their loved ones. Flowers, whether posh or low-grade, have long ago been placed on their graves. Now they are completely vanished. One second they are here and accounted for, and then a deed of atrocious violence occurs and they’re gone. Bitter memories and loving recollections replace the husband of the wife now in black widow’s weeds and the children are filled with hate for the assassins. Ronald remembers George Hodson as well and still sees him clear as a bell.
The Melbourne conservative press are applying the big bellows of outrage on the fires of opinion and the conservative radio stations are adding gallons of fuel. The Victorian Liberal Party are on notice that, if they want to retain office, they had better smarten up their footwork and get their skates on. There can be no more prison guards shot dead by runaway timber-cutters. The new election will be fought on law and order issues, of that there can be no doubt.
And there’s no shortage of law and order at Pentridge. The grim-countenanced guards crack right down on long-term inmates, particularly the ones with psychosis. But there can be no secret act put in place to stop criminals getting out because that is what criminals do. One particularly brazen escape, halfway through 1966, involved three inmates secreting themselves in the false bottom of a prison van using welding gear. No one could possibly detect them in the bottom of that van and when it took off down Champ Street to go to Moreland, they must have tried hard not to snigger. It was just so easy and simple until the welding broke off and they fell on the road as plain as day. They were severely caned for that outrage and given extra time tacked onto their already long sentences.
But other criminals admired their ingenuity and copied it.
The moral point to make here is that, no matter how appallingly criminals behave, the prisons punish them worse. Criminals require education, not a baton on the backside, and they require trust not unimaginable torture. In 1966, it was common for prisoners to be flogged with canes or whips, while other inmates were forced to watch on. How does this help? It doesn’t at all. It only hinders progress.
Governor Grindlay is a good and progressive person, and a gifted representative of the law. But he is having tremendous difficulty handling the rising wrath of his own staff of officers who just about want to skin Ronald for what he did to George. They don’t want to hear that he didn’t shoot their brother officer, even if two officers have committed suicide in the certain knowledge they both shot him from the towers. Not even that gives them pause and they bay for Ronald’s gore. We want revenge for poor old George they bay, cry and moan.
It is possible the guards could riot, they’re human are they not? Has something like a gaol strike ever happened before?
Maybe.
The heat even during winter in gaol is unendurable, particularly when a criminal is made to stoke the boiler for two hours or more, and now Ronald’s murder trial looms like a beacon. There can be no possible thought other than that, if it goes badly for him, then his neck will be deftly broken. It is time for him to repent for what he’s done, even though he’s in such a panicky state he can’t really remember whether or not he actually did it anyway.
His wife Dorothy writes, but doesn’t bother to visit, and he does not take this too well. He writes to her at her Cotter Street cottage, telling her she’s got too hard, but she is resolute – certainly no pushover. If he did really shoot the officer, after all, how on earth can he call her hardhearted?
She quarrels with her dominant and interfering wealthy mother, who rings her just about every day with instructions to divorce Ronald. The cops tapping the phone of course laugh their heads off as they listen to the headstrong, exhausted daughter trying to conquer the unconquerable: a mother who seems more like a tyrant.
But they also seem to enjoy coming around to her simple cottage and insulting her and knocking things around. During one visit, they turn her opportunity-shop fridge upside down searching for thieved pearls snap-f rozen inside great big ice blocks. This is an old criminal lark, and not a bad idea if it works out, but poor whimpering sleepless Dorothy screams when they do it and shrieks and blubbers even more intensely when one of the police officers accuses her of cheap morals. He demands to know why the floors are not scrubbed and why she’s not wearing a bra.
The cops hassle her all the time. And when she’s not there, they leave cards under her much-scuffed front door to show they’ve been dropping over on the off-chance.
Her mother accuses her of marrying beneath her and falling for scum, and that could all well be perfectly true. But she completely fell in love with this utterly charming shaman and delightful raconteur who can freely quote from David Copperfield. And just how much better is he with all that life in him than her usual yacht club boyfriends and their obsession with status.
Ryan is obsessed with status too, it is true, but it is other people’s status he enjoys. Also their cars, if he can hot-wire them.
Chapter 7
IT IS DIFFICULT, 50 years on from the execution of 3 February 1967, to imagine what Pentridge must have been like at the time. Theories of redemption and retribution and innocence or guilt just dissolve into the thousands of boulders and thick, rusty bars that collectively make up a prison so hateful and ugly that it practically devours an entire suburb. If you go there today, what you discover is thousands of one- and two-bedroom flats that are fashionably called ‘studios’ or ‘apartments’. The whole gaol has become Parisian in theme but the old hellhole is there, just the same.
