Indigenous Executions and the Colonies to the East
The move to reintroduce public executions for Indigenous criminals was isolated to Western Australia and South Australia with the remaining colonies to the east never formally contemplating their reprisal.
It is strange considering disparaging cultural constructions of Aboriginality and the threat of frontier violence was prevalent in the other colonies. To start with Victoria, the difference in that colony lies with the leadership of Charles La Trobe, Superintendent of the Port Phillip District (1839— 1851) and later Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria (1851—1854). Victoria never once hanged an Indigenous offender at the scene of the crime. An explanation for this position came in 1842 with the execution of an Indigenous male named â€?Roger’ who was found guilty of the murder of a settler at Mount Rouse. The presiding judge, John Walpole Willis, wrote in a letter to La Trobe stating that there were â€?no mitigating circumÂstances’ in the case of â€?Roger’ and believed that, â€?if the sentence is to be carried out the example would have a better effect if the execution took place at Mt Rouse rather than at Melbourne’.[662] LaTrobe’s responded that his preferred site for Indigenous executions had always been the colony’s capital.[663] La Trobe explained his position to Judge Willis this way:I think it exceedingly doubtful whether, from what we know of their temper, it would be productive of the good effect intended upon the natives in that part of the country. It would possibly not only disgust them with the spot which has been chosen for their future location, but might arouse feelings which it is of the greatest importance to avoid exciting...[664]
La Trobe was the key figure that determined the location of executions from the earliest days of the colony until he gave up his position of Lieutenant-Governor in May 1854.
Given the colony's Private ExecuÂtion Act was proclaimed the following year, there was hardly any time to establish a new convention for Indigenous executions outside of his administration. Thus, La Trobe's conviction that public executions at the scene of the crime would actually encourage rather than pacify IndigeÂnous violence is central to understanding why Victoria diverged from South Australia and Western Australia in this regard.[665] As an aside, it is interesting to see La Trobe's mind at work in this passage. He is clearly trying to reconcile his view of the Indigenous â€?temper' (as he puts it) with what he knows of the practice of executions to see whether they would connect to achieve the intended ends of punishment. Not only does he hint at the didactic function of punishment but also that, within the same cultural milieu, a different conclusion can be reached about the â€?right' punitive technique to employ.Queensland occupies an interesting middle ground in this discussion of race and the reprisal and public executions. The timing of private executions in Queensland was tied to New South Wales since it did not separate from that colony until after Sydney proclaimed its Private Execution Act in 1855. Queensland was certainly not exempt from its share of late nineteenth-century frontier violence—or racial tension for that matter. These factors put the merits of fully private executions to the test. In 1865, for example, one MP stated during a debate on QueensÂland’s first consolidation of the criminal law since becoming a colony: â€?for the aborigines, I believe, hanging is the only thing that brings home to them the terrors of the law’.[666] When an Indigenous criminal named Dugald was sentenced to death for rape in 1872 it was suggested that his execution take place where Brisbane’s Indigenous inhabitants collect their blankets rather than in the private confines of the prison.[667] As John McGuire has already demonstrated, Queensland occasionally allowed for a controlled number of spectators of the same ethnic group to attend Indigenous, Pacific Islander and Asian hangings well into the 1890s.[668] John McGuire labelled these hangings â€?semipublic’ to get across the sense that Queensland’s private executions were sometimes modulated owing to the race of the offender.[669]
Australia’s two oldest colonies, New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, never contemplated the reintroduction of public executions of Indigenous offenders once abolished. The reason for this difference is complex but can be put down to two important factors.
First, by the 1850s the frontiers of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were more stable in comparison to South Australia and Western Australia. The two older colonies had already overcome the most acute Indigenous resisÂtance in the decades preceding the abolition of public executions and thus did not have a convincing reason to reintroduce them.[670] Second, as mid-century humanitarianism swept through the Colonial Office in London, the later settling colonies of South Australia and Western Australia were obliged to deal with Indigenous resistance through the judiciary, or with at least some semblance of due process. It was an obliÂgation much weaker in the earliest days of colonising the Australian continent where widespread settler reprisals and military skirmishes were often conveniently overlooked.[671] Public executions on the frontier presented Western Australia and South Australia with an opportunity to legally â€?terrify’ the Indigenous population who resisted colonisation. A need already satisfied for the established colonies of Tasmania and New South Wales by the 1850s.At first glance, the evidence presented above suggests something contrary to the nineteenth-century narrative that executions were on the path to greater privacy. However, when one understands how nineteenthÂcentury colonial culture viewed Indigenous bodies, beliefs and intellect the reprisal of public executions makes perfect sense. Settlers were, in fact, altering the practice of capital punishment in such a way whereby they thought it might be better equipped to communicate the lesson of the gallows to a troublesome target population. In South Australia and Western Australia this task was deemed more urgent than in the older colonies where the frontier was under greater control. Still, only a limited number of Indigenous offenders were actually executed in accorÂdance with the amendments after their successful passage through both legislatures. In Queensland, the â€?terror’ public hangings could induce in non-European onlookers was also seen as valuable to the administration’s penal goals. Indigenous offenders, Pacific Islanders as well as some Asian offenders occasionally underwent a â€?semi-public’ execution after private executions were officially introduced. To twenty-first-century readers the outward utterances of colonists towards Indigenous Australians are jarring, to say the least. However, this development—when properly contextualised—fits neatly into a penal regime that was framed with settler interests in mind.
More on the topic Indigenous Executions and the Colonies to the East:
- Like the other colonial legislatures to the east, South Australia and Western Australia abolished public executions in 1858 and 1871 respecÂtively—the westernmost colony being the later of the two.
- Notes