Last Words

by Dickins, Barry

  The daughters in a bad sort of dream view the television set in the corner of the living room and meekly see the Channel 9 news bulletin where their late father tops the bill. They turn the sound right down, stare at their late father’s face and feel as sick and violated as can be.

  They eventually watch some other sort of program as escapism and see to their mother in her bedroom. She is unable to speak for four or so days: her throat and voice box just produce a sort of honking noise, a noise of purest grief.

  Father Brosnan sits with Governor Grindlay in his office and they tentatively sip at too-hot cups of tea together and sort of look at the heap of fresh newspapers piled on the top of his desk. There is nothing to say. Grindlay is paler than Ryan’s ghost, and Father not too far behind.

  Around the prison, there are hardly any more protestors and the sudden silence gongs just like those big church bells they all heard before, right on eight o’clock, when they heard each peal and clap and reverberation, gonging Ronald’s body into modern history.

  Chapter 18

  THE CABINET ARE satisfied that the law has had its way and that they shall romp home in the upcoming election. The premier has shown sworn devotion to duty and absolute mercilessness over wrongdoers, which is of course the exact same thing.

  Inside his wonderful palace of an office, in his stuffy but luxuriant big padded cell of an office, Premier Bolte takes his first shit of the day and like a pig he smokes on the imperial lavatory for the stinking peasant he really is. He puffs clouds of vile cigarette smoke over the toilet wall so it cascades across the office and eventually lands in the mouth and nostrils of Dick Hamer, who one day will be premier himself, and wishes that Henry would give up the habit.

  Dan Webb from Channel 7 does an interview with the relaxed premier on the warped steps of parliament a few minutes after eight in the morning and he asks the premier, ‘What were you doing at eight this morning, Premier?’ and Bolte grins broadly and says ‘the three S’s’ which means ‘Shit, shower, shave’, and the majority of voting Victorians laugh like anything at that barbaric remark and make their minds up to give him their vote next month because Bolte is a real man.

  At morning tea, he drifts off mentally for several seconds whilst the press buzz around him like blowflies trying to capture one of his cow manure bon mots.

  The protestors and families who have sung the Christian hymns of forgiveness have discovered no forgiveness over the weeks they have congregated to show with passivity and force of will their opposition to the hanging and they have camped by the walls and they have committed the same walls to memory.

  Now they must wander back home.

  Some still stand in the side streets surrounding Pentridge Prison because they have stood there for weeks, singing out their heartfelt protests, to no avail now. They still sing though, some of them, even though it is over. They don’t require home and tea on the table. They require the state to alter its mind but it has no mind to alter.

  All around the vast gaol there are remnants of where protestors camped. There are makeshift tents and crude canopies and bent old placards swinging away in a truant summer’s breeze and empty takeaway coffee cups and piles of cigarette butts and sun umbrellas that afforded temporary cover from the blasting furnace of the sun that was among the worst hot spells ever recorded for Melbourne. It was the equal in heat to the unreal temperature just before Ryan and Walker miraculously hopped over the big wall back in ’65.

  The television cameramen don’t want to film anything anymore and the jump-stump orators don’t want to vacate their improvised vantage points and scuffed stepladders from where they have whimpered and ranted and bleated and prayed and watched the minister Clyde Holding himself get bashed by the cops and turfed into the back of a police van for speaking out against the hanging.

  If they do that to one of their own, what won’t they do?

  The hangman wanders back to the Grindlays’ manse and repacks his scuffed leather cases. He has bags of time to kill, having killed his client, and fair dinkum he feels rather famished. So he says goodbye to the ones who put him up and heads off to piping hot Sydney Road for a juicy souvlaki and a refreshing black coffee to satisfy his latest cravings.

  The anxious, sleepless daughter of Officer George Hodson is weeping in her church for the lost soul and lost spirit possessed of Ronald Ryan, a man whom she loves as a perfect Christian lady loves a sinner and she is crook on herself for not doing much more to save him from the bloodthirsty gallows. But in truth she couldn’t have done more.

  The vast majority of Victorians, however, celebrate the hanging and chink glasses in cheerful pubs. They will happily give their vote to such a strong and iron-willed premier, who will never ever relinquish his elected duty to protect them. And if that means a hanging, then he is happy to provide one that the wrongdoer shall never ever forget in his life. ‘Henry’ as they love to call Bolte, is good to them and jovial and jokes with them and loves fun, loves to smoke and drink. He may be a drunkard, for all they know, but every important premier must have his share of weaknesses.

