Last Words

by Dickins, Barry

  I have never heard anyone have a good word for Walker and it’s of course a bit too late to ask Ryan what he thought of him. Ryan was only 42 years of age when he got hanged and Walker was about twelve years younger. When they fronted their simultaneous murder trials in the Supreme Court, and Ryan was informed that the decision was to hang him, a simpering Peter drew a rapid-fire caricature of a hanged skeleton upon his slate, and scrawled the word ‘You!’ at its base. He handed it to Ryan as he was being sentenced to death. Walker thought that was hilarious. No wonder he is hated.

  We go back to the Hume Highway just after New Year’s Eve in late 1965 – so late in 1965 that it’s now very early 1966. The two drive the limo purchased from the very famous television personality Kevin Dennis, motoring at a leisurely pace past Albury where the border cops didn’t recognise them and waved them through the busy fruit fly inspection part, and then on towards the purple mountains of Wodonga.

  Back in Victoria, the mood for Ryan and Walker is blacker than carbonised hate. Premier Henry Bolte is taking a bucketing in the press, and the radio stations with their overzealous overpaid commentators are barking out overheated rants about there now being no law or order. The feeling is such that anyone can hop out of gaol nowadays, even if they’re uneducated morons like Ryan and Walker. The uneducated morons have destroyed the idea of steady governance and poor old Bolte is down on his knees.

  And what must other prisoners think when two low-grey-matter blokes doing just-about-life sentences pulverising unbreakable bluestone boulders of three-feet round and five-feet long are suddenly motoring towards Sydney in sunglasses in a posh limo with jazz music on? Are they tuning into Billie Holiday or the Mills Brothers? Couldn’t we just as easily be out there too, in a big limo smoking dope and giving patrol coppers the finger?

  Newspaper and breakfast devourers say, ‘Isn’t it shocking what these escape artists are up to!’ and mutter to themselves in front of the box at every overpowering and frantic news bulletin.

  ‘Isn’t it murderous the way they got away with it!’

  Parents fear their kids shall be throttled in their school, or for some reason snatched off some street.

  Of course, there have always been unpredictable murderers in Melbourne: it’s always been a fairly brutal sort of city. But the cold-blooded murder of a prison officer? And then the similar freak-out of an innocent tow truck operator slain upon a lav? It’s pushed things a bit too close to the brink.

  Dorothy decides to shift her girls to a different state school in order to disguise their background and installs them in Auburn Central as soon as term starts. It’s February 1966 and her father tells her in no uncertain terms that he’s just about had it with her, and makes it hard for her where her rental property is concerned at Number 15 Cotter Street, Richmond. It is his cottage anyway and he threatens her with eviction which just about blows her mind.

  The Victorian Police have arrested lots of Walker and Ryan lookalikes by now – in fact the gaols are full of them. The radios blare away the latest gossip: Ryan and Walker have been sighted in the Grampians. In Reservoir. In Braybrook. In Seymour. Wherever.

  The cops have kicked doors in and upset innocent families and questioned and blathered and interrogated and phone-book-punched lots of Ryans and Walkers but they are all the wrong ones and, despite the general alarm, nothing happens of any kind. Many a criminal would love to betray them but sadly they don’t know how. It all adds to the law enforcement officers’ sheer frustration.

  The press are shown No Man’s Land up close and personal and many impressive black-and-white photographs are taken and studied and reproduced in popular mass-circulation newspapers so the great escape is extremely lucrative for media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch. The escape is legendary – a national story, no less – and, to Ryan and Walker’s considerable delight, all of the Sydney newspapers are running the latest hearsay.

  In the party room of the Liberal Party, Premier Henry Bolte experiences a vision as if from above. The quick and lively capture of the two escapees would help win him the next year’s state election because the voting public would see him as tough on crime.

  But the problem persists that nobody in the country has the foggiest idea where they are.

  Criminals in pubs are drooling as the reward money multiplies, and then multiplies and multiplies again. Tens of thousands of crisp lovely dollars are on offer in exchange for a useful dob. It is terribly tempting but also impossible. No one knows where they are in Sydney, if indeed they’re in Sydney at all. It’s all hot gas and innuendo and missightings and bumbling and guesswork by overpaid experts. The Victorian Police exploit every conceivable tracking device, including hound dogs and clairvoyants, but nothing works of any kind.

  It is hard of course for Dorothy Ryan, who is hanging on like grim death in her bugged Richmond weatherboard, and jumping whenever the phone goes off. Has the kids’ dad been captured? Or could he have been shot dead? It is nigh on impossible to run the cottage with any degree of normalcy with police barging in and out around the clock and some even threatening to rape her (a threat to which she responds with the question, ‘How would that be helpful?’) The police harass and hound the kids as well and spy on them round the clock.

  Ronald’s mother, Cecelia, seeks some sort of solace with Father John Brosnan out at Pentridge Prison although there really isn’t much that the good father can do. He just puts on the kettle and they both light a candle and think wistful thoughts while they sip their hot tea.

