Remember Ronald Ryan

Playwright's Biography

Barry Dickins
: With a CV as long as your arm, and one that includes work with a number of pioneering Melbourne and interstate theatre companies, Barry has been keeping himself busy over the years with a number of writing and acting projects. Most recently he wrote
Believe Me Oscar Wilde
in 2000, and
Abide with Me
in 1999 (La Mama—written as writer-in-residence for Trades Hall Council). He won a Victorian Premier's Award for his play
Remember Ronald Ryan
(1995) which was commissioned by, and premiered at, Playbox. Barry began working with Playbox long before it moved to The Malthouse, writing
The Golden Goldenbergs
,
The Interrogation of Angel
and
Lennie Lower
while there, undertaking a writer-in-residence position in 1982, and premiered
Graeme King Lear
in 1983. Barry's
A Dickins Christmas
premiered at Playbox in 1992. His other written work includes
Royboys
;
The Death of Minnie
;
Reservoir By Night
;
The Fool's Shoe Hotel
(also produced for ABC-TV);
Between Engagements
(La Mama);
Hymie
and his memoir
Unparalleled Sorrow
, which chartered his recovery from depression. Barry has published a number of monologues, sketches, autobiographies, plays and screenplays, prose and poems—not to mention maintaining a regular presence as columnist in the daily Melbourne media and as poet in residence at Genazzano Catholic Girls' School in Kew.

Introduction

Barry Jones

I had very mixed feelings about writing this introduction to Barry Dickins' plays about the life and death of Ronald Ryan, the last person to be judicially executed in Australia.

Ronald Joseph Ryan was born in Carlton on 21 February 1925 and died on the gallows at Pentridge Prison, Coburg, on 3 February 1967.

His death was the last in a ghastly cavalcade of 2,050 men, women and, occasionally, children, hanged since the British invasion/conquest by the First Fleet in January 1788. If we add extra-judicial lynchings of Aborigines the number would exceed 2,500.

On Sunday 19 December 1965 Ryan, aged forty, and Peter Walker, aged twenty-four, escaped from B Division of Pentridge with almost incredible ease. There was no warder on duty at the time. Ryan took a rifle from a guard post and menaced a turnkey into opening the side gate.

The escapees knocked over the Salvation Army chaplain who tried to stop them and ran for Sydney Road to steal a getaway car. Ryan aimed his rifle at Warder George Hodson to prevent him from seizing Walker. Hodson fell, hit by a bullet which pierced the innominate artery in his chest, and died within minutes. Ryan and Walker then stole a car and eluded pursuit. They remained in Melbourne for some days, holding up a suburban bank on the day of Hodson's funeral. On Christmas Eve, Arthur Henderson, an accomplice of the escapees, was found in a St Kilda lavatory with a bullet in his head after having had a fight with Walker. He died next day. Ryan and Walker fled to Sydney where they were captured in January.

In March 1966 Ryan and Walker were jointly tried for Hodson's murder before Mr Justice John Starke. Philip Opas, QC, Ryan's counsel, stressed the ambiguities surrounding the killing. Hodson, a tall man, was within a few metres of Ryan, a short man, when shot. The downward path of the bullet suggested that Hodson was shot from a height or at a distance. Most witnesses heard only one shot, and prison officer Robert Paterson admitted having fired a shot in the general direction of Ryan and Hodson, although he said that he lifted his high-speed rifle skywards at the last moment. The fatal bullet and its cartridge case were never recovered. However, the jury convicted Ryan of murder and he was sentenced to death.

It must have been excruciating for Mr Justice Starke, who had fought so hard, and successfully, to save Rupert Max Stuart and Robert Tait, two earlier
causes célèbres
on the death penalty, to have been the judge who passed the mandatory death sentence. Newspapers had pointed out Mr Justice Starke's opposition to the death penalty and his role in the Stuart and Tait cases. Seven jurors later stated publicly that they had considered the death penalty was now obsolete and would have brought in a different verdict if they had realised that Ryan might be hanged. Walker was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twelve more years in prison, having nine years of his original sentence still to serve.

Walker was later tried for Henderson's murder but convicted of manslaughter only, and sentenced to another twelve years. These differing penalties pointed up the lottery nature of the law. If the jury which acquitted Walker of Henderson's murder had sat in Ryan's case, Ryan might well have been acquitted.

Ryan appealed unsuccessfully to the Full Supreme Court and the High Court against the application of the narrow and semi-obsolete ‘felony murder' rule, whereby juries are virtually deprived of the right to bring in a manslaughter verdict where a death has occurred in the course of a felony such as jailbreak.

