I experienced a virtual-reality 'execution' (2025)

The jail opened in 1853 and closed in July 1991. In 138 years, not much was done to make it more comfortable. There was no glass in the barred windows of the cells, which could become extremely hot, cold or wet. There was no plumbing either, so most prisoners had to slop out their buckets every morning – right up until 1991.

The three-storey bluestone building maintains its sinister, claustrophobic bearing, although the former offices, small areas of public space and some of the cells are now used as galleries.

The jail has a great collection of death masks (which were sometimes produced in limited, numbered editions upon the deaths of particularly notorious criminals), an exhibition on the history of prison uniforms, and some interesting information about the early representation of gay men and lesbians on Australian television (hint: they often appeared in prison shows).

The night I met my executioner was the official opening of the exhibition End of the Rope: Shadows of Capital Punishment, focusing on Ronald Ryan, the last man hanged in Australia, and the jail was crowded with unusual VIPs.

I arrived with John Killick, a former bank robber who became an underworld legend in 1999 when his Russian girlfriend Lucy Dudko hijacked a helicopter to break him out of Silverwater Prison in New South Wales.

Killick was talking to Doug Morgan, who took part in an apparently superhuman crime spree in the 1970s in which one man sometimes seemed to commit two robberies almost simultaneously. It turned out that Doug had a twin brother, Peter, who was responsible for more than half the heists.

Doug Morgan is now a painter and his portrait of Killick is on display in the jail, among other works of art such as a suit of Ned Kelly-style armour decorated by Geelong’s most-famous former inmate, Mark “Chopper” Read.

“I never knew he’d done that,” said a woman examining the inexplicable six-headed Ned painted on the breastplate. “It’s amazing what you learn coming to these exhibitions. What would I know? I was only his wife.”

She turned out to be Chopper’s life partner, Margaret Cassar, and the mother of their son, Roy (who also turned up looking handsome and dignified, if mildly puzzled). It seems Chopper made four similar suits for the launch party of his beer, Chopper Heavy, and the other three disappeared on the night.

Ronald Ryan’s niece, Veronica Allen, made a speech remembering her uncle, who was hanged in 1967 for shooting dead a warden while escaping from Pentridge in 1965. Allen, like many others, believes that Ryan was innocent and that another prison officer fired the fatal shot. She told me that sadness about the fate of her uncle racked her family for generations.

“I would always see my nana crying and I never knew what that was about,” she said. “Some of the townspeople were quite awful, and I didn’t understand. Mum was always scared of retribution, so she said to us, ‘Don’t say you’re related to him.’ My nana died of a broken heart. And my mum grieved Ron until the day she died.”

Killick was in jail with Ryan on the night Ryan was hanged.

“I used to see him every day,” he told me. “They had a 24-hour watch on him in an observation cell. He had the light on all the time. He had no privacy. It was a terrible situation. They took him out for an hour a day, put a security hood on him and took him down to the exercise yard for a shower and for a walk. And that was Ryan’s life right up until he died.”

Also at the jail for the exhibition’s opening was a man whose father had unknowingly bought and lovingly restored Ryan’s 1952 Standard Vanguard getaway car, and a schoolteacher who had been kidnapped with nine of his pupils by Geelong escapee Ted Eastwood in 1977.

While this strange gathering tucked into wine and cheese, I was led to a cell and fitted with a virtual-reality headset to watch Atalanti Dionysus’s VR movie A Miscarriage of Justice.

At first, I was a close spectator to the last days of Ryan’s life, eavesdropping on his final conversation with a priest, for example (I also caught glimpses of the last woman hanged, Jean Lee, who was executed while sedated in 1951).

Towards the end, rather confrontingly, I actually became Ryan. My sentence was pronounced, I was hooded, the floor appeared to drop out from under me, and I was hanged.

Not before time, some would say.