The play that gave Australia's last hanged man a human face, cheeky and wretched and courageous by turns, carried the name of a Melbourne writer who spent four decades chronicling his own city. Barry Dickins, the playwright, author, artist and teacher behind Remember Ronald Ryan, died on July 13, 2026. He was 76.

Remember Ronald Ryan premiered on September 17, 1994, at the Merlyn Theatre as a Playbox Theatre Company world premiere, directed by Malcolm Robertson and Kim Gelvin-Melville, according to Malthouse Theatre. The play dramatized the case of Ronald Ryan, hanged on February 3, 1967, for the shooting of a prison guard during an escape from Pentridge Prison, and it won the 1995 Victorian Premier's Literary Award. Three decades later, people were still asking Dickins why the case held them. "Something about the larrikin spirit, I'd say," Dickins had written in his introduction to the play, according to writer Jeff Sparrow's essay for Griffith Review. He returned to Ryan's story once more in 2017, retelling it in prose in Last Words: The Hanging of Ronald Ryan.

To write the play, Dickins tracked down people who had been at Pentridge Prison on the morning of the execution and spent long, "boozy sessions" with Father John Brosnan, the Catholic chaplain who accompanied Ryan to the gallows, according to writer Dave Graney in The Adelaide Review. That research, Graney wrote, showed "how much real blood, guts and bone a writer has to get arm deep into" to tell the story straight.

Dickins was born on November 6, 1949, in Reservoir, a working-class suburb in Melbourne's north. He left school early and spent five years in a North Melbourne factory before training as a set painter for television productions at Channel 7. He soon began frequenting La Mama Theatre, where his first play, a translation of Ibsen's Ghosts, was staged in 1974. It was the start of a body of work that grew past fifty plays, nearly all of them produced by independent companies such as the Pram Factory, La Mama and 45 Downstairs rather than the state's major stages, and by one account never found the wider recognition beyond Victoria it deserved.

His subjects ranged as widely as his output: plays and books took on poet Sylvia Plath, opera singer Joan Sutherland, the criminal Squizzy Taylor, actor Frank Thring, playwright Oscar Wilde and painter Brett Whiteley, the last of whom he profiled at length in the 2002 biography Black and Whiteley: Barry Dickins in Search of Brett. His career had started even earlier than the stage, cartooning for The Age before he turned to plays and prose full time. Melbourne's Wheeler Centre, which hosted him at literary events for years, described his writing as marked by "wit, humour and lyricism" and an eye for finding the ridiculous amid pain, a description borne out in lighter work such as his book Barry and the Fairies of Miller Street.

Alongside his writing, Dickins taught English and creative writing in Melbourne schools for 41 years, including stints at Scotch College, Melbourne Grammar and West Preston Primary School, and drew on that classroom life for his 2013 memoir Lessons in Humility: 40 Years of Teaching. Speaking to students at Victoria University's Footscray campus in April 2015, he summed up his own restlessness: "It's good to be diverse in your writing. I could be writing a book about fairies one minute and interviewing Johnny Cash the next," according to Victoria University.

Dickins was also one of the Fitzroy Football Club's most devoted supporters, writing a column called Sentimental Roymance on the religion page of the free Melbourne Times through the 1980s and 1990s. Writer Adam Muyt, who interviewed Dickins for the book Maroon & Blue in the early 2000s, remembered him opening their conversation on a park bench in Northcote with the line, "You'll find I speak like I write," in an obituary for the Footy Almanac. He did, Muyt wrote, delivering testimony that was "deliriously beautiful and heartfelt and honest." A fellow Almanac contributor, Colin Ritchie, put it more plainly in a tribute posted after his death: "One of those characters you simply cannot replace!"

Dickins was divorced. In a 2017 interview, he counted "the spirited company of my son, who is great company" among the things he hoped would never change. His funeral was held on July 27, 2026, at St Carthage's Catholic Church in Parkville.

Dickins spent his career turning Melbourne into paper: a hanged man's case reopened twice, a losing football club given a religion-page poet, a working-class childhood retold across more than fifty plays and dozens of books, and four decades of students who had him for English. Nearly all of it stayed rooted in the city that produced it, staged by the independent companies and read by the audiences he never stopped writing for.