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TOMORROW is the 40th anniversary of the last judicial hanging in Australia, the execution in Melbourne of Ronald Ryan for the shooting murder of prison officer George Hodson, 41, during an escape from Pentridge Prison in 1965.

Apart from an occasion to remember Australia's last official neck-breaking, the anniversary of Ryan's hanging will be observed as a signal moment in our political history: it marks the event that prompted state governments still retaining the death penalty to cut the crimson thread running through Australia's history and abolish capital punishment.

We remember Ryan now as an unlikely candidate for the gallows, a small-time crook whose sanctioned execution by the Victorian government of Liberal premier Sir Henry Bolte caused a firestorm of community opposition, the scale and intensity of which dwarfs most modern-day protests.

It ensured that no government anywhere in the country would politically risk imposing the death penalty again. Victoria abolished the penalty in 1975. The last state to do so, Western Australia, abolished it in 1984.

Ryan's historical notoriety derives from his being the last man to hang but also from the extraordinary campaign of public and media protest mounted in his name in the summer of 1966-67. For many of the protesters, myself included, the hanging of Ryan represents an important moment in their political awakening.

As a child, Victorian Premier Steve Bracks argued with his father about the Ryan hanging, and he counts the case as significant in his political development. The late Tasmanian premier Jim Bacon, who spent his teenage years in Victoria, said he, too, was politicised by the execution.

The hanging propelled me into involvement with the Labor Party as well. As a university student organising the campus protests in which students from across the political spectrum mounted a round-the-clock vigil on the steps of Parliament House in January 1967, I felt revulsion at the idea of such a coldblooded judicial killing. That feeling of disgust has never left me. Most present-day Australians who were teenagers or older in 1967 can tell you exactly where they were at 8am on February 3 in that year.

For those who had some more prominent role to play in the execution drama, the emotional scars run even deeper and, 40 years on, those still with us say they will never get over it. A prominent TV journalist covering the execution threw up in a prison toilet after witnessing the hanging, and spoke in favour of abolition for years afterwards. Another journalist witness, Brian Morley, from 3AW, went to the execution with an open mind about the death penalty. To this day he cannot speak about what he saw without weeping.

I was not aware until he spoke about it at the launch of my biography of Ryan in 2002 that Barry Jones, who led the anti-hanging campaign in 1967, had been so emotionally affected by Ryan's execution that he had never so much as referred to it in public till then. "I felt a terrible sense of personal responsibility for Ronald Ryan's death," Jones writes in his just published autobiography. "If I had worked harder, networked more effectively, thought more strategically, would the outcome have been different?"

Thoughts of personal responsibility also had an impact on a central but unlikely figure in the case. I know from my interviews many years ago with Justice Sir John Starke that he was deeply affected by Ryan's hanging. Starke was a life-long abolitionist, who by a quirk of fate found himself on the Supreme Court bench as the trial judge in Ryan's prosecution for murder, and was bound to pass the mandatory death sentence when a guilty verdict was reached by the jury. I am quite sure that Starke worried about Ryan and his meeting with the hangman until the day he died in 1994.

As the years have rolled by, new generations appear intrigued by the Ryan story, and public fascination has not diminished. So what was it about the Ryan case that has created this enduring interest and concern among many Australians, this blaze of anger that smoulders still for some of us as milestones such as the present one approach?

It was surely the dramatic nature of the case itself, but it was also the cultural and political climate of the 1960s, when all kinds of established social mores were under challenge from a more confident and assertive generation of Australians.

Certainly, the Ryan case was marked with tragedy and drama from the beginning. The biggest police manhunt in the state's history followed the escape, particularly after Ryan and Peter Walker, who escaped with him, committed still further offences. They first staged an armed hold-up of a Melbourne suburban bank four days after the break-out, Ryan telling bank staff and customers that the rifl e he was brandishing had already killed a man. Several days later, the body of an associate was discovered in a Middle Park toilet, shot by Walker, who apparently believed he and Ryan were about to be betrayed to police.

There was widespread and genuine fear in the Melbourne community when the escapees were at large: parents kept their teenage children at home from parties, cinema attendances dropped off and calls reporting putative sightings of Ryan and Walker were hitting the police switchboard at the rate of one every 10 minutes. People feared they would encounter the fugitives in their backyards, armed and dangerous. While the escapees were at large, they were the most wanted men in Australia, and they came to be regarded as feared bogeymen and the embodiment of criminal evil.

Ryan and Walker avoided recapture for 17 days during which this intense community anxiety continued and saturation media coverage of the police manhunt ensued. A cabinet minister in the Victorian Government, John Rossiter, was later to describe the period when Ryan and Walker were at large as "a reign of terror" in which the "veneer of law and order in the . . . community is not very thick".

It can scarcely be said that the enduring nature of public interest in the Ryan case has been animated by residual belief in Ryan's innocence. His defence counsel, Philip Opas, QC, now in his 90th year, steadfastly maintains that Ryan was not guilty of the murder that saw him go to the scaffold. Opas became convinced of Ryan's innocence because of discrepancies in the witness evidence. Most opponents of the hanging accepted Ryan's guilt, as I do, but argue that capital punishment has no place in a civilised society, and that Ryan was, in any event, an inappropriate candidate for the gallows.

Ryan was a recidivist offender and he did have grandiose fantasies of becoming Australia's leading criminal, but there were redeeming features in his make-up and he showed promise of better. For my book, I interviewed former Pentridge prison governor Ian Grindlay about Ryan. He had stood next to Ryan on the gallows, so close he could have reached out and touched him as he stood on the edge of doom. He had got to know Ryan well when he was serving a term of imprisonment in the 1960s at the Bendigo Training Prison when Grindlay had been governor there.

Grindlay expressed a high regard for Ryan. "By the way you're talking," I asked, "Ryan sounds like a model prisoner?" "No, not a model prisoner," Grindlay replied. "In my 30 years in the prison service, Ryan was the model prisoner." Ryan confessed his guilt to Grindlay the night before the hanging, saying that he had fired to prevent Hodson capturing Walker: "I did shoot him. But I didn't mean to kill him . . . only to stop him," Ryan said.

Grindlay was deeply affected by the execution and his health suffered badly because of it. A devout Catholic, he would say a prayer for Ryan every day of his life until his own death in 1984.

Mike Richards is author of The Hanged Man: The Life and Death of Ronald Ryan (Melbourne, Scribe, 2002), which won the Ned Kelly Prize in 2002, and was runner-up in the National Biography Award in 2003.

See also:

http://www.castles.me.uk/...ading-tower-of-london.htm

For something of a little history and strange interest...