Ronald Ryan and Peter Walker became Australia’s two most infamous criminals went they escaped from Pentridge in broad daylight, taking the prison priest and then a warder hostage as they made their way to the middle of Sydney Road where the warder hostage was shot dead. Rumour always had it that he was accidently killed by gunfire from the prison wall but in any case, the two convicts were on the run for two months and everyone hid under their beds if you were to believe the press. They did kill again too, Walker shooting a shady truck driver in a public dunny in Middle Park.
The significance of it all, though, was that Ronald Ryan would become the last man hanged in Australia, the public protest bringing an end to capital punishment as a result. Now Ryan was a bad man and quite deserved his fate, even if it was a miscarriage of justice, but that couldn’t change the fact that there was grave doubt about all this that has never been tidied up. It was Walker (who no one considered executing) who shot the truckie, and there was always doubt about who shot the warder. So how come they hanged Ryan? Because State Premier Henry Bolte needed a distraction from relevations concerning his own corruption, they say.
It is a question we will return to.
“... And Saul had a concubine whose name was Rizpah...” 2 samuel iii, 7
From this single line, Charles E Israel contrived the biography of the lass Rizpah, and through her eyes told the tale of Samuel and Saul, Jonathan and David, Abner and all the rest. Given his name (apparently real), he probably had no other choice. It was just like the bible with sex scenes and blood added and the poetry removed.
Sodom and Gomorrah by Robert Wormser—the book is just plain awful in every way—and the film is similarly regarded by many critics, but that isn’t really fair. It has it’s moments, and if the decadence is disappointingly prudish, there are plenty of fine cleavages on display.
Granger makes a stately Lot, but the bit where he gets seduced by both daughters is left out of the film. However, the battle scenes are more thoughtfully staged than in most epics. Nevertheless, you suspected that the twin cities were blown off the face of the earth not because they were decadent (there's hardly a sin to be seen anywhere) but to put them out of the misery of their tedious lives. Except for the fact that the Americans weren’t the first to use an atomic bomb on people, God was.
The search for the actual location (and therefore the existence) of the twin cities is carried out by Christians with all the fervour of the hunt for Noah’s ark. They think it will prove the truth of Genesis. No luck so far.
Gullible tourists are shown this as a likely candidate for the pillar of salt but it's made of limestone and about twenty feet too tall to be Mrs Lot. Serious geologists say that if the cities do exist, they are most likely to be under the bed of the Dead Sea.
