Philip Opas sits in his small office in chambers and frets and sweats about the outcome for the client he drew. He is aware that he is probably just about as spent as his client, as he tries hard to catch up with all the newspapers and memos and piece of courtroom gossip and innuendo. His barrister and solicitor colleagues observe that beaten look: that baffled and not-with-it appearance that belies the always high-octane Opas.
The puff has gone out of him due to the effort of getting to London and the even-worse effect of being sent back. All those stalled flights, cancelled trains and buses to nowhere to match the myriad other misunderstandings that just about blew his mind.
He seems and is dithery and extremely unwell, as if he has developed a certain paranoia about justice not seeming all that possible anymore. He has always told and seen the truth in every single situation and has never compromised with it, and nor would he falter now. But something is up with him.
He drew the brief of a condemned chap and he liked him after their very brief conversation out at gaol and the liking was genuine and spontaneous. There was something childlike and enigmatic about Ryan; he seemed innocent, and probably was.
Chapter 9
IN THE LEAD-UP to Christmas of 1966, Melbourne people, like all people the whole earth over, want to forget their worries. And from afar, they do seem quite forgettable. They’re to do with money, mostly, and the health of their families. And the rising costs of rental and car registration and going to the doctor and the hospital, if someone in the family’s unwell. For most people, Christmas is a chance for healing and frivolousness and the end of distressful situations, such as the one Ronald is facing every single second of the day and of course all night long in his sweaty, cramped cell.
Dorothy writes once more to Ronald ‘inside’ and he has the ignominious task of perusing her messy and hurried handwriting style and trying hard to nut out exactly what she is saying. As he cranes his tired neck over those ink-spattered pages, he eventually discerns that she has received his signed copy of her divorce papers and is now going out with a new man, a Greek guy she fancies. He further reads that she has changed her married name by deed poll to her new chap’s name and she isn’t Mrs Ryan any longer.
He cries buckets in his midnight cell, hiding his eyes in his brawny arms and shaking harder than he thought anybody could. Despite the grief and shock of divorce, he’s been hanging on to the hope she still loves him and if he can defeat the third of February date, they will somehow see each other in gaol until he does his time.
But the sheets of paper in his shaking right hand make him doubt the lot from now on; and speaking of ‘now’, he wonders just how much ‘now’ he now has left.
There used to be plenty, when he was young and eager and slim and glossy, and whistled after women in the bush or the street. But now his body is diminished after long years in gaol. Shall he ever get out of it, he thinks, and he keeps thinking until he gets a migraine and asks the guard for a painkiller but naturally that is out of the question.
He thinks and he thinks until his head almost blows up, on the matter of whether he shot the officer. This conundrum is the new occupier of his memory. There is no other recollection available amid all that’s gone. All he knows for sure is that he feels like he didn’t do it and feels like he couldn’t do it – like he would never ever kill another human being, let alone one that he actually quite liked. Hobson, after all, was a cheerful fellow, and happy to play chess and draughts. Why would he ever want to kill him?
He often conjures the souls and the spirits of those two other dead guards, those in-limbo prison officers circling Coburg, like the ghosts of dead. Those abysmal things who tried to do their sworn duty and shoot at Ronald, who was so close to George it was sort of the same identical target in a way. A fraction of a second, fraction of a foot, and it could have all been very different. But they shot George and they got him, and now Ronald will die too.
He knows that the angle of the shots from the tower means he couldn’t have possibly fired at George, unless he was twelve foot tall to do it. He was just remonstrating with George, trying to get him to ‘back off!’, while Peter Walker tried to get the car going.
He understands he didn’t do it because he never touched the trigger. He never killed a thing in his life but bunnies in the bush with an air gun.
It is so hot at Cotter Street. The daughters sit on the brick front fence and look at the moon over the flats and wonder if they shall see their father again in the flesh and not just in the Sun News. Every day, he looks meaner and shadier but they know that that isn’t him. It’s just the press touch-up artists doing what they’re told. The editors just know how to sell newspapers and it just happens to be Ronald’s touched-up fierce visage that boosts circulation to unheard-of heights.
The daughters sort of like their new father but he isn’t the fun of the old one and it is the old one in gaol that they pine for. They want to just hang out with him and go swimming at the beach together again, but it feels as if he has been excised and gone forever already – like it is just a stand-in out there in the gaol.
The girls wish they had an icy pole to cool down somewhat but it’s the middle of another 100-degree night. It’s been over a month since it’s rained a single drop, do you know, and so they whisper gossip amongst themselves and stare at hot people in hot cars dawdling by and eventually head back to bed in the squeaking-floorboard, leaning-over hovel where the new daddy snores right on his big, fat back next to mummy, who snores just as badly.
They are on school holidays, so that’s something to kind of enjoy: fun things like maybe sleeping in, instead of vaulting out of bed to shower and quickly get into school clothes. They feel funny about having a new second name, the Greek guy’s name, as they were used to being called by their dad’s. It’s another one of those little things that are hard to believe – indeed, it sometimes feels like they disbelieve their own lives. They still practise their guitars and rehearse their singing and dream of forming a country and western girl band.
