Remember Ronald Ryan (12 page)

FIRST
GUARD
: Did you ever see him? Or speak to him?

SECOND
GUARD
: No.

FIRST
GUARD
: Then what is there to remember? A petty crim who stole hundreds of motormowers and kept them in a warehouse.

SECOND
GUARD
: He was kind.

The two
GUARDS
complete their duties, put the mops and buckets away.

Governor Grindlay's office. After the hanging we see
GOVERNOR
GRINDLAY
sitting stunned in his tiny cramped office.

GRINDLAY
: Something there was good in him. But not burglary. No-one can sanctify him. Nothing can resurrect him. Christ forgive him. I see him most nights when I pray for him. The spit of his mother. A pathological hatred of authority. Why were we friends? So different. I watched him go through. I was standing from here to where you are. I could've touched his shoulder. I had him body-searched when he came back from Sydney. My people wanted to fix him up for shooting Hodson. I said when he hangs he will be as clean as that. And he was. Not a mark on him when he was hanged. Clean as a whistle. Clean soul inside him. I pray for you, Ron. Someone has to. You and George. I knew you both. Remember Ronald Ryan.

GRINDLAY
closes his eyes in earnest prayer. Blackout.

‘Cool Water' returns for the curtain call.

THE END

CHARACTER

RONALD RYAN

SETTING

The condemned cell, Coburg Prison.

The set is the condemned cell at Coburg Prison on 2nd February 1967.

It is filth itself with rusty barbed wire surrounding the dusty louvres of its solitary window.

RYAN
, sometimes but not for very long, gets up on his stretcher bed and peers through it.

He is garbed in disillusioning harsh pants and horrid top with printed black arrows.

He looks positively ghoulish.

His hair is his only vanity and this he oils and brooms with a busted plastic blue comb.

He is preparing to either be hanged or liberated at eight the next morning.

On a grotesque desk he keeps a dusty copy of the Catholic Bible.

And a few prison-issue envelopes for his correspondence.

He has a razor with which to shave.

He has a stick of broken shaving cream.

He has 100 minutes to live.

He is feverishly pacing and then feverishly still as a stone.

Lights up as
RYAN
fronts the audience.

He is precisely like a river current which has stopped.

One lace on his exhausted gymnasium shoes is untied.

He is very close to the audience, on edge as well as nonchalant.

Hundred minutes left so don't walk out on me my darlings

You are the beloved ones remember

You turned up to see me hang or walk relatively free

There is no harm but the harm

The hours one of those just stepped in to see me

An hour it was who liberated me and listened to me with such care

The hour sat down and leant his chin on his other arm

Like an obedient child

Like an obedient bird

Like an old longing in my home

Which is D Division

Last night the earth stopped and I began to breathe simultaneously

Thank you David Copperfield

What am I saying?

The first Coburg tram has just rumbled over Sydney Road

The first baby just got born not far from Jordan my home

I want to travel to Jordan and do time with my redeemer Christ Almighty

Who shall forgive me for murder as He knew more than I about how that felt

They hanged the thing they couldn't understand

They pinned him up personally on the bloodstained board

The one person who could've helped

Not just me but all of the bickering butcher-heads of the world

The ones who run the program and ruin the result

The ones who tip scorn far in

Tip it right in the writers and thinkers who make Stalin look left-wing and alternative

We are ruled by reactionaries who failed kindergarten

Illiterate Premiers

Poisonous parsons

Evil architects such as the parasites who designed this jail in windy Coburg

Where the wind goes to die and all the fairies commit suicide in their filmy fashion

I'm a fairy telling you

Besides I heard what I'm saying already whispered by children in Bell Street

So it must be true

Last night they shifted every single criminal out of D Division just to let me have it

Just to stick it up me

That I'd have no fellow murderer to speak to or joke with

I was all alone in D Division

With merely the ghost of myself to talk to

And bot a smoke from

And thieve his last match therefore and inhale a last gasp of throat cancer on the house

We sat thus my mortal ghost and my heavenly shade and we laughed a great deal

And I was for a time frightened I'd drown my Catholic Bible

Leant to me by the old Salvation Army bird who comes here each day without fail

And she reads from it to my one working ear canal

But I don't take it in much as I'd like to take the lessons in in sin

I'm a sinner and they have convinced me of that solemn fact by George

George Hodson

I'll do you

I'll be you

They're hanging me because we were good friends in here

Where's your English accent now you need it George?

