Conclusion: Death of a Spectacle

In Centennial Park in Sydney the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed on 1 January 1901. Among the festivities at the ceremony was a 10,000-strong school choir providing a full-throated rendition of Federated Australia, Advance Australia Fair and Rule Britannia.

¹Sam Garkawe, â€?The Reintroduction of the Death Penalty in Australia?—Political and Legal Considerations’, Criminal Law Journal, vol. 24, no. 2, 2002, pp. 101—108.

© The Author(s) 2020 221

S. Anderson, A History of Capital Punishment in the Australian Colonies, 1788 to 1900, Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53767-8_9

removed the death penalty for murder by 1955; in 1985 it was treason and piracy that were made non-capital offences. As for the practice of executions themselves, the spectacle of it all was well and truly dead. At Australia’s last execution, that of Ronald Ryan inside Pentridge Prison in 1967 for murder, there was a large tarpaulin draped below the drop to prevent anyone from viewing the scene. When one journalist present stooped low to the ground in an attempt to see under it a nearby prison guard chastised him—�None of that!’—he was reported as saying.^[800]

From the very first execution onwards, the idea that crime had conse­quences needed to be communicated by those in positions of authority to grease the wheels of a functioning society.

A long-standing distraction from the example of an execution was just how frequently they were botched. Amateur hangmen, faulty equipment and uncorrected flaws in technique caused a great deal of avoidable pain for the condemned and outrage on the part of the onlooker. In the inter­ests of �humanity and decency' the Colonial Office in London attempted to standardise execution procedure in 1880 by circulating a Memo­randum to the Australian colonies on proper technique. It signalled how a more fundamental aversion to pain and suffering was developing in colonial culture during the 1850s, even when applied to the body of a deserving criminal.

A penitent criminal was desired for those administering the execu­tion but the allure of �dying game' was a powerful cultural expectation working against this outcome. It was often left to a diligent clergyman to direct the condemned away from bravado and toward a more remorseful and dignified exit from this world. On the day of execution the sheriff and hangman also worked to manufacture some kind of penitence from the criminal. Though acting �game' gave the condemned an opportunity to construct the narrative of the execution, the behaviour of dying crimi­nals could often be subsumed into larger cultural contexts. This was most obvious in the aftermath of Ned Kelly's hanging. He died displaying very little resistance at the gallows, uttering a seemingly innocuous state­ment in front of no one other than official witnesses—it was as close to a perfect execution for which the authorities could hope. However, as Kelly's legacy demonstrates, even the actions of a compliant criminal were able to produce a narrative that was contrary to the administration's wishes.

To behold large numbers of women, children and members of the lower class gathering enthusiastically at the foot of the public scaffold was a cause of great concern. Elite writers thought that witnessing scenes of violence actively demoralised and hardened the onlooker. It was the key reason that more respectable colonists tended to avoid public execu­tions and chastise those who did attend. The Private Execution Acts guaranteed that spectators would only attend executions in a strictly professional capacity; everyone else now required the personal approval of the sheriff to witness the scene.

The transition to private executions in Australia was an interesting chapter in the history of capital punishment on the continent. When Henry Grattan Douglass introduced the first Private Execution Act in 1853 he did so as a means to publicise to Britain that New South Wales was becoming a little more civilised and refined. It was a desire deeply rooted in the cultural legacy of convictism and a wish to distance the colony from its penal past. The trigger for reform was impossible to replicate in Britain's other substantial possessions and it propelled the Australian colonies to move quickly in the context of the Empire. Under­pinning this unique desire was a public execution spectacle that had, for a long time, been the subject of concern for all of the colonies. It was not lost on legislators that an execution in private would correct many of the distractions to do with the crowd, criminal and execution procedure.

At first glance the decision of South Australia and Western Australia to selectively reintroduce public executions for offenders of an Indige­nous background appears to counter a nineteenth-century narrative that was said to appreciate more discreet forms of execution. However, in the eyes of legislators, the changes made it more likely for the message of punishment to be successfully communicated to Indigenous Australians. On the untamed and newly established frontiers of these two latter settling colonies, the �terror' that public executions could evoke in local Indigenous populations was viewed as immensely valuable. Beliefin their efficacy was deeply rooted in disparaging European cultural construc­tions of Indigenous intellect, temperament and habit.

Abolitionist voices started to be heard more frequently in the colonies by the middle of the nineteenth century. Prominent pamphleteers were often independently wealthy men, piously minded and comparatively well-educated. Their arguments drew from the work of European intel­lectuals, the Bible, contemporary examples of capital punishment’s fail­ures as well as a desire to keep pace with �civilization’ abroad. In practical terms, abolition was not a cause pursued like an intercolonial �movement’ nor was a dedicated organisation active for more than a handful of years in any given colony. The New South Wales legislature stands out due to the disproportionate amount of abolition bills it dismissed, most often at the first reading. However, the failure of abolition bills showed, again and again, that the majority of the legislature was actually in favour of the death penalty being administered. From this numerical dominance we can deduce that the transformations capital punishment underwent in the colonial period were actually sanctioned by those who favoured the retention of hangings and believed very much in the example they set.

Surrounding all of these debates and changes were generations of governors and lawmakers ensuring that the parameters of capital punish­ment matched the context within which it operated. Too extensive a capital code and they were overly cruel; too limited and they were not doing enough for a frontier society with a strong criminal element. The capital statutes were modulated according to a number of uniquely colo­nial anxieties—over bushranging, the safety of frontier women and the gender imbalance—to name a few.

This book has borrowed freely from the sociologically-informed liter­ature on penal change to produce an historical study that looks at capital punishment with a new lens in Australia. The central dynamic of penal messaging and reception, passing through the external filter of culture, has been a productive one for this study to pursue. The practice of execu­tions in Australia changed in dramatic ways throughout the nineteenth century. It went from being public to private, amateur to professional and haphazard to standardised. Meanwhile, the capital statutes were narrowed, mercy was wielded more freely and the hangman was called upon for only the very worst criminals. To preserve the central lesson of the gallows—that crime has consequences—the British punishment that arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788 was forced to alter its course. Those who chose to navigate at different moments had to plot a route that respected the unique contours of Australian colonial culture and memory. The passage taken ended up killing the spectacle of capital punishment but allowed it, for better or worse, to pass safely into twentieth-century waters.