Yesterday the Tasmanian Aboriginal community gathered to mourn the 200th anniversary of the execution of Jack and Dick, two men from the Oyster Bay Nation who were hanged in Hobart for the murder of a convict stockkeeper in the early days of the war against the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land. I offer my deepest condolences to the Palawa and Pakana peoples of Tasmania.
Jack and Dick had been detained for some months in the Hobart Gaol, which stood opposite the Supreme Court of Hobart Town. Against all principles of British law they had been tried without being able to speak English well, although later writers suggested they were given an interpreter. They were unable to make their own defence, but that did not seem to bother Chief Justice James Lewes Pedder, who condemned them to death.
The two Aboriginal men were hanged alongside a group of white convicts, en masse, on a high scaffold that sat above the walls of the gaol. It was a horrifying execution, which was described in The Colonial Times of 15 September 1826.1 It was supposed to be witnessed, and accounts of it were taken to send a lesson about British justice and to show examples of repentance. I will leave it to the Times account to let you judge whether either of those things were achieved:
After the elder of the aborigines, named Dick, had received the sacrament, (who has never since his confinement, been able to walk, suffering under a loathsome cutaneous disease, which almost covered his body), [he] screamed out most bitterly, apparently fully sensible of his impending fate, and, not withstanding he could climb up the ladder to the platform, he refused, when he was carried up by the Executioner. Being placed on the platform, he would not stand up along with the rest of the unhappy sufferers; he was therefore placed upon a stool, which dropped with him, when the awful moment arrived which plunged them into eternity.
His partner in crime, an interesting youth, seemed quite unmoved at his awful situation, until Tuesday and Wednesday morning, during which period, the poor lad became quite sensible of his destiny, and prayed most fervently to the Almighty, for the forgiveness of his sins. During the period he has been confined in gaol, if any one spoke to him in a friendly manner, he would laugh and appear as cheerful as if he were with his sable brethren in the woods. He declared his innocence both before and after trial. The old black died very hard; and the cord having slipped from the younger up to his elbow, he reached up his hand to his neck and bled profusely from the nose. The Rev. Messrs. Bedford and Carvosso attended them on the scaffold, and performed the last sad and friendly office to these miserable men, when, at 9 o’clock, they were launched into eternity!
I was interviewed by ABC Hobart about this (and it’s made the Australian Arab news). I feel the day truly belonged to Tasmanian Aboriginal people but I was able to explain what I learned about colonial justice while writing Musquito: The Real Story of a Legendary Colonial Warrior. Musquito had been hanged alongside the Oyster Bay man Black Jack, and six white ‘bushrangers’ (escaped convicts) on 25 February 1825. Musquito could speak English but his death was also seen as a ‘most extraordinary precedent’. While four Aboriginal men were hanged at the outset of the war the colonists called the ‘Black War’, not one colonist or convict was tried for murdering or harming an Aboriginal person in Tasmania. This was a most partial form of ‘justice’.
After Jack and Dick died, Aboriginal people left Hobart, and in 1828 Governor George Arthur declared Martial Law and banned them from ever attending the settlements. By the mid-1830s, George Augustus Robinson had induced the vast majority of Tasmanian Aboriginal people to go to his settlement at Wybalenna on Flinders Island. While he was travelling around Tasmania recruiting people to the settlement, Kikatapula, ‘Black Tom Birch’, told Robinson that Jack and Dick had been flogged by Colley and his death was retribution. But no one was able to say that at their trial.
The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre is seeking a memorial to Jack and Dick (and I hope to Musquito and Black Jack). It would be appropriate. In the meantime, we keep writing these stories to tell the truth about colonial history.
- The Tasmanian Aboriginal Corporation chose the date 24 September for the commemoration, but the colonial newspaper is quite clear that the executions occurred on 13 September. The real expert on this case was the late Dr Jacqueline Fox, who unfortunately died before I could tell her how good her work was. Fox, J., 2015, ‘Criminalising frontier conflict in Van Diemen’s Land: Indigenous prosecutions during the Black War’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 17, pp. 65–82. ↩︎