  One wonders what, if anything, Walker felt. They were comrades when they were on the run, after all, and it could’ve easily been him hanged for murder.

  Philip Opas sort of recovers but he is not as sick as Barry Jones, who is so conquered by the going-ahead of the hanging he is completely wiped out by inertia and depression for the first time in his brilliantly scholarly and successful television-star life. Barry Jones simply doesn’t understand how to cope with the hanging once it has occurred. His ethics are telling him one thing but the politics of the day scream another. His mind is like the bawling and brawling bells strung out along Sydney Road, the incessant migraine of much vibrating brass.

  All day on the fatal third of February, he just walks around and around the fabled city he loves and knows every detail of. In the end, he just sits in a profound trance on the time-warped curved wide stone steps underneath all the clocks at Flinders Street Railway Station and cries into his enormous breast pocket handkerchief. He sits in the warped curved stairs under the clocks where generations of people have agreed to meet up and he stares at the common lot just hurrying off to work. The office or the sweet stall, it makes no difference.

  He stares hard and very long at all the ordinary people. Honest or not, happy or sad, it doesn’t matter because they are alive.

  He goes up to his favourite spot to read, which is the State Library in La Trobe Street, and sits trying to find some sort of solace under those friendly green-shaded old reading lamps he has always loved. He’d always thought of them as the unknown and unthanked teachers of the poor who have no books with which to read. Barry is so tired out he simply falls asleep on the lovely smooth-to-the-touch old wooden reading desk, with both his shoelaces untied.

  He just can’t get himself right and in the end he repairs home and slowly and calculatedly takes his aching feet out of his shoes. In his socks, shirt and trousers, he lies on the family bed and stares into the ceiling as though for meaning but he can’t detect any. Ronald was hanged to win Henry office. It just keeps on going around like a deranged chorus in his head all the time; and every single jolly, laughing passing child’s voice singing out, enraptured, since they are happy and they are safe and they are free, is anathema to the Whiz Kid. Barry Jones fought to a standstill to save Ronald but it’s no use and he just has to bear it.

  Ronald’s mother is sitting on a hot old warped street seat in Richmond, wishing she had enough money for a dozen fresh oysters. In the shop window there in Church Street they’ve got lobsters on ice, freshly boiled so as to make the poor drool.

  She wishes lots of stuff but, more than the scrumptiously boiled lobsters and even more than the icy drooling prospect of a dozen fresh oysters, she wishes she and Father had seen Henry that time up at his important rooms at the parliament.

  She wishes she could have said her words of hope to the leader of the parliament; even if he hadn’t listened proper
ly. It would have felt like justice.

  Ronald is hurled in a no-mucking-about fashion into a great pit of quicklime that dissolves his young body pretty much within a week.

  He has no name and no history any longer.

  He has no body and he has nobody. He has no wife or sisters or kids.

  He had 55 cents in the bank at the time and no shares or assets.

  He is over.

  Public life goes on and on, of course, and people write articles of analysis and have sharp things to say and even memorable or historical things to bear in mind. But nothing can bring him back and puff oxygen into his sails again. Not now he’s lost in the lime pit.

  April arrives in the year 1967 and of course the premier is returned. Grateful Victorians would never dream of voting for anybody else, especially after the great strength he showed over the Ryan affair.

  Afterword

  TOM PRIOR USED to write stir-up stories for the Sun News Pictorial at the Herald and Weekly Times Building in Flinders Street and, according to him, he was remarkably popular, although I never heard anybody quote from him. He once told me he won some big award for investigative journalism examining racism by applying Kiwi shoe polish to his face and pretending he was an Aboriginal.

  He was a big, sort of wavy-haired, pugilist-looking man who appeared to be in some sort of perpetual ill-temper.

  He told me over a poisonous cup of Herald and Weekly Times tea in the cafe one day that he watched Ronald get it.

  ‘We had to hand in all these invites, they were huge impressive bloody things like a menu for the Titanic and when we went into the D Division out at gaol there was this eerie sort of thick silence … We just stood there gawking up at him. He was blindfolded and handcuffed at his wrists as well as his trouser-legs. There was no hope he could hop away.’

  We sipped our appalling tea, which was liked by our boss, Rupert Murdoch, and he told me a few other things as well whilst they were on his plate.

  He said a few of the reporters had been drinking not far from gaol, so Ronald would’ve smelled the alcohol on them.

