Last Words

by Dickins, Barry

  ‘You have become a human rights candidate, like an emissary for social justice. Please believe me, dear boy, when I tell you your fight is not merely yours alone but for the entire Melbourne community. You’ve become an idea.’

  Ronald likes being thought of as an idea and starts to really enjoy the first of many conversations and conversions. The social justice component of his brain has started to kick into life after years of quasi-schizophrenic, hard, honest toil for his own family mixed with the toxin of pure greed. Father waxes lyrical about the power of prayer and introduces him to a Salvation Army woman who’s well-known in the North Melbourne and Carlton areas, and lends Ronald her own copy of the bible.

  The gaol’s ancient church bell regularly clangs and it seems like it clangs for him. A sound that he starts to like a lot is the unmelodic bell that clangs at exactly eight in the morning and seems to reverberate right through each rusty iron bar. Even the big bluestone bricks seem to shake: the weight of the chapel bell is monumental.

  He likes the other bell ring times too and, having a lot of time on his hands (until 3 February, of course), he studies each gong and memorises each chime, perhaps drawn to their fatalistic gloom. At times, these gongs appear to go on forever: the prisoners go crazy from them and complain to the officers, but what can the officers do?

  In any case, the guards have their own problems – not least, the fear of riots, especially in H Division, where bloodthirstiness and wild brainless revenge from bashed prisoners is simmering on low but just about to boil.

  Walker is never to see Ronald again and their so-brief foray into the wilderness and brief taste of liberty on the road to Sydney is like the fragment of a gaol dream. Now they are back at Coburg again, it’s as though no escape ever happened. Walker is reunited with largish chunks of powerful bluestone boulders once more and, with guards standing over him, he has to painstakingly disfigure each block into tiny, meaningless portions until he is shoved onto the next one. This is called hard labour and it is hard indeed.

  He will be old when he gets out and he knows nothing else. His matinee idol days are on the cutting room floor and he declines to recall all that has gone before or anything even worse coming up for him. He is made of hate and the public feel the same emotion about him but they also hate Ryan, who needs to be taught a most serious lesson indeed.

  Church ministers continue to orate from their altars and congregations in every parish continue to lament. People weep and gnash their teeth, even when they don’t have many. They talk about how to overcome the determination of the Victorian Liberal Party to remove Ronald Joseph Ryan from Planet Earth because that removal is on the cards and is only a matter of time and not that much of it.

  In every suburb on just about every single Sabbath, there are such speeches on human rights violations that senior churchgoers can’t remember ever having heard anything so fiery and heartfelt. Some of these passionate church speeches are published in September in a number of conservative newspapers. It’s as though there can be no topic these days, other than the upcoming hanging.

  Ronald keeps his crewcut head down and focuses only upon the Holy Catholic Bible that the friendly old Salvation Army woman has lent him. He reads it closely, from cover to cover, because he has now nothing else to do with himself except commit certain favourite passages to heart. His heart still functions, after all, and he gives his thanks for that fact and tries hard to work on his spirit and his soul. To not much avail because he is frightened and who wouldn’t be?

  The trap looms large.

  What he is after is forgiveness but he cannot find it in the brightly lit cell (if only the screws would agree to extinguish the glaring lights in the room). He just has to put up with the haunting recollections that go with the sharp-bright-light-induced headaches, which are exacerbated by the slate-like-pillow he must lie on.

  The rusty handbasin offers occasional relief by virtue of a few scattered drops on his shaven face: at least he can shave from day to day. But what he can’t do is tell if he did commit murder or if he didn’t. Either way, he prays to God to forgive him.

  His memory, like his reasonably young heart, is shattered beyond repair. Partly because of the opiates he used as supercharged energy to vault vast thick walls. Partly from trying to understand how a rifle that doesn’t smoke does smokes after it’s fired. But mainly from the shock of seeing his George – friendly George, the chummy officer who played chess with him – simply cease to be before his eyes.

  His memory is tired, like his once-lithe physique, a physique that is weary from beating bluestone and hanging around day after day in his boring cell. The fact is that the unchanging, confining cage he stays in is the real barbarian, the real culprit that taunts him around the sweaty and circular clock his face has turned into, as he squints at himself in his fragment of shaving mirror and beholds a thing that is leached of humour. A thing more reminiscent of living death than that young bloke who was full of beans and always on the pick-up for a young chick.

  He waits for nothing to happen and nothing is what he gets. Nothing except the rock-hard pillow and granite-hard bunk that he tries in vain to extract rest from, but it is like trying to get comfy on a volcano. He paces his cell at night until seven in the morning, when the time comes to recommence hard labour. He and a dozen other criminals swing the heavy pick in a sort of pathological harmony, a psychotic trance of blisters the size of tennis balls – blisters so large he can’t put on his gym shoes and has to hobble at speed. Their reward is food that is so rat-like it makes some inmates vomit and lose invaluable strength from their aching bodies.

  He is permitted to write with pen and paper to his family at Cotter Street but those letters are heavily censored. His exasperated wife tries hard to read them and to make sense of his sentences but the only clear sentence is death. That is all she can possibly keep up with – she and her sorrowful young daughters, as they sit down at the cluttered tea table and write to their condemned dad.

