The Selective Reintroduction of Public Executions

In both colonies the original decision to abolish public executions for Indigenous Australians as well as Europeans came under direct criti­cism—though most detectably in South Australia.

The Act would entirely prevent the execution of the aborigines in the usual manner. If any of the white population committed a crime, it was perhaps desirable they should be executed under the provisions of that Act, but it had hitherto been considered necessary in the case of an aborigine that he should be executed in the place where the crime was committed, in order that the associations connected with the crime should be connected with the punishment. If that Bill were passed, however, the supposed sentence of death on aborigines would be practically abolished.^[627]

Consequently, Strangeways suggested a special clause be inserted into the 1858 legislation that would allow the Governor, upon his written consent, to propose a place of execution other than the Adelaide Gaol for Indigenous offenders. The success of Strangeways clause would have, in effect, facilitated the continuation of public executions for offenders of Indigenous background. Two other Members supported the clause but it was eventually voted down by a majority of the House who thought that, �such scenes did no credit to our civilisation in the eyes of savages'.^[628]

The will of Parliament to banish public executions for Indigenous offenders was strongly tested over the next three years, beginning at the execution of Manyella in 1860. At trial the twenty-year-old Indigenous male was found guilty of wilfully murdering John Jones, a hutkeeper, near Mount Joy on 13 May 1860.^[629] Having been sentenced to death two years after the introduction of private executions, the law dictated that Manyella be executed in private or, in the wording of the legislation, �within the walls of the Gaol'.^[630] However, in conflict with the original intention of the 1858 Act, Manyella was taken on a long journey back to a police station at Streaky Bay, the closest to the scene of the murder, and hanged in the public gaze.

Manyella's execution was a creative solution to a problem that high­lighted how this new legislation found itself in complete opposition to the presumed needs and desires of those settling South Australia's outlying districts. While explaining the Government's actions in the Legislative Council, the Chief Secretary began by stating that the govern­ment had been requested by the settlers in the district to �make an example of the murderers in the vicinity of this crime, so that his tribe might receive a salutary lesson'.^[633] He continued by positing that, given the previous success with public executions on the Eyre Peninsula, �he trusted they would need no more executions at Streaky Bay'.^[634]

Even more pronounced than in the case of Manyella was the outrage directed at South Australia's first truly private Indigenous execution. It was conducted in June 1861 inside the Adelaide Gaol following the murder of Mary Ann Rainberd and her two children by four Indigenous males. �We have been cheated', stated an incensed The Northern Star, �the fellows should be hanged up here [in Kapunda, the town where the murders took place], or they should have been placed at the rifle target for the volunteers to shoot at, so they would have a lingering death'.^[635] Employing a more restrained prose The Advertiser questioned the logic of private Indigenous executions.

What effect will this private execution have upon the aboriginal natives?

What practical result will follow it? Where is the salutary lesson of terror that it was intended to teach other would-be murderers? The mere destruction of four murderers was surely not all that was contemplated by the jury who convicted them; we will venture to say it was not the principal idea.^[636] Of course, the law inflicts vengeance; and in a still more emphatic sense it holds forth salutary warnings; but what warning to the native tribes is there in the private hanging of these four men?

The private execution of the �Rainberd Murderers' was clearly a waste in the eyes of the early settler. In the seclusion of the prison yard, the gallows was shorn of its additional functions that had proved so useful in dealing with disobedient Indigenous groups on a vast frontier. The didactic potential of the execution to communicate the authority of settler law had been neutered—so much so that the young colony's legislature sought to remedy the situation.

In 1861 the disharmony between the laws of South Australia and the will of the people was corrected when an amendment to the 1858 Act was passed along racial lines. The amendment stipulated that a sentence of death passed over �any aboriginal native' could be �publicly carried into execution at the place at which the crime... was committed, or as near to such place as conveniently may be'.^[637] The Indigenous offender's body was also to be buried at the place of execution or close by that site. It signalled the partial reinstatement of public executions in South Australia but only for Indigenous offenders. The existing system of private executions for non-Indigenous offenders was not altered by the 1861 amendment.