Give it away Ryan you haven't got a chance

Give it away and come back to me and they'll give you life and not swing you

Swing you for murdering poor old me!

You shot me five times including the shells from the fellow guards who murdered me!

Why does everyone want to murder me!

I was dead drunken and every other officer was dead drunken

We made home-made Scotch in the big still on the west tower out of indolence

Out of boredom in other words

I know you collect words like pardon

That's the only word will spring you like a trapped bird my old friend

I came at you and you couldn't even see me in that bright morning sunlight could you Ryan?

You said there was too much glare to see a single thing that hot morning

But witnesses said and testified and crucified you that you shot me

And they claimed they beheld gun smoke arrive out of the breech

But your thieved rifle did not produce gun smoke and it didn't work anyway

And my fellow drunken officers murdered their fellow officer

By shooting me into a sheet of Jarlsberg

I didn't think that was in excellent taste

And I gave myself extreme unction outside jail that hot morning

I span round and round holed with big bullets like a Jarlsberg

And with bubbling hot bitumen all over my nice kind face I fell down quite dead in fact

Right in front of put-out tram travellers who looked worse than what I did

And that Ronald is saying something dear boy

You were shrewd to escape right on Christmas and showed no initiative

Just as you shall show none getting hung in public tomorrow like a side of beef

I managed to whisper ‘The Lord's Prayer' as my eyes went out And immediately up to heaven old Georgie Boy went!

I am very sorry I shot you George and they have made me believe that

That I knelt and went into a kangaroo shooter position because I used to do that for a quid in the scrub

But I never did and you never did accept my apology for the rabid public believing I did you to death

We used to play chess in different divisions until they shoved me here in D

And we got on and so forth and so fifth as Ian Grindlay used to say

Our Governor who was like the brother I didn't get in the rough and tumble of life

He respected me and told his wife Audrey I had potential and that's correct I have potential indeed!

But not in the new place they shoved me in

The Condemned Cell which is no place for Catholics

No place for forgiveness and mercifulness or the shade of George Hodson my only friend in D.

You were so tanked when you came out and called out for me to give myself up

Drinking all that grog with your fellow officers in hundred-degree heat Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie!

Why am I talking so hard?

Why don't I give the soliloquy away—sell it to an op shop for ten cents or something!

But Christ Almighty makes you speak directly to his father who writes poems in His spare time!

He personally wrote the Genesis which is my favourite poem in the whole history of poetry!

I talk in order to understand

Understand what the prison is doing to me in about seventy minutes or so

Assist me to make amends upon the end of a rope for a thing I didn't do and they all know it

No-one here wants me to hang but it is of course a fait accomplice

The Government intend it and they need to win the April State election by a wider margin

The Premier Henry Bolte doesn't care one way or another

But the others around him salivate for me and come unbidden just for me!

The Cabinet intend it

The Cabinet intend it

The Cabinet intend it

To win the vote they are intending to kill the thing they love

Which is me the Irish-looking guy

The square-jawed and the boxer's nose and the fitness like a long-distance cyclist

Like a man

They need to kill the last living man

To win the election they shall kill the last living no-hoper!

Whatever.

It could be much worse than much worse in fact it could be terrible naturally

Imagine if my wife saw it and then my children were made to look at it happen to their daddy

My three daughters made to look and not in their infantile visions

But in actuality like the actual gibbet

The actual gibbet road-tested to hang errant Catholics still on Earth!

My head in a basket and my kids to see that come off their daddy!

For something I did not ever do!

I wept blood I did when they buried you dear George!

Nobody but the Governor understood I loved you George!

