Remember Ronald Ryan and Ryan: Two plays

Barry Dickins

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781925210149
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

The human and political story of the last man to be executed in Australia, Remember Ronald Ryan won the 1995 Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Dickins portrays the man behind the legend as loveable, cheeky, courageous, and wretched.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%This edition includes a new monologue spoken from Ryan's perspective that 'speaks to a new audience from his poor and unmarked grave'.

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, ...