The funny aspect of that is that the promoters of Pentridge Apartments have exploited the razor wire avantgarde look and added more grisliness for good measure. The place has blossomed into a highly marketable miasma of lawn sprinklers pattering away and school buses picking up kids.
Pentridge began in the 1860s when convicts got down on their skinny hands and knees – and at the point of whips and clubs, if they weren’t fast enough. The creatures were made to build their own gaol and to make it resemble purgatory: the theme was rotting, not yachting. The design was influenced by claustrophobia and fever and doing exactly as you were instructed in order to be of use in soci
ety. They had no say about a single thing, least of all how they rested, after a twelve-hour stretch of bluestone sawing and wall-making. The idea was to break you, so you reformed – though there were obviously other ways to do that as well. Though the slight problem with the method was death, of course, because people tend to die when they get strung up for a day or savagely beaten by brutal guards.
The concept was to design a shithole so terrible that no convict in his right brain would ever wish to return there. A place of rats and black, crawly spiders; of burnt porridge and painful whips. A place where the officers clubbed you and cuffed you and kicked you and insulted you, not just at any hour of the day but throughout the night. Thousands of bodies are still buried out there, beneath the trendy one- and two-bedroom flats that are highly desirable, the hoardings assure, despite (or perhaps even because of ) abominations past.
Also there was the shame: the extreme, intense guilt and backbreaking sorriness of having to admit that you had ever been ‘in’. It was really hard, when you got out of prison in the 1960s, to confess that you had been ‘inside’. You never got anywhere admitting that sort of thing, and very often you didn’t even have to. If you went for any sort of a job interview, the employer could generally see within a second or two that you’d been ‘inside’, because of the ‘gaol whine’ in your moaning voice. You certainly didn’t present very well.
My memory of visiting friends in Pentridge is vivid and wrenching. You notice too many aspects of them in your extremely brief time there. You have to look at them through thick glass and at first they’re unrecognisable, their old familiar eyes not so much cowed as just colourless. The light’s a bit too bright, and you can barely hear them, and it is pretty hard to know what to say. They look so beaten and ashamed.
The experience of Pentridge is the annihilation of joking and the instant installment of dread. Everything is both too large and far too microscopically small and hope is hammered into froth and fear from the very first appointment with your tormentor (as opposed to mentor).
The reason you are there, the guest of the place, can range from pinching a pie to hitting your wife, because she found fault with your aftershave. A friend of mine was once imprisoned for four weeks in the early 1970s for stealing one Mintie from a Coles in Brunswick. What would they have done to him if he’d pinched a whole packet?
When I picked him up at the old Champ Street reception area, I didn’t quite recognise him as he had been shaved completely bald – and this was a man who used to have an afro. It wasn’t a first offence, that theft of one single solitary Mintie, but it did seem a bit much to give him a month.
Many a respectable husband has found himself an unexpected guest at Pentridge for an offence that today would seem simply trivial. Far too trivial, in any way, to warrant such a speedy removal from the niceness and luxuries of home only to have to languish with hardened jailbirds in the company of bored and restless officers who are so keen on spontaneous cruelty. Who see such cruelty as perfectly Christian, even though it isn’t, for being beaten senseless did Christ no good either.
To be there in the 1950s and the 1960s was to experience such savagery (thinned appropriately with boredom and helplessness) that it would do your head right in. And after a decent taste of it you’d never be quite the same.
It is uninteresting to be ‘inside’ and many a jailbird becomes so cramped and claustrophobic and depressed and depressing it is all they can do to hang in there. There is no credit, only shame, in having gone through it, only to come out even worse, and even more murderous in intent and damaged psychology.
There once was a very popular misdemeanour called ‘Loitering with Intent to Commit a Felony’ which meant that you, as a potential prisoner of Coburg, possessed a mood or quality of awfulness that made your bearing besmirched and your nose evil or your eyes too close together. In short, you looked like you desperately required a big go of the whip. Police saw you leaning like a loser on a barber’s window and they ran you out to Pentridge to take the grin off your face, and so begin your recovery program. No one grins at Pentridge Prison for very long and the sourness and gloom last a lifetime.
We read from day to day of notorious crimes perpetrated in the identical Melbourne we grew up in maybe at the time of the Ryan execution in 1967 but the crimes today seem horrendous, rather than simply the result of bad luck. Or at least, that’s how they tend to strike me.
The other day, for example, I read about a lawyer murdered in cold blood by the Melbourne Mafia in Brunswick and in the newspaper I studied a coloured photograph of the slain body in a laneway. The next thing you’re doing is gobbling down a custard tart and telling everybody how bored you are.