  Occasionally they arrive on snowy white sheets, with Coburg Gaol letterheads, but more often he must write on cheap butcher’s paper and fold it roughly, again and again. It’s a job to get them into a gaol envelope and beg for a stamp from someone that hates him and they nearly all do in there.

  But Ryan’s letters are not the only messages that his three impressionable daughters receive. Cruel things are said at their school lockers, and out in the blazing hot basketball court or where the kids play handball against a brick wall. And mean messages are recorded on note paper and made into planes that land in crumpled points right next to their porcelain inkwells.

  When the daughters of Dorothy read them, they suffer in a hundred ways.

  Chapter 8

  HIS LAWYER, PHILLIP OPAS, has one final hope. A visit to the Queen at Buckingham Palace. As the head of the Privy Council in London, Her Majesty has the power to spare the colonial, Ronald Ryan, so the trade union movement subsidises the lawyer’s journey from Melbourne to the other side of the world on the slim chance he can get to speak to Her.

  An appointment is arranged, or at least that’s what they think. This is pretty desperate stuff, all right, but then the entire life of Ronald has been nothing but. Opas gets to Melbourne Airport with his documentation and all his hopes intact and back at Coburg Ronald waits.

  In Melbourne, the street protests accelerate and enlarge so that great placards and banners are everywhere. Marches and vigils take place on an unprecedented scale, with police on horseback galloping straight into university students as they demonstrate against the execution. Riots occur in gaols all over the country as it was thought hangings were over, a thing of the ghastly past. In the sophisticated sixties, public life is supposed to be democratic and faithful to the spirit of liberty. But in the Victorian Liberal Party, the upcoming state election is all that matters.

  Phillip Opas is an unlucky traveller. Some planes are delayed and others are cancelled: as unprecedented engine trouble follows unprecedented engine trou
ble, the few jets he alights almost immediately put down, quick-smart, after they take off. As he hopscotches across Asia, he runs his eyes over documents and pins notes to other notes and adds scribbles. Hoping is about all he’s got left and like airline fuel, it’s starting to run out.

  He experiences such annoyances as hotels that he thought were booked become unavailable and every possible stuff-up ensues. His itinerary has become improvised and his well-thought-out timetable is a joke because of unseen bungles and troubles.

  But in the end, he makes it to Buckingham Palace with the typed-up letterhead in his hand and looking perfectly natty. Quiet, polite and overtly respectable, he waits at one of several official reception areas for a concierge to show him through to Her Majesty.

  He waits, in fact, all throughout the first day and well into the evening. He wonders whether there has been some kind of error but is assured by staff there is none and that he should content himself with the knowledge that the Queen is the most illustrious lady on the planet and thus seriously busy. He should just sit there, calm and still, and Her Majesty will eventually see to him: he absolutely is somewhere in her absolutely choked schedule, there’s no doubt about that, whatsoever.

  ‘Would you just display some patience, if you please, Mr Opas!’

  So what can he do but show plenty of it and sit there, indefinitely, surrounded by armed officers, not unlike his forlorn client? Perched like an Antipodean fossil at the end of a thickly carpeted hall, he endures the swishes of skirts and pompous stuffed shirts, and is never once even offered a cup of tea. After reading the paper, a paper he purchases himself, he keeps staring at his fancily printed invitation and its posh white embroidered Buckingham Palace envelope. But still nothing happens.

  Mr Opas is gifted at waiting, he has waited in courts all of his life. He has waited in the reception areas of prisons as well, but never before has he waited like this, never once with so much at stake. But he just has to wait at Her Majesty’s Pleasure; which is the way a gaol term was described in the old days. You did time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, which could be quite a stretch or even a lifetime.

  He is a real gent is Mr Philip Opas and just has to hack the extreme absence of good breeding. He just wishes that they would get on with it, as he is aware of time running out.

  But his time, in fact, has already run out. To his considerable dismay, Opas is informed coldly at the end of his long day that in fact the Queen has simply been far too busy trying to keep up with all of her interviews and his time is now up. He will have to make a new appointment to see her about the Antipodean murderer, Ryan.

  He is taken aback by this new dramatic setback and explains that time is of the essence for his client. But they are implacable: he must simply reschedule. He requests a new appointment for early the next day, a Friday as it transpires, but they smile grimly and explain that Fridays are not good for Her Majesty and to come back on the following Tuesday. Without even receiving an appointment card, he is rapidly ushered out.

  He has just enough money on him to prop at the Mayfair Hotel in one of their cheaper rooms: at least it has a telephone and a not-bad bed.

  He cannot do that much over the weekend but re-read his brief and his hand-lettered notes and just hang on until the following Tuesday afternoon, very late in the afternoon as it happens. He tries to be philosophical as best he can but time is getting away with murder.

  He breakfasts upon the English interpretation of baked beans, since they are cheap as well as not too bad, and he possesses not much money in his skeleton-thin wallet. He meets with Australian officials on every level to try to guarantee his last-ditch Royal Interview but no such guarantees can be given. Her Majesty keeps her own schedule and no appointments can be added or altered.