On 12 December 1966, State Cabinet confirmed Ryan's death sentence. As was the practice, Mr Justice Starke appeared before Cabinet but was not asked for comment or advice on whether the penalty should be carried out.

It was easy, but wrong, to typecast Ryan as a professional killer, ruthless and incorrigibly violent. Growing up in Brunswick and Mitcham, he had a tough childhood with an abusive stepfather. Apart from an undocumented statement that at seventeen Ryan had taken part in a hold-up at a country bank in New South Wales, for which he was never charged, his criminal record began in 1956, at the advanced age of thirty-one. He was a lifelong Liberal voter.

His crimes began after his marriage mostly involving ‘get-rich-quick' schemes: false pretences, receiving, forgery, uttering, storebreaking and stealing, running away from a police station, possession of explosives in suspicious circumstances. Ryan spent four years and nine months of his life in jail until his fatal escape bid. He had gained his Intermediate and Leaving Certificates by correspondence in prison and planned to matriculate. Known to police as a ‘homing pigeon', easy to apprehend because he was never far from his wife and daughters, he presumably began planning to escape after his marriage broke up and his children no longer visited him. There was a notation on his papers that he needed special supervision because of his desire to see his family.

In the 1960s I was the Secretary of the Victorian Anti-Hanging Committee and played a co-ordinating role in the public campaign to persuade the Premier, Sir Henry Bolte, to commute Ryan's death sentence. When our campaign failed, I experienced a crushing burden of responsibility.

On the morning of Ryan's hanging, I could not bring myself to go to the vigil outside Pentridge, but stood with another crowd standing in silent protest under the clocks at Flinders Street Station.

After the deed was done I went home and lay on the bed all day, just staring at the ceiling. I could hardly bear to imagine the feelings of Ryan's mother, his wife, his children, his lawyers Phil Opas and Ralph Freadman, Father John Brosnan, the witnesses and participants at the execution, let alone Ryan himself.

I was traumatised and it took some weeks to recover fully. I remain deeply grateful for all the loving support I had at that time.

I felt such acute sensitivity about the Ryan hanging that for many years I could not speak about it, even in private.

I was a Member of the Victorian Parliament in 1975 when Dick Hamer introduced the Crimes (Capital Offences) Bill providing for the abolition of hanging, and persuaded his party to allow a free vote on the issue. I thought that my Second Reading speech, on 19 March 1975, was probably the most passionately argued of my whole political career. I never mentioned Ryan's name, apart from a single sentence that slipped out in the Committee stages. Where possible, for decades I avoided driving past Pentridge.

For thirty-five years I refused all interviews and declined an invitation to see Barry Dickins' award-winning play in 1994.

I never spoke in public about the hanging until the launch of Mike Richards' book
The Hanged Man
in 2002.

Ryan's execution was highly political. In Victoria between 1955, when Sir Henry Bolte became Premier, and 1975, when the death penalty was abolished, there were 71 death sentences, and 70 commutations. The death sentence on Robert Peter Tait for the savage murder of an old lady was confirmed in 1962, then Cabinet reversed itself after a major public campaign and intervention by the High Court of Australia.

There is much to be said for the ‘Tait substitute' theory. If Tait had hanged in 1962 and Henry Bolte had not suffered such a humiliation due to a forced reprieve after what was really an appalling crime, his manic determination to hang someone would have been satiated and Ryan would not have been chosen.

The circumstances of the killing which led to Ryan's hanging were ambiguous. I doubt if Ryan had any intention to kill but I am certain that Bolte did.

Ultimately, all executions are political.

The Canadian philosopher Ronald Wright argues: ‘States arrogate to themselves the power of coercive violence: the right to crack the whip, execute prisoners, send young men to the battlefield. From this stems… [what] J.M. Coetzee has called “the black flower of civilization”—torture, wrongful imprisonment, violence for display—the forging of might into right.' States employ ‘various styles of human sacrifice'… as forms of ‘the ultimate political theatre'.

Barry Dickins writes with passion about Ryan's life and death and the subject shows his dramatic gifts at their most compelling. We have much to learn from both works.

Melbourne
September 2014

Barry Jones AC, public intellectual, author, social activist and former politician has been named as one of a hundred National Living Treasures by the National Trust of Australia. He was Secretary of the Victorian Anti-Hanging Committee at the time of Ronald Ryan's trial and execution.