Penitent Spaces: The Role of Private Executions

It is important to realise that the time-tested ritual of the execution cere­mony, passed down from England to Australia in a colonial exchange, was, in and of itself, configured to induce complicity from the criminal.

The introduction of private hangings in Australia during the 1850s (see Chapter 6) did nothing to touch the fundamental interaction between the criminal and his minders. However, this new execution space was more likely to induce penitence for one major reason—it removed the criminal’s interaction with the general public. To demon­strate how pernicious this interaction could be consider the example of a criminal in Adelaide who, at his public execution in 1840, had some old friends stationed below the drop. According to the eyewitness account of Joseph Fogg Taylor, the criminal smoked on the scaffold, made faces at the clergyman, kicked the hangman’s shins and dared him to remove his disguise. These behaviours were, according to Taylor, �greatly applauded by his comrades’.^[340] Moreover, these very same men, wrote Taylor, were satisfied with the occasion only because their friend �was game & died like a “pebble”'.^[341] Public executions were not spaces that were likely to elicit penitence from the criminal since they exposed them to the expec­tations of the rowdy onlooker. Ifit was not familiar faces below to play up to, jeering and abuse might lead to similarly unhelpful responses.

Contrast that account with the private execution of Andrew George Scott at Darlinghurst Gaol in 1880. Scott was not subject to the gaze of the general public but was executed in front of a select crowd of govern­ment and gaol officials. In his cell the famous bushranger had expressed a desire to make a speech to those gathered in the gaol yard. His testimony would be a final chance to shape the narrative of his life and crimes before the hangman activated the drop. Yet, when Scott mounted the scaffold, he hesitated and called upon the chaplain for advice. The chaplain told Scott that there was �no one except magistrates and officials present' to witness his final testimony.^[342] Upon hearing this Scott changed his mind and �did not insist upon making any address' to those gathered in the gaol yard.^[343]

There are, of course, individual temperaments to consider in these two examples but it is hard to deny that replacing a large and boisterous crowd with the detached faces of officialdom removed a key incentive to criminal misbehaviour before death. By making officials the only witnesses present, the criminal was thereafter shielded from the imme­diacy of the public gaze and their expectations of a �game' death. As a result of private executions Perth's The Inquirer and Commercial News even suggested that the practice of �dying game' was almost extinct in the Australian colonies. Writing in 1874 the newspaper remarked how, �the gameness or cowardice of the depredator is veiled from the eyes of the public'.^[344] Thus, displays of �gameness' had �gradually disappeared' from the scaffold in consequence of private executions.^[345] The private execu­tion space worked to the advantage of those running the execution by removing this key incentive to misbehaviour and made it more likely for outward displays of penitence to be observed.