  Security at the prison is tightened as if with a pump-action-screwdriver and sniffer dogs are everywhere. There shall be no more vaulting over bluestone walls as far as Governor Grindlay is concerned: the Ryan and Walker exit was a one-off. New weaponry is put in place and the German shepherds are made viler: maltreated so that they maul better. Razor wire is imported to stop criminals getting out and excellent gassing ideas are put in place so that even the dumbest escapee would have to think twice, or even a third time, before trying to seek out his freedom.

  Ryan and Walker, meanwhile, are residing in a private hotel room in cheap western Sydney, and still wilting in their disguises. Walker is sorely tempted to wash the dye out of his normally pitch-black hair, as well as the itchy, awful eyebrow peroxide that is really getting on his goat. They go everywhere together just to keep a united front but it’s been over three weeks since the big escape over the wall and familiarity is busy breeding contempt. They are beginning to get seriously sick of each other to say the absolute least.

  They purchase, rather than steal, things like jeans and fresh jocks, and that feels pretty good if somewhat unusual. They try to keep up with the news but they are both busy gentlemen. They snap at each other in bottle shops that bear newspaper-cut-out pictures of them on their walls, and they walk past reward posters on every lamp pole. But nothing happens. They feel inviolate and they are inviolate. Nothing can come near them except body odour.

  They drink together at the rough old bars of central Sydney, with wanted posters on half the walls. But no one recognises them, even one inch away, as they grin and chink and chat and laugh with brewery workers and bus drivers, not to mention mean-faced squinting taxi drivers and pimple-throated university students and noisome women who wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on. It’s as though the duo are walking on air and will never be brought to justice.

  They are driving on air as well, purchasing a heavenly, fairly brand-new-looking sports car painted British racing green, which they of course pay for in cash. They hook up with a few good time gals and pay a professional sports photographer to take photos of them posing as Hollywood gangsters. Like Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde, they grate their dentures and chomp on cigars, brandishing weapons in the most tough guy way. The paid good-time gals laugh uproariously as they lounge around the camera, even though it isn’t that funny.

  They are on a most short fuse, having burnt the candle at both ends and employed an acetylene cutter right in the middle. Things
are going to become both nasty and deathly at any tick of the clock, despite the fact that the several high-class thieved gold watches on Ronald’s left wrist all go at slightly different times. There is something childish about him that requires him to make strangers laugh, even while he’s planning to rob them. ‘Pick of the crop!’ he loves to exclaim as he relaxes next to another sucker in a bar, wrist twinkling with sensuous gold watches. People can’t figure out whether he is serious or not but he is never serious. One of the traits in his personality his wife really liked about him was his laid-back approach to life: the fuss-less way he went about making a living, whether that be by knocking off wallets or chopping up wood.

  Meantime, back at the prison, Governor Grindlay is having a friendly word with his wife. He and Audrey are lying in their rather cramped bed, at the rear of the manse where all the governors stay. Amid the framed prints of Buckingham Palace and reassuring reproductions of Queen Elizabeth II, and the hall-stand and the desk full of papers, you can just make out a photograph taken of Ryan some years ago when he was a prisoner at the Bendigo Training Prison. He arrived there as a teenager after stealing a fair few cartons of cigarettes from a milk bar, as well as hot-wiring a car in order to give it a whirl up a hill.

  The governor, whom Ronald had always called ‘Guv’, is recalling how people at Bendigo Training Prison thought so highly of Ronald and saw such potential in him. They especially liked the way he groomed himself and combed his pitch-black hair so sleekly and wore his proper prison-issue uniform perfectly, and always well-ironed. He was a model prisoner, of course, and no doubt about it whatsoever.

  The governor and his wife liked to be with Ronald and chuckle good-naturedly at his tales of growing up. Even if he was a bit boastful, he was definitely a bit of fun. Even as a teenager, it wasn’t long before Ronald had you laughing your fool head right off. He knew how to be hilarious on the spot, alright.

  It is with a lump in both their throats, then, that they listen that morning to the latest news broadcasts on the ABC.

  ‘Is he in Sydney, darling?’ Audrey asks her husband, who, uncertain, can only shrug.

  ‘Let’s both of us hope they don’t kill him. He’s playing with fire, that boy!’

  And Audrey in her mind’s eye can see Ronald getting shot dead in a filthy lane of Kings Cross and then buried interstate so anonymously. She weeps hard for Ronald but not a single tear for Walker, who didn’t have the charms.

  Ryan and Walker lead their charmed existences in and around Central Sydney, pausing every now and then for icy schooners, in an effort to slake their bottomless thirst. But it isn’t so simple thanks to the huge shovelfuls of salt that shonky barmen tip into the beer barrels. The escapees aren’t the only ones who find themselves unbearably parched on particularly hot days, as they guzzle salty hops for all they are worth. They drink with illiterates and chat with lobotomised schoolteachers upon scuffed barstools, lazy hour after lazy hour, and still no one recognises them after three weeks on the run.

  All actors realise, sooner or later, they shouldn’t extemporise too long or the working script fizzles and the audience eventually walks out. There is no understanding and no logic and no meaning with a story like this. Ryan and Walker go too far, as criminals and actors tend to, and the stolen bank money weighs rather heavily upon their once brawny shoulders. They take to paying hookers for services without checking on their credentials, and coming on to women who are really men in clubs of Kings Cross.

