A VICIOUS CIRCLE – THE HANGMAN’S NOOSE
Tuesday, February 28th, 2017‘The death penalty was brought to Australia with the First Fleet’. Mike Edwards, The Hanged Man, The Life and Death of Ronald Ryan, 2002.
Botany Bay – 1788 – January, 18-20: Approximately 750 (570 male and 193 female) of England’s convicted criminals, reprieved death on condition they be exiled, reached Botany Bay in the middle of January 1788.
‘In determining the daily ration no distinction was drawn between the marines and the convicts…the standard adopted was that of the troops serving in the West Indies’. Wilfrid Oldham, Britain’s Convicts to the Colonies, Library of Australian History, Sydney 1990
Among them among Thomas Barrett, Henry Lavell, Joseph Hall and John Ryan friends from years of imprisonment in gaols and on prison hulks moored along the Thames River.
Sydney Cove – 26 January: The entire fleet relocated nine (9) miles (14km) north to Sydney Cove on the 26th of January.
27 January: ‘The landing of a part of the marines and [male] convicts took place the next day, and on the following, the remainder [of the men] disembarked’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. F.L. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1961
27 February: One (1) month later – 27 February – Barrett, Lavell, Hall and Ryan stood beneath‘ a large tree fixt as a gallows’.
Britain’s invasion and colonisation of New Holland brought Australia’s First Nations starvation, disease and imposed a racist caste system based not only on colour but in time on shades of hue.
Well practised retribution was meted out when any of dared to challenge the predators who stole their land and plundered their resources.
‘Imagine if we had suffered the injustices and then were blamed for it’. Paul Keating Redfern Speech, Paul Keating, 10 December 1992.
Although the myriad injustices that followed Britain’s invasion stand in plain sight, because of widespread ignorance of our shared history in mainstream non-Aboriginal Australia, they go largely unrecognised and unacknowledged.
Even when acknowledged the consequences for the First Australians of Britain’s 1788 invasion and conquest; gross gender imbalance, starvation, syphilis, the death penalty 1788 , the smallpox virus that in 1789 killed 50% of Sydney’s Aboriginal families are simply swept under the carpet. (more…)