The guards loved you the hardest and they wept without stint for your spirit!

But I shaved my head and bowed like a true supplicant to get my prayers to you in heaven, boy!

And you told me you liked it when George I called you boy!

Because you were just a boy like me and we were friends in our fashion dear boy of mine!

I got out with a man I didn't know or like

He was Peter Walker but I didn't know his name when we escaped that day

I liked his brutality and suaveness which I naturally already possessed

He was so strong he could pulverise bluestone boulders all of the long day inside

That's what we called jail

Inside

You are inside or having another baby outside

Which is only fair and right in suburbia

I lived in suburbia but I didn't pay rent and had the phone on for free

In Richmond

It was the terrace you have when you don't have a hovel

15 Cotter Street it was

My wife Dorothy was given it by the Mayor of Brighton

Her father George

I was happy to shift in and we had three kids there

Licking the last bit of myra plum jam out of the big tin of it that lasted a year easily

The coppers had the phone tapped

It was rather trying to get through to my wife when I was out on a job

Ringing in from the bush

And hearing heavy senior sergeant breathing and constable gasping

I was a natural-born thief

Born in the Great Depression

A bit before in Balranald in New South Wales actually

My old man ran a bird sanctuary and charged innocent people a halfpenny a look at bowerbirds

He was a bowerbird himself the old cheese

And on the side he dragged the bloated corpses of drowned cows out of water channels

Claiming someone had to do it

I screamed weeping blood on a dirt floor of his vile shanty

Even when I hanged in my last dreams I never saw him not once

Because he declined to transmit a loving signal my way

He celebrated the here and now

I sing to liberate my hanging man

I sing when I wake in the Condemned Cell

With the vigil starting up I can hear them going into ‘Holy Night' out there in Sydney Road

All them mothers and fathers of Melbourne who assumed it was the Swinging Sixties

Only too real now

Only me to front the trapdoor which opens to remembrance

Memories of seaside holidays so brief as to be phantoms of the working classes

Memories of hot train rides to Brighton Beach that dissolved in sugar in my prison cup

Why did I enter that warehouse armed in the first instance I wonder?

Like all criminals you take that which isn't yours but you make it yours by having it!

Good Lord I'm going to laugh!

This is the natural criminal's pickle, his lament, surely to gold watches!

Some moron drops his watch at the races and it's suddenly dangling on your own arm

The freckled one with seventeen Timex watches winking away at the pawnbroker!

I can hear them setting up down there

I can hear the Christians singing each to each

I do not think that they shall sing for me

I slept badly last night for some obscure reason which eludes me now I am fully conscious

I must have been dreaming Pip was with me again in D Division

Pip my favourite daughter

She goes to Auburn Central School and told me she hit her head on her locker

I hit it so hard dear Daddy when the Phys Ed teacher he came along the glossy corridor

I was listening intently to your execution on radio 3DB on my transistor radio

And the Phys Ed guy he says what are you doing Pip banging your head all the time on your school locker?

And I says that's my father they're hanging in Sydney Road jail out at windy Coburg!

He is being murdered right out there condoned by the Roman Catholic Church!

I thought they were just and merciful but they are pagans!

And the teacher says he didn't know I was Ryan's daughter or Ryan's anything!

My mother she changed our name by deed poll when Dad got caught up in Sydney!

So I wanted to listen intently to the radio when the teacher he came along like that!

I told my other sisters and all they done was produce a light sort of humming noise like purest sorrow

Sorrow uncut

Sorrow manifest

Sorrow like the sound the human throat makes when your dad is murdered in Coburg!

My sisters they produced the same humming effect

Similar to the effect of human disbelief and inhuman hanging of your daddy in Coburg!

They hanged my father who was in love with us sisters and his poor demented wife Dorothy Ryan!

All them journalists watching him shoot down through time passing through the trap

Father John giving Daddy extreme unction under the trap a second later

The mystical miracle herb chrysm

Father knew from his training to run it into Daddy's nostrils and under his lovely clown's eyes