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.
However, only a few years after their abolition, both colonies reprised the practice of public executions but only for Indigenous offenders. For European criminals, the basic tenet of a private execution within the walls of the prison held true for as long as capital punishment remained on the statute books.
In complete contrast are the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania which never contemplated the formal reintroÂduction of public executions once they were abolished. Queensland sits somewhere in the middle since it occasionally allowed for a controlled number of spectators at the execution of non-Europeans but only if they were of the same ethnicity as the criminal. The early settlers of South Australia and Western Australia valued Indigenous executions for the role they played on the frontier. The â€?terror’ of a public execution, preferably enacted at the scene of the crime, was perceived to pacify© The Author(s) 2020 169
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_7
Indigenous resistance to colonisation.[607] In the vast untamed frontiers of these two colonies, public executions broadcasted a decipherable symbol of settler law and power to an Indigenous audience who did not share the colonisers’ culture or language. Their perceived efficacy was based on a disparaging cultural construction of Indigenous intellect, habit and temperament. While privacy was prized after the mid-nineteenth century for European offenders, the opposite held true for Indigenous ones. Only from a public execution, so the thought went, could Indigenous Australians on the frontier fully digest the example capital punishment had to offer.