Opas’s office is strewn with books, and thousands of screwed-up reminders attached to other screwed-up reminders and phones that never stop ringing. The office hours go all through the night and Opas is on the edge of a complete nervous breakdown. He needs to create a miracle so that his latest client can be saved and his death sentence commuted to some other punishment. But the hours are catching up on him and he is jittery and not great.
The problem is that there isn’t a loophole or any legal manoeuvre to wriggle Ryan through. There’s no way to stall the execution, though the hours do seem to become longer and longer. But whilst there’s a puff of oxygen in his lungs, Opas never chucks it. He telephones, writes and rewrites copiously, spurred on by a sense of injustice. He is a veritable wreck.
At Coburg the final adjustments are being made to an entirely new sort of gallows that you might call cutting-edge or state of the art. It involves the great beam in the middle of D Division having the noose attached to it, pride of place, and surrounded by a kind of theatrical device that is a walk-over type of bridge or platform high up, where the doomed will walk to his trapdoor. A big green tarpaulin is being placed under it to cover pretty much all of his body, so the audience of officers and invited journalists can avoid feeling ill while they pay their respects.
Dorothy thinks of Ronald but doesn’t show it, and tries to get on with husband two. But it isn’t so easy when she’s being constantly reminded of her past by TV specials and radio documentaries and people gawking in the street, and reminding her on public transport that she married the Devil.
The daughters know that there is scarcely any time left for their father, whom they are not permitted to visit where he languishes. It must be gruelling for them to take a look at any newspaper in the land and see the perpetual nauseating headline telling all who read it that the jig is up; as if their daddy is nothing but a joke or a statistic or something else equally odious or pathetic.
What will they s
ay to other schoolchildren at their brand-new school of Auburn Central, where they like the friendly teachers and sunny school principal, and have much more space to play in and far better lockers? The girls try to enjoy everything new and bright but hope is not one of these things.
All of this grit and horror happened 50 years ago. Has the rage of the law against convicted criminals simmered a trifle now, to at least a bit below boiling point? Is the temperature lowered enough for us to basically accept that putting a criminal to death is a crime in itself? It sometimes seems like absolutely stuff-all has been learnt from the lesson of Ronald, who was innocent anyway, having to endure that which is unendurable. He did it tough, all right, the poor man.
The thinking, or absence of thinking, back in 1967 was that, not only did he richly deserve his fate, but that the crime rate would drop as a result of it. That all those obscene murders and assaults and sexual grotesques happening in each sombre lane would instantly recede because of the hard new line imposed on all law-breakers.
The tragic and grave truth of the execution that did indeed take place right on the dot of eight in the morning of 3 February was that it did not send out any message of a new toughness from the government of the day and it did nothing to ease the queue of criminals that continued to bank up in Melbourne’s overcrowded courts. Thieves and assaulters and standover chaps and prostitutes all continued to turn up in their droves to hear their gaoled futures explained to them.
The hanging of Ronald did nothing at all to dissuade bank-defaulters or alimony-defaulters or rogue car yard men from continuing to ply their nefarious trades.
If anything, the hanging of Ronald increased crime. If anything, it sent a message out that if the law could get away with murder, why not thieve and murder yourself? Why not wreak extra havoc on the idiotic suburbanites and shop keepers who deserve havoc anyway?
In the newspaper recently was the news that a rapist is to receive something in the vicinity of 35 years. He also murdered one of his victims on the grounds that he ‘felt like it’, as he later explained to police. At the same time, I read four new letters to the editor of the Herald-Sun, as the former Sun News Pictorial is now called, and these articles of literature seethed with the demand to fetch back the death penalty and immediately ‘hang the scum!’
Just as there was a passionate minority in favour of abolition at the cusp of Ronald’s own hanging, and many church groups ready to speak up or chant, there is nowadays a vocal minority of people who demand that we reintroduce capital punishment. None of us wants to be raped, after all, or shot from a tailgating limo driven at speed by the Mafia. We are good pampered pasta eaters and we do our kids’ homework with them of a night and we would all like to be alive the next day.
The conservative, upwardly mobile zombies in suburbia who address their sexuality by ramming fellow zombies in their big-buck jeeps are all pro capital punishment and would tailgate all day to make it on time for Victoria’s latest hanging if it ever came back again. The God-fearing and real-estate-buying conservatives who would reintroduce the noble noose in order to send the appropriate message to all those criminals who sell dangerous drugs to impressionable Christian schoolchildren at every possible chance. And you know, in a way, who can possibly blame pro-hangers like them when you think of bizarre citizens such as the lunatic who chucked his little girl off the Westgate Bridge or the guy who drove his sons into a dam because he felt like it? Or the fantastical amounts of infanticide reported every day in The Age because it has turned into an even more morbid paper than The Australian (which is saying something in a time where horrifying acts of violence are more popular than a Big Mac)?
Ever since I left my old high school I have always bought myself, early in the morning, both a fresh copy of The Age and The Australian and mostly I have enjoyed their contents and have always had my favourite columnists and sports writers and feature writers and I liked in the past to take a funny look at the letters pages to check out their compulsory piousness and extreme citric sourness.