  He is on the phone back home to Australia at his own expense and, instead of any faint ray of hope, everything is black as treacle back there despite the protests and public uproar and newspaper articles coming out against the hanging. The cabinet is on track to go ahead with it on time: the infamous third day of February of 1967 is Ronald’s doomsday.

  Philip Opas must feel let down – or perhaps ‘betrayed’ is a smidge more accurate. He tries to keep a good face on it and goes over and over just exactly what he should say to the Queen herself when the new time comes up. He cannot possibly rest or sleep, so he just paces up and down the cramped room at the hotel and wishes that there was more he could do. But there is nothing at all that he can do. He just has to sweat it out until he sees her.

  Eventually the day of the rescheduled appointment arrives. But, as he impatiently sits in the stuffy overheated reception area, staring fixedly at his watch, Opas is informed that time is no longer running out, it has in fact come to a stop. She has cancelled him altogether and he just cannot believe it. He has come all this long way, putting up with every unexpected minor calamity and major hindrance and the incredible boredom of the wait, counting every coin in his wallet, and then she just up and drops him.

  The promise of the interview is null and void, it is quashed for good, trashed for the trash that it was. Philip Opas is devastated that the last rays of hope have dwindled away to nothing. How must he feel, the poor chap, as he checks out of the hotel and catches the tube to Heathrow Airport with nothing at all in his bag. Nothing comes from nothing and he has the ignominious luck to head back home to Melbourne with only heartbreak to show for his pilgrimage.

  How tired he is, and exhausted in both brain and spirit, to not see the Queen in respect of his client, the one he drew at the office at chambers in Queen Street, the one he understands is in so much trouble, more trouble than anyone he’s ever met or briefly known in his years of advocacy and court appearances defending other clients in their troubles; some innocent, some undoubtedly not innocent, but all under law of the land deserving the chance to be heard properly. Isn’t that our law?

  He has the poor fortune to be late for his flight but just squeaks in and is shown to his seat in economy. On the bumpy flight, with plenty of nauseating updrafts and downdrafts, he studies a newspaper, an Australian one with the inevitable portrait of Ryan on the front page and a headline stating how little time he has left. The anguish upon Philip Opas is inestimable and the pressure is making him sick.

  Once again, he hopscotches by various modes of aircraft from England to Australia via uninteresting islands and packed-full airports and more and more inexplicable delays. Chronic food poisoning is the order of the day, and the order of the nights as well.

  It takes close to a week to get back to his small office at Owen Dixon Chambers in Melbourne’s Queen Street and report all of the edgy details and frustrations and insults. What must the life of Opas be like six weeks before the un-cancelled appointment at D Division, with Ronald following all the newspaper columns and essays as best he can and doing his best to concentrate? It’s so difficult to concentrate with the noose looming.

  To make matters even more of an upheaval, Dorothy finally issues divorce proceedings. She explains in a letter to Ronald that their old life was nothing but a joke, a nightmare in actuality, and that it is much happier for all concerned if they legally separate. Imagine, if you can, Ronald’s feelings.

  And while he feels them, he still has to do the blue-stones every morning, and on and on into the night. He must still pound away like the slave that he is. Every mole on his back is owned by the gaol and every single hair on his head is owned by the hangman. All his story needs is for that public servant to come and then the story is over.

  In the final weeks, a sort of nightmare occurs in the most seemingly genteel city on earth. It is extremely rare for Melbourne people to speak up or out, but at last a great many do and most irate and hoarse and righteous they have become. Melbourne people hardly ever get together, let alone demonstrate their emotions over something as violent as a hanging. But this was the 1960s. This was the times of the Melbourne Film Festival and New Wave Everything and Lolita the lovely banned book and the air was full of s
ophistication, The Seekers and The Enlightenment, hopefully.

  Thousands of righteous religious words stream forth, plus pious articles and outspoken broadcasts. In congregations and trade union headquarters and university tutorials, the social injustice of what is going on fires up people who seldom feel fired up about anything. It seems safe to say that this Ryan affair is different. It truly and lastingly matters and people, thousands upon thousands who normally don’t fuss about government policy, speak up in the most impassioned way.

  So they gather, and they sing Christian songs of solace outside the gaol’s thick rocky walls. And there they set up camp, in makeshift homes of trees and canvas, chanting in protest against Government Approved Murder. It is so unlike Melbourne citizens to do a thing like that, to sing out, to ring out, to raise their indignant voices in their normally quiet and ever so psalm-like parishes of shyness and dignity.

  Priests of every denomination speak out loud and long to their congregations in the hope it will get through to the Liberal Party Cabinet; however nothing does and the date remains fixed. The dreadful date of the absolutely finite third day in February remains the one highlight on the cabinet’s diary.

  Has Ronald a diary in his cramped cell? All he has is the battered black copy of the Catholic Holy Bible to consider and to hopefully console his restless and racked young body up until his appointment with the hanging fellow; someone coming along the gallows pretty soon to soothe away all his terror and dispatch him to what he vaguely imagines Paradise to be. Could that be the mighty Murray River again where he swam with his happy sisters long back and caught not-bad amounts of redfin?