  He said after the hanging he walked back to Sydney Road and was just about completely deafened by all the bells. He’d expected the trams not to be running as a sign of industrial protest but luckily and unluckily they were still going; so he went back to Brighton Beach, where he lived, and switched on the television set to just watch any old thing and free his mind from the violence he’d just witnessed firsthand.

  ‘I just watched cartoons all day to try to forget it. I remember that I handed my great big white embossed invite in when I left and how it resembled an invite to a debutante’s ball.’

  Extra afterword

  IN EARLY MAY of 2016 I was invited to a luncheon with Brian Burke, the barrister who represented Ronald at his Supreme Court murder trial. It was really a case of getting caught in the aspic of modern history, as this man not only knew my subject but wept hard over the execution; for he told me so over an excellent repast furnished by both Julian Burnside QC and William Gillies, my other luncheon companions. The edibles took place at the Savage Club off Little Collins Street on a rainy day with moist lawyers and saturated barristers scurrying about in gorgeous gowns endeavouring to open recalcitrant umbrellas as black as the heavens.

  I hadn’t been to the Savage Club for at least sixteen or so years and had quite forgotten its charms and bewilderments. There’s a rule, for example, that prohibits women from sampling the bon mots and aged cheeses that are archived in a library of stiltons. Some vast examples of these even have the names of barristers engraved on them. I saw these as some were taken from their sarcophagus and presented at table.

  In short, I love it there, and, walking at a leisurely clip up to the door, I beheld Barrister Burke holding on to a large black umbrella in company with Mr Burnside and Mr Gillies and I was ceremoniously ushered into the light at the top of the stairs that seemed to be made of purest bullion.

  After a lot of legalese and charmed tales of murders and homicides and favourite beheadings, the talk got on to Ronald Ryan and I politely inquired of Brian Burke as to what sort of a voice he had whilst alive. He replied that Ronald bore a broad and country sort of vocal range and passed me the salad at once.

  After the meal, which was delicious and of lamb and spuds, we repaired to a sort of late nineteenth-century drawing room, very posh: original oil landscapes, by Penleigh Boyd, resembling heaven; idyllic riverside trees shimmering like our butter at lunch.

  We enjoyed really good coffee here and relaxed awhile together, with me listening to a mixture of gory and gruesome dispatches of people over the centuries and somehow I’d remembered the baffling case of the arm in the shark tank at the Coogee Aquarium Baths.

  I believe it took place in the 1920s or possibly 1930s but the thing was a man’s bulging arm, I think it was the right one from memory, it was no doubt tattooed and someone discovered it and called in the police. They quickly realised, from the knife incisions on the arm, that the person had suffered a grisly end.

  The talk got to Ronald once again and Mr Burke confessed to me that he had liked Ronnie very much and was astonished to see just how strong he was in the lead-up to the hanging.

  He then said that he, Burke, had wept like mad and I stared into my excellent percolated black coffee. Not long after that we left the Savage Club to its stuffed elephants and hand-signed stilton cheeses.

  I asked Mr Burke, who is 87 years old, whether I might see him again and, as he cheerfully opened his vast old-fashioned pitch-black umbrella he said yes, he’d like that.

  I walked up ancient Little Collins Street in an entirely new way because I had experienced history happening to me.

  Acknowledgements

  My acknowledgements are to:

  Mr Sandy Grant, who read the first draft and encouraged me to complete it for publication to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Ronald’s execution.

  Ms Meelee Soorkia, who also gave me faith in the writing; without the faith in the prose there is nothing worth writing home about.

  Mr Eamon Evans for his crispness.

  The late Governor Ian Grindlay, the Governor of Pentridge Gaol, for recollections and kindnesses, as well as to his wife, Audrey, whose descriptions of the hangman have no equal.

  The daughter of Officer George Hodson, Carol Hodson, whose pity for Ronald Ryan seemed practically astonishing since it was her father who was shot; Carol’s practising Christianity has been the greatest acknowledgement of all.

  Published in 2017 by Hardie Grant Books,

  an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

  Hardie Grant Books (Melbourne)

  Building 1, 658 Church Street

  Richmond, Victoria 3121

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  Hardie Grant Books (London)

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  Copyright text © Barry Dickins 2017

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the catalogue of the National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au

  Last Words

  eISBN 978 1 74358 481 1

  Cover design by Andy Warren

 

 

 
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