The Botany Bay Medallion

‘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 ‘from the realm’ reached Botany Bay in the middle of January 1788.

Among them 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.

‘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

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‘When leaving Botany Bay Phillip noticed two [2] French ships in the offing…there would seem to be “some justification for the saying that England won Australia by six [6] days”. Edward Jenks, History of the Australian Colonies cited H.E. Egerton, A Short History of British Colonial Policy, Methueun, London 1928

Sydney Cove – 26 January: By ‘8 pm’ on the 26th of January the entire  English fleet  was riding at anchor in Sydney Cove nine (9) miles (14km) north of the original beach-head. 

Port Jackson – 27 January: ‘The landing of a part of the marines and [male] convicts took place the next day, and on the following [28th] the remainder [of men] disembarked’. Marine Captain Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. F.L. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1961

Aside from seagulls how many white birds were on dry land at Sydney Cove on  26 January 1788? None

Sydney Cove – 6 February: Between 6am and 6 pm the two hundred and twenty-three (223) women and their children, twenty-two (22) born on the voyage, were rowed ashore.

7 February : ‘Owing to the multiplicity of pressing business necessary to be performed immediately after landing, it was found impossible to read the public commissions and take possession of the colony in form, until the 7th of February’. Tench. ibid

27 February:  Towards the end of the  month Thomas Barrett, Henry Lavell, Joseph Hall and John Ryan stood beneath‘ a large tree fixt as a gallows’. From Here To Eternity

If for no reason other than the fate of these four (4) young Englishmen provide insight and shed light on the ‘universal terror’ meted out to Australia’s First Peoples their brutal intersecting stories need to be told.  See: ‘Terror’ Arthur’s Algorithm

The punitive way the English dealt with their own people reveal them malicious and vindictive in the extreme.

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Britain transported one hundred and sixty-three thousand (163,000) criminals to Australia.  Twenty-five thousand (25,000) were women. Of these twelve thousand (12,000) went directly to Tasmania.  West Australia, where transportation ended in 1868, received ten thousand (10,000)  male prisoners and zero females.

Well practised retribution was meted out when any dared to challenge the predators who plundered their resources and stole their culture, stole their children, stole their land, stole their lives and continue to do so.

Because of such gross imbalance of the sexes in the criminal, military and civilian population Britain’s invasion and colonisation of New Holland imposed  a racist caste-system on Australia’s First Nations’ Peoples. In time caste came to be based not only on colour but on shades of hue.   G is for Genocide

‘Imagine if we had suffered the injustices and then were blamed for it’. Paul Keating Redfern Speech, 10 December 1992.

Although the myriad injustices that followed Britain’s invasion stand in plain sight, because of widespread ignorance of our shared history throughout mainstream non-Aboriginal Australia, they go largely unrecognised and unacknowledged.

Even when acknowledged the consequences for the First Australians of Britain’s 1788 invasion, conquest, the death penalty  starvation, dispossession, dispersal,  gross gender imbalance –   genocide, syphilis –   starvation – the smallpox virus that killed 50% of Sydney’s Aboriginal families in 1789 are simply swept under the carpet. (more…)

 James Freeman – ‘Hang or be Hanged’. 

Extract showing a pardon on condition of becoming the public executioner. Dated 1 March 1788, signed by Governor Arthur Phillip.

‘For here was an opportunity of establishing a Jack Ketch who Should, in all future Executions, either Hang or be Hanged’. Dr John White, Chief Medical Officer, First Fleet Journal.

1788 –  Friday 29th February: Shaped as another busy day for the infant colony’s’ criminal court.

To avoid Sydney’s intense midday sun and drenching humidity, after the long drawn-out dramas of the previous two (2) days, it had been decided court would convene earlier than usual. See: Blind Man’s Bluff

At 8 am convicts James Freeman and William Shearman, accused the previous day of stealing from government stores, were first to appear in the dock.

Both were found guilty.  While Shearman was sentenced to 300 lashes Freeman was condemned to death .

Next to appear George Whitaker, Daniel Gordon and John Williams charged with stealing eighteen (18) bottles of wine.

Whitaker was discharged. Gordon and Williams, both Afro -Americans, were found guilty and sentenced to hang with Freeman. The executions to take place that afternoon.

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‘The full force of laws against theft was imposed from the moment the expedition arrived in Sydney. At the end of February 1788 five [5] men were convicted of theft and condemned to death, illustrating that property was more sacrosanct than life itself.