Justification for South Australia's amendment came from two sources; the past efficacy of Indigenous hangings and the cultural and linguistic differences of the Indigenous population. From the �example' provided at the Coorong in 1840 to subsequent Indigenous executions on the Eyre Peninsula, MPs expressed their belief that the gallows had proven itself a valuable friend of the isolated settler.

In 1871 Western Australia introduced private executions for all criminals, regardless of race, but by 1875 they had passed an amend­ment altering this original position. Like South Australia before it, the Western Australian legislation stipulated that the �Execution of aborig­inal natives [was able] to take place as if the said Act [of 1871] had not been passed'.^[640] When introducing the amendment to Parliament the Attorney-General, Robert John Walcott, clearly explained the aim of reinstating public executions for Indigenous offenders: �The object of this measure was to strike terror into the heart of other natives who might be collected together to witness the executions of a malefactor of their own tribe'.^[641] Walcott insisted that the bill was not conceived in a �vindictive spirit' but as a means to deter Indigenous wrongdoers from committing �outrages' among themselves and against the settlers.^[642] A number of Members speaking at the second reading of the amendment also expressed their support, commenting on the previous capacity of the gallows in preventing Aboriginal crime.

The very idea that the â€?terror' of public executions could deter Indige­nous offenders from crime had a strong basis in colonial culture. There is a long documented history of viewing Indigenous people through the lens of the â€?savage' that can be traced back as far as William Dampier in the late seventeenth century. His comment about Indigenous people on the west coast of the continent as being â€?the miserablest ∖sic.∖ People in the World' is well known.^[644] The idea of the â€?savage' was not the only category of analysis that colonists carried with them from Europe, particularly when concepts like that of the â€?noble savage' are also taken into account. If Dampier was the archetype for one school of thought, then another early figure in Australian exploration history, Captain James Cook, embodies the other. On first impression he wrote that Indigenous Australians were â€?far more happier than we Europeans', live in the â€?Tran­quillity' of nature and â€?set no Value' upon the materialism of European life.^[645] However, when Indigenous peoples appeared to fall prey to the â€?vices of civilisation'—drink, dice and venereal disease—rather than excel in the areas of bodily propriety, habit, dress and biblical instruction, an increasingly disparaging account of Indigenous people became dominant among settlers as the colonial era matured.^[646]

Such cultural stereotyping led to further assumptions about effec­tive ways of carrying out punishment on the Indigenous population. In Moreton Bay, Libby Connors also noticed how the �theatre of justice' was used to express the �power and terror' of British law to Indige­nous peoples.^[647] Moreover, in the Queensland Parliamentary debates on maintaining rape as a capital crime, Ross Barber quotes many MPs who believed death to be one of the few punishments that actually deterred Indigenous wrongdoers.

Colonial culture ordered and categorised Indigenous people in such a way that rendered violent, public and bodily punishments commensu­rate with their assumed �savagery'. The selective reinstatement of public executions in Western Australia and South Australia is just another example of how culture—operating completely separate from the penal sphere—had direct implications for choices in punishment in the colo­nial period. The practice of executions was materially altered in such a way as to maximize the lesson of the gallows on a specific population that was interfering with the goals of colonial society to expand into new frontiers. To inculcate a feeling of �awe' and �terror' in the Indige­nous onlooker was, in the eyes of the coloniser at least, necessary for the example to be properly received. As an aside, it is worth briefly pointing out that these two administrations were also trying to communicate to nervous colonists as well. Strengthening the symbolism of capital punish­ment for Indigenous Australians was a means through which lawmakers could show that they were listening and responding to the concerns of colonists. For a simple legislative amendment there certainly were many layers of meaning, both implicit and explicit, to unpick.