Barry Dickins - Last Words: The Hanging of Ronald Ryan

Barry Dickins wrote the stage play Remember Ronald Ryan for the Playbox Theatre Company, which won the Louis Esson Prize for Drama at the Victorian Premiers Awards in 1995 as well as the Amnesty Prize For Peace Through Art in the same year.

This is the way these true events have come to life in Barry Dickins imagination.

I dedicate Last Words to Mrs Jan Bush, one of Ronald Ryans daughters, who gave me such gruelling and heartrending stories Ive never forgotten, and to the memory of her mother Dorothy, who is the last loving word upon Ronald.

Contents

Last Words is the story of the political hanging of Ronald Ryan on 3 February 1967 at Melbournes Pentridge Prison. A hanging that occurred in spite of a vigil led by Christian groups, trade unionists, law students from Monash and a vast number of ordinary families. A hanging that was the first to occur in Australia after an absence of 20 years and that thankfully remains our last.

Ronald Ryan was found guilty of murdering Officer George Hodson on 19 December 1965 when he escaped Pentridge in the company of a fellow prisoner called Peter Walker.

But was he guilty?

I say no. Officer Hodson was shot and killed on Sydney Road, but it wasnt Ryan who pulled the trigger. It was two gaol officers, trying to stop him in his tracks from a tower, who unfortunately werent too accurate: two gaol officers who later killed themselves because they felt so much guilt about having killed the wrong man.

This is the story of what happens to a condemned man before he is hanged, as well as the trauma that is endured by his family. This is a story of political opportunism of Premier Henry Boltes decision to go ahead with capital punishment in order to win the upcoming Victorian election on a law-and-order ticket.

This is the story of a miscarriage of justice.

Barry Leonard Dickins
April 2016

I T WAS INDEED very difficult to believe the law and I am one who has always loved the law could go ahead and speed the hanging of Ronald Ryan on the third of February 1967. He was supposed to have slain a prison officer called George Hodson a couple of years earlier when, in the strange company of an escapee he didnt know, he got over Pentridge Prisons bluestone wall. According to witnesses, he shot Officer Hodson at point blank range with a rifle he pinched from another officer.

But what exactly did these witnesses witness?

The jury at Ronald Ryans murder trial was told that they saw rifle smoke come out of the breech of Ryans carbine. But it was the sort of carbine that made no smoke. The jury was intimidated to believe what witnesses swore they saw, even though what they saw simply didnt exist. I suppose you could call that stress.

Ryan also defied logic with his choice of escapee: a Mr Peter Walker who, at the ripe old age of 78, today resides in a much newer gaol, having got done for ice trafficking and hydroponic marijuana freelance distribution. (He got all that going at the rear of a dilapidated post office in the bush, where he paid no rental monies and just did what he liked as recently as 2015.)

Ryan apparently chose Walker, a man he barely knew, to break out with because he was as strong as an ox. Physical strength would come in handy, of course, while hopping up a vast hot bluestone wall and when one is on the run. When they managed to make it onto Champ Street, which is still there in Coburg, on that baking hot day, and shots were fired from the tower above, witnesses heard Walker cry out Whats your name again?

At the time Ryan was holding George Hodson at bay with a rifle hed recently thieved. Walker, meanwhile, had got a rusty old Simca Aronde going by hot-wiring it; he knew the old lark of twisting some silver foil off a Cherry Ripe wrapper and, after a bit of bullshit, the Simca Aronde roared into questionable life and Walker, still not knowing Ryans name, cried out Ive got it going!

Which brings us to the two good officers in the tower above Champ Street. They fired down at Ryan, as two good officers would do, but unluckily their aim was bad. Both the bullets hit Hodson and ripped right through him. He had been pleading with a sweaty Ryan at the time to Give it away! because You havent got a chance; last words that proved prophetic enough because Ronald Ryan, his entire life through, never really did have a chance.

People waiting for the Flinders Street tram at the Sydney Road tram stop on that sweltering day saw Officer Hodson reel back after being struck hard with two bullets coming from the direction of the tower. They saw him spin in a very rapid-fire way in a series of unsteady circles. As well as being obese, he was drunk from the Christmas booze-up that all the officers on the towers were engaged in. (Thats another reason why Ryan picked the nineteenth of December to get out on: he thought that most of the guards would be drunk. And he was right, they were right out of it.)

Officer Hodson, fatally shot and just about dead, swung that obese body around for the time, and crashed to his doom right in front of Flinders Street tram travellers. And, believe me when I tell you, they werent just shocked by the assassination and all the screaming of witnesses and Walker savagely tooting the horn of the pinched Simca Aronde escape vehicle and also the nauseating repeat horn sound of the Mr Whippy van as its driver tried to run over both prisoners. The other emotion experienced by those conservative tram travellers was annoyance at being made late.

Hell hath no fury like a righteous prig on public transport. Our kind will not be held up by anything, least of all a murder.

It was perfect and complete chaos at the tram stop 100 yards away, with people just doing their thing as they waited for a tram. They can be notoriously slow on the Coburg line, of course, and you need the patience of a saint to just stand there and philosophically fry in the sun and hope and pray that a city one turns up before you melt. But can you picture the scene as though you were also observing an overweight, boozed-up and blood-splattered prison officer as he swirled to his death on the molten tar? The day was over 107 degrees in the old imperial measurement of heat. The asphalt was so hot it was liquefying.

When I was researching a play on Ronald Ryan back in 1992, I was given a large, crystal-clear, black-and-white photo of Hodson as he lay hunched on the bubbling hot tar. And in a way I wish I hadnt been, as it has haunted me ever since. It depicts his horrified expression: terrified eyes staring, prison-issue cap still on. A police photographer, instantaneously there on the scene, had snapped it for the record, then filed it away, and in the end a nice lady from Police Homicide gave it to me to assist me, and encourage me with my studies, for the sake of the stage play.

I dont know how many times Ive looked at that grisly photograph and wondered what it must have felt like to be poor George Hodson, who was a most friendly, genial sort of gentleman and used to play checkers with Ronald Ryan before the great escape.

It was an iconic escape but a bungled one too. They really oughtnt to have done it. It was considered impossible to get through all the incredible obstacles, such as razor-sharp chicken wire and tetanus-embedded shards of filthy glass that were specially designed to snag the sinning ankles of any would-be escaper. But Ryan and Walker did it. They scrambled like rats across what inmates called No Mans Land.