A father hurls his daughter from the Westgate Bridge and no one is surprised anymore, least of all the father. The jaded reader thinks temporarily it’s shocking but a second later is raving away at a morning meeting and thinking of the pick-up after school of the kids.
We all know that crime is shocking, but that doesn’t mean we are often shocked. The train passenger taking a look at the daily news is not appalled so much as bemused when casually confronted by yet another spilling of blood and still more cruel and unusual methods of harm.
In the end, I think that the reading public wearies of shocking news and so instead turns to leisure like cartoons and comic strips, although even they can be ghastlier than so-called reality.
But towards the close of the year of 1966, citizens who kept up with the news closely follow the dramatic murder trials of Ryan and Walker. Needless to say, Ryan is sentenced to death and Walker to another nineteen years for the manslaughter of Arthur Henderson. The majority of citizens think that Walker should die too, of course, because of the incredibly ruthless method of disposal he employed upon the man in the toilet; and many people figure that the authorities are planning to hang the wrong fellow.
Ryan’s barrister, Philip Opas, unsuccessfully seeks to influence the jury’s opinions, speaking eloquently about the trajectory of the bullets that slew officer Hodson. He points out that they simply had to have travelled downwards, according to all forensic and pathological examination of the wounds. It was simply not possible for Ryan to have fired at that trajectory, as he was on the ground looking directly at Hodson.
But all Opas says is rejected.
The popular opinion of the day is that, because Ryan has slain a figure of authority, he must pay the ultimate penalty. Walker, on the other hand, has only slain a civilian, so he must do a lengthy term of imprisonment and that is that. The government has its way, no matter what new evidence turns up, and no matter how eloquently various community leaders speak out against the forthcoming execution.
Among the most outspoken is Barry Jones, a former television quiz champion on a program called Pick a Box, as well as the secretary of the Anti-Hanging Committee. He writes passionately against the hanging in his book And the Penalty Is Death, as well as speaking out through the media. But even he must feel like a voice in the wilderness: the Government of Victoria cannot and absolutely will not budge.
There is much debate, particularly in the various churches of our country, about whether execution of any kind is just as bad as any private foul deed. Many outspoken ministers get up before their congregations and just about lift the leadlight roofs right off with their outraged comments about human life, and its sacredness under God. Passionate parsons write feverishly on their kitchen tables or dining room desks and throw themselves heart and soul into the fight to save Ronald.
His mother is old and very tiny (the spit of him, actually), and she meets with Father John Brosnan out at Pentridge Prison to see what can be done for her doomed son.
But not a lot can be achieved, other than prayers, and all through the yearning year of 1966, there never have been so many vigils. Ronald meets Father John too and likes him on the spot: he identifies with his charismatic personality, which is the never-say-die kind that prefers kindness to brutality. Ronald senses a similar fighting st
ance – a similarly defiant spirit, you may say – and he looks forward to their strictly limited conversations as he sits in his cell.
Ronald is trying with all his might to smite the evil inside him and resurrect the old innocence that once lay in his heart. Life was good lots of times when he was young and he remembers meeting Governor Grindlay back at the Bendigo Training Prison all those years ago when he got done for the large theft of cigarettes in a pinched van even though he hardly smoked. ‘That was a mistake!’ he murmurs to himself just as Father comes to the door of his tiny box of a cell to see how he is coming along. Ronald is clinically depressed and suffering from anxiety – and who in his black gym shoes would not be?
It is very calming and healing when someone enters his unvisited cell to discuss what might be achieved before it’s much too late. It is only August and the execution is not listed until February: he is hanging in there, so to speak.
And it is especially comforting and calming when the delightful and intellectual Catholic priest enters his cubicle. Whenever he does, Ronald tries hard to tidy up the screwed-up lavatory paper and rinse the excreta off his tin-bucket toilet. He wishes he could wear a better T-shirt, or something perhaps more fashionable, but he cannot do a single thing about his crummy appearance. So he just combs his lovely glossy black hair with his only thing of niceness: his sixpenny tortoiseshell comb.
He tries hard to produce his famed grin – he has always been able to pull that out of his magic box of a body in times of need, and this is just such a time, is it not? Father walks in and extends his big brawny right forearm, and they sit together all through the meagre allotted time. Father assures Ronald that things are not so black as they appear and that Ronald shall have a good fighting chance, given all the good lawyers appearing for him, and the fact that the press is showing small signs of sympathy. Even the terrible but terribly popular radio station 3AW is broadcasting many passionate transmissions to the public on a human rights level.
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