But this year I have stopped reading the newspapers. Not entirely, mind you, because they have always been an enjoyment for me in my day, but when I read about terrorist acts, complete with vomit and blood, descriptions of mass murders in the Congo, or someone’s inane analysis of why a man drove his own kids off a pier in Port Lincoln just after firing a gun into their young and so innocent heads, I feel like giving up on bad news.
The good news is that Victoria’s gaols now only use gallows as works of art. The state’s hundreds of thousands of prisoners are terribly overweight and they eat too much, as is well known by the newspaper headline swallowers of endless suburbia. These everyday folk will accept a lot but they will not accept rape and murder if the culprits are given literature board grants to compose the lurid memoirs sought after by chequebook-dangling publishers.
And maybe that’s fair enough. But ladies and gentlemen, please hear this. The only way to get a murderer right is to educate them, and teach them to pay attention to the holiness of life. Criminals who are perfectly dreadful, and in many circumstances come from even worse parents, all have to be shown the power of pity.
My feeling is that absolutely nothing has been learnt in the 50 years since the last man was hanged by his neck. Nothing at all has been learnt to prevent idiocy and pigheadedness and insensitivity from being able to dress up as stern civic duty.
For all the good that Ronald’s death did, he may as well be a happy old bloke of 92 smiling at us from an old folks’ home.
Chapter 10
IT’S HALFWAY THROUGH the hot-as-hell January of 1967 and Ronald is awoken to the sound of new-bought timber being screwed and nailed. He can hear the trapdoor being daintily, almost obsessively, sandpapered and nailed in just such a way as to make it look fabulous. Without ever seeing it, he hears the fresh paint being slapped on, the hangman coming and looking, and people from all over Pentridge stepping on it to test its undeniable powerfulness and all of its wooden, in-your-face strength.
He only has the one friend: the old Salvation Army lady, aged 70 if she is a day, who used to joke with me when as a kid I drank at the Albion Hotel in Carlton. I can still see her in my mind’s eye today: the Irish-Catholic lantern jaw, the femininely pugnacious disposition. I remember that she used to roar laughing of a busy Friday night at the Albion Hotel and demand a coin or a note from the waterside workers and toughs who guzzled with me in their crowded and stuffy midst. It was she who lent Ronald her bruised copy of the Catholic Holy Bible to commit to his faulty memory in his last fortnight.
She is the best friend he ever had in his 42 years of existence, and his only other friends are the words in that bible.
He reads it because his life depends on it – or rather, his soul and his spirit.
He is glad to read it and cries when the guard takes the bible away from his shaking grip on its pages and its mystical meaning; even its moth-eaten fragrance offers salvation and hope. He reads his least favourite passages and then his most favourite ones and feels nostalgia for his biblical childhood. His pious mother read the bible to him and also read William Blake aloud in the bush; incantations of rich hope in love and, of course, pageantry.
He now knows that he never shot George but everyone says that he did. Going by her letters, his ex-wife thinks he did too and he realises that one day she will make the girls believe this too, which is a thought that just about kills him.
He tries to picture his daughters growing up but can’t because his mind is a mess. The images are becoming distorted: things the kids said that he could clearly quote aloud to himself just last week are becoming slowly fuzzier and filmier. He swings the pick, the body-numbing tool, to hit at least some sort of a target with, and the guards swear at him and intimidate him and remember him to George.
His lawyer is sick and off work, very sick indeed, with what his GP calls a nervous breakdown. The doctor says that Opas could die if he doesn’t take it easy, so he reluctantly quits. Brian Burke
takes over as his replacement and suddenly Ronald’s day is busier than ever, with new barristers buzzing about like blowflies and hope suddenly back on the agenda.
Ronald seeks leave from official pulverising duties to request some sort of family visit but that is naturally rejected by the governor who, at 10 pm one night, suddenly turns up in his cell. With the overhead, just-about-neon light on, as always, Governor Grindlay can see in a second just how disillusioned and terrified and depressed Ronald is. So he sits down in the cell and, after a few minutes, he tries to explain to Ronald that his end is his own doing.
He reiterates that feeling amidst his officers is running at an astronomical temperatures and he is concerned that they may cause a riot. Ronald is concerned about this too and keeps on insisting that, when the escape was on, he didn’t actually ever shoot anybody. The stolen carbine wasn’t for shooting: it was a prop, an object, a tool, a bluff. But the governor looks into his eyes and says it is the eleventh hour and no words can alter the outcome.
‘Thanks for the help,’ Ronald replies most emphatically, surprising both of them at how bitter he is. For an instant, the governor looks more or less evenly into his eyes again, for that is where all answers lie and all lies answer. He says he is indeed sorry it has all turned out as blackly and bleakly as it has and they shake hands, friendless and final, and leave things at that.
Father John is in next, talking to Ronald in a very laid-back way about such things as restoring Ronald back to his old Catholic roots to pacify his mum.
Ronald asks what is involved.
‘It’s no different from re-registering a car!’, laughs Father, and for the very first time in a year, just about, Ronald laughs too, an oxygenated chuckle it is indeed, and life-altering, like the sudden inhalation of life, or at least hope, because he has been feeling so hopeless for so long.
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