  So it’s not long before they fall into a trap set for them by Victorian and NSW police officers. It boils down to a raunchy rendezvous with some young bosomy nurses who both seem to go for them but are really in the pay of police. They meet up in Mascot outside a hospital, expecting some refreshing ardour. The cops arrive out of nowhere and absolutely cane the pair. Nurses are shocked and doctors are horrified as unmitigated fisticuffs and handcuffs ensue.

  Walker gives up on the spot, arms up in surrender, but Ryan takes five armed cops to hold flat. He bites and spits and screams and hisses, and throws punches to little avail. They are chucked unceremoniously in the back of a van and vanish to the nearest holding cell before you can say Jack Robinson.

  Governor Grindlay and his wife watch it happen on their television set at home and are suitably shaken by the broadcast.

  ‘They’ll be back here soon, the way they’re going, my love,’ whispers the Guv, ‘and that is the end of that.’

  Because the murders and the manhunt have become a national story, Sydney people are hysterical about their lack of security and the outrageous way the pair have loped around their city doing whatever they pleased.

  The Victorian Police charge them with two murders. They are extradited at great expense to Victoria again and the Melbourne media go completely insane again.

  The scene out at Pentridge is beyond belief, with guards slavering for their necks and baying for their blood – especially Ronald’s, since it was he who took George from them in his idiotic escape, that rashly thought out vanishing-act that robbed them of their beloved brother screw. Governor Grindlay is experiencing enormous trouble trying to keep his officers cool, calm and collected when all they want to do is beat Ryan into pulp.

  The two escapees are notorious now and obviously fear the worst: for the first time in history it could well be the officers who riot. The police hate that laid-back smile of Ryan’s and seethe and hiss and foam and bark to do anything to get rid of it and him ASAP.

  They are put in different cells to await their murder trials at the Supreme Court, so they don’t really see each other anymore after those torrid weeks on the run. They don’t trust anyone and nobody trusts them: it’s a new sort of No Man’s Land.

  Ryan shaves of a morning and reads in the Sun News Pictorial that he shall be executed without a doubt; Walker as well, without another doubt. He exercises his mind by studying the bible, which he just about knows off by heart. Is he frightened? No one knows but his Lord.

  Walker is reading in his much more limited fashion in his cell and complains about there being poor lighting and crap food, although the guards watching every twitch he makes tell him he’s lucky to be breathing.

  George Hodson has his funeral service and a few of his fellow guards speak up for him and one of them breaks down, understandably. George’s daughter, being a practising Christian, pleas in the press for peace all round, since there have already been two lives lost in blood.

  Dorothy is hounded by her mayoral father and pompous fur-coated mother to repent he whom she married for the unrepentant charlatan he is. But she lights her candles every night all the same, and gets the girls off to school on time come hell or high water, or indeed hell and high water both. It is hard to make certain the girls are clothed and educated properly in amongst the baying for her errant husband’s gore, and she finds it really just about impossible to accept this is the same chap she married.

  Her nerves pack up badly particularly when police barge in one day, and shriek at her to let them know why she married such a monster. All she can say is he got into bad company and is now to pay the highest possible price in the country.

  Chapter 4

  IT MIGHT PROVE helpful and interesting here to speak of Ronald and Dorothy’s first meeting, which occurred just after the conclusion of the Second World War. They met in Melbourne’s Batman Avenue just on the edge of Princes Bridge where the Yarra River is; a most filthy river indeed in which people for 150 years have thrown ugly furniture. The only fish that dare breed there are poisonous. At the bottom of the river lie the skulls of murdered police officers and slain barbers – or so at least it is thought.

  One wonders why Melbourne can be so violent. I suppose it is just the remoteness from England and Europe, where there is sophistication and civilisation in equal measure. In any case, Ronald was eking out a living in a foul foundry in West Footscray and living in a perfectly uninteresting cheap boarding house and riding his iron-framed gents’ pushbike around town, when at the age
of about 22 he cycled into the city looking for some action, and at last he found it.

  He was terribly fond of himself, that callow youth, who paused to rapidly comb his jet-black hair in front of the window of a shop, adjust his groovy, silk-looking tie and do up all his tweed jacket buttons. He then wheeled his heavy bike (pitch-black like his hair) down the stone steps to three illuminated ferries. They were filled with folks jitterbugging to the music of Glenn Miller, bright coloured lights and great big loudspeakers. For a suitable sum, it was possible to dance on there too and, as the boats rocked and rolled, the kids rocked and rolled with them, prancing about with tremendous enthusiasm.

  Sweaty kids grind into the hips and gyrating groins of the other gender, if there is such a thing in the dark, as they dance at high speed and puff cigarettes and sip soft drinks or slurp something stronger. There are plenty of brown paper bags purchased just a little bit before at the bottle shop of Young and Jackson’s.

  Ronald is terribly cocksure. He boasts a powerful body due to all that wood chopping in the scrub and riding that big heavy pushbike all over the streets, but let’s not forget that inside he is lonesome. Such is the crushing sameness of boarding house life where a singed rissole is the only subject to gossip about.