February 21.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
‘...a good deal of shooting...’
Hangings were intended to terrify and teach Indigenous people resistance to British colonisation would not be tolerated.
Unlike public executions for European offenders which always took place in or around the Adelaide Gaol, public Indigenous hangings occurred at the scene of the crime with settlers and fellow tribesmen encouraged, sometimes forced, to watch. Recognising that race was a determining factor in the treatment of a capital offender, this paper shows how pioneering South Australians placed great value on the violent theatre of the gallows, as it was thought to pacify a troublesome Indigenous population who did not share British culture or language. It was a belief that culminated in the successful passage of an 1861 amendment through the South Australian Parliament that made provisions for the reintroduction of public executions for Indigenous offenders.[1]This was after public executions for all capital offenders, regardless of race, had been abolished three years prior in 1858. [2]
In the analysis below, the spectacle of frontier hangings are invested with much greater significance than has previously been the case in major South Australian contact histories. [3] Sentencing an Indigenous person to death was more than just punishment; it was a calculated stage-play intended to simultaneously terrify and teach Indigenous people that resistance to British colonisation would not be tolerated.
Act to amend an Act, no. 23 of 22nd Victoria, intituled ‘An Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals’ 1861 (SA) (25 Victoria, no. 1).
Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals 1858 (SA) (22 Victoria, no. 23).
Foster and Nettlebeck 2012; Foster et al. 2001; Pope 1989, 2011.
Acknowledgment: Steven Anderson, ‘Punishment as pacification: The role of Indigenous executions on the South Australian frontier, 1836–1862’, Aboriginal History Vol 39 2015 pp. 3-4, n.3, n.4, n.5
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“Awkward words are always avoided.”
[Charles] Heydon* wrote...specifically to protest at activities then occurring on the Endeavour River, to which Augustus Cutlack was also witness. “Private persons go out to kill blacks and call it 'snipe-shooting'”, Heydon alleged:
Awkward words are always avoided you will notice. “shooting a snipe” sounds better than “murdering a man”. But the blacks are never called men and women and children; “myalls” and “niggers” and “gins” and “picaninnies” seem further removed from humanity...What right have “myalls” to exist at all – mischievous vermin with their ignorance, and their barbarism, and their degradation and their black skins. [1]
Heydon later became a New South Wales Supreme Court Judge and Attorney General in the 1880s...Summing up the ongoing conflict in February 1877, a correspondent to the Cooktown Courier stated:
This district has been settled over three years; armed police to a considerable number have been waging war with the blacks, and private individuals have been doing a good deal of shooting among them... [2]
Journals of the Legislative Council, (Queensland), 1875, xxii, part 2, 907-9.
Cooktown Courier, 21 February 1877, quoted in Bottoms, “A History of Cairns”, 71-72.
Acknowledgment: Raymond Evans, “Plenty Shoot 'Em”: The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier', pp.156-7, 169 n.26, n.29.
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A parliamentary motion – words but no action.
On the 20 February, 1970, the Australian Senate passed unanimously a resolution presented to it by Aboriginal Senator Neville Bonner. It called on the government to recognise that Aborigines had had “prior ownership” of “this entire nation” and should be compensated for their dispossession.