November 4.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
“They must hang till they fall in pieces.”
‘Respect’ and Disrespect’ for human bodies.
Black men, this is the white’s punishment for murder, [1] the next time white men are killed in this country more punishment will be given. Let none of you take these bodies down, they must hang till they fall in pieces. We are now friends, and will remain so, unless more white people are killed, when the Governor will send me, and plenty more policemen, and punish much more severely. All are forgiven except those who actually killed the wrecked people, who, if caught, will also be hung. You may go now, but remember this day, and tell what you have seen to your old men, women, and children. [2]
Police Commissioner Thomas O’Halloran addressing the Milmenrura (through a translator) after the execution of two Indigenous men following the ‘Maria Massacre’* in 1840.
When Major Thomas O’Halloran articulated the government’s position to the Milmenrura in front of a makeshift gallows at the Coorong in August 1840, he may as well have repeated it at every one of South Australia’s 23 Indigenous executions. The gibbetting of the bodies was unique on this occasion but the idea that Indigenous hangings were to serve both a punitive and an elevated didactic function in the colony was not. 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…
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…A number of scholars working in non- South Australian contexts…have noted, with varying brevity, how public executions were calculated to edify, and even terrify, Indigenous audiences. [4] Capital punishment was an active ingredient in colonisation and ought to sit alongside more conventional thinking about how Europeans came to dispossess and pacify traditional societies – the appropriation of productive land, forced cultural and linguistic assimilation, exclusion from the political process and unchecked settler violence to name but a few…
Western Australia offers the best comparison to South Australia regarding the distinctive treatment given to Indigenous capital offenders. The colony mimics a legal narrative in which public executions gave way to private executions in 1871, only for the law to be amended in 1875 to allow for the resumption of public executions for Indigenous offenders. [5] Similarly, Western Australia often carried out Indigenous executions at the scene of the crime as well as occasionally displaying the body after death. [6]. The proportion of Aborigines executed in both South Australia and Western Australia approaches 50 per cent of the total number of people hanged during the colonial period. [7].
…Of the 66 people executed in the history of South Australia 23 were Indigenous, all of whom were hanged within the first 26 years of European settlement. What these numbers fail to reveal is that the crimes of executed Aborigines tended to be committed on the then fringes of European civilisation. Starting in the immediate vicinity of Adelaide, the epicentre for confrontation soon migrated to the Eyre Peninsula, where 14 of the 23 Indigenous executions took place. Like a heat map tracking the advancing frontier, Indigenous crime did not rise in the colony of South Australia but was instead created by the steady march of colonisation ever outward…
…It was not until 1972, when Don Dunstan was the Premier of South Australia, that the right of a judge to sentence an Indigenous offender to a public hanging was finally revoked. [8]
For scholarship on the legal history of South Australia in the period concerning this paper, see especially, Ward 2010; Hague 2005; Castles and Harris 1987. For an overview of the legal history of Australia with a strong focus on the colonial period, see Castles 1982; Kercher 1995. The South Australian practice of public executions was borrowed from the English experience. For the extensive scholarship on the gallows in their original English context, see among others, Devereaux and Griffiths 2004; Gatrell 1994; Linebaugh 2003; McGowen 1994.
O’Halloran quoted in Tolmer 1972 [1882]: 190.
Foster and Nettlebeck 2012; Foster et al. 2001; Pope 1989, 2011.
Connors 1992; Finnane and McGuire 2001; Hogg 2001; McGuire 1998.
An Act to provide for carrying out of Capital Punishment within Prisons 1871 (WA) (34 Victoria, no. 15); An Act to amend ‘The Capital Punishment Amendment Act, 1871’ 1875 (WA) (39 Victoria, no. 1).
Purdue 1993; Adams 2009.
Of the 120 people executed in Western Australia during the period 1840–1900 exactly half were Indigenous, see McGuire 1998: table opposite 187. Of the 47 people executed in South Australia during the period 1836–1900, 23 were Indigenous, see Towler and Porter 1990.
The Act received assent on 29 February 1972 despite carrying the year 1971 in the title, see Lennan and Williams 2012: 676.
Acknowledgment: Steven Anderson, “Punishment as pacification: The role of Indigenous executions on the South Australian frontier, 1836–1862”, Aboriginal History, Vol. 39 (2015) pp. 3-6, 3 n.2, 4 n.5, n.7, 5 n.10, n.11, n.12, n.13, 21 and n. 114.
This is a reference to the ‘Maria’ massacre which occurred off the South Australian coast in 1840. The other ‘Maria’ massacre occurred off the north Queensland coast in February, 1872. On the latter, see entries for 14 January and 15 and 21 March.