The sentences were carried out at public hangings, which the whole convict population was forced to watch’. Henry Reynolds,  Searching for truth-telling, History, Sovereignty and The Uluru Statement From the Heart, NewSouth Publishing, 2021

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‘Few personal documents relating to [Governor Arthur] Phillip survive; his low personal profile and the secret work in which he was sometimes involved make him one of the least-known founders of any modern state – in this case Australia’. Nigel Rigby, Peter Van Der Merwe & Glyn Williams, Voyages of Discovery from Captain Cook’s Endeavour to the Beagle, National Maritime Museum Greenwich, Bloomsbury, Adlard Coles, 2018

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1788 –  27 February, Sydney Cove: Four (4) convicts John Ryan, Thomas Barrett, Henry Lavell and Joseph Hall stood before a hastily  convened military court accused ‘on shaky evidence’ of robbing or conspiring to rob food from the government storehouse.

‘Just three [3] weeks before half a continent had been declared Crown land in one of the most remarkable acts of plunder in modern times.’. Henry Reynolds. op.cit.

Found guilty all were sentenced to death. The execution to take place later that same day.

‘The arm of a large tree was fixt upon as a gallows’. Arthur Bowes Smyth, Surgeon Lady Penrhyn, First Fleet  Journal, Australian Documents Library, 1979

These four (4) men were mates. Their strong friendship had been forged during three (3) difficult years imprisoned in Dunkirk a prison-hulk moored in the River Thames. See Mutiny on Mercury and Swift

Under the ‘gallows tree’ pressure was brought to bear on the youngest John Ryan; ‘he turned king’s evidence [and] his irons were removed’.

At 5pm, Marine Captain James Campbell approached Mr Brewer the Provost Marshall with a twenty-four (24) hour stay-of-execution for Hall and Lavell. Their nooses were removed.

No longer part of the action they became part of the audience.

Only Thomas Barrett died that day.   ‘The lifer who was the ringleader [was] launched into Eternity’. See: From Here to Eternity

‘The body hung for an hour and was then buried in a grave dug very near the gallows’. Lieutenant Ralph Clark, First Fleet Journal, Australian Documents Library, 1979

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‘The bloody raw power of decapitation…the eternal tension between drama and control…lies at the heart of the death penalty’. Frances Larson, Severed, Granta Books, London 2015

PICTURE

Sydney: By December 1790 Governor Captain Arthur Phillip RN knew ‘certain officers’ of the newly arrived New South Wales Corps (June 1790) – led by Lieutenant John Macarthur an ambitious junior officer – were circling the tents.

In Phillip’s judgement the Pitt Administration in far off England was in danger of losing New South Wales (Australia) gateway to India,  Asia and its  ‘proximity’ to  Spain’s South American ‘treasure’ colonies. See: Proximity Not Distance Drove Britain’s Invasion of New Holland.

However the threat did not come from the First Nations’ People. The previous year 1789, 50% of local Eora Aborigines had contracted smallpox and were dead. The survivors were struggling to regroup. See: A Lethal Weapon Smallpox – Boston 1775 – Sydney 1789

Governor Phillip knew a serious threat to King and Country came from within the military ranks. Isolated, without naval support in the midst of a hostile soldiery, he had only one (1) option in his armoury – diversion.

And to deliver it only one (1) sure arrow, his personal convict game-keeper, the ‘hated’ convict John M’Entire.  Missing in Action HMS Sirius & HMS Supply .

1790 – 9 December, Botany Bay: ‘On the 9th of the month, a serjeant of marines, with three convicts, among whom was M’Entire, the governor’s game-keeper (the person of whom Bannelon had, on former occasions, shewn so much dread and hatred) went out on a [kangaroo] shooting party’. Marine Watkin Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. F.L. Fitzhardinge, Angus and Robertson, 1961

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‘In 1800 and 1801 many hundreds of Irish prisoners arrived, pushing the percentage of Irish to more than one-third of those under sentence and one-quarter of the white population. Governor King nervously estimated that more than half of the recent arrivals were Catholic ‘Defenders’, summarily transported  for their part in the massive Irish rebellion of 1798′. Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation 1788-1990, Chapter 2, 1990

1800 – September, Sydney: Governor Lieutenant Phillip Gidley King RN succeeded Governor Captain John Hunter RN who had been recalled to England took up his commission on Hunter’s departure in September 1800.

King found himself juggling many balls; an unruly soldiery, a tsunami of grog, French colonial ambition and a simmering Irish rebellion. The Irish, many sentenced to death following the uprisings of 1798 on home soil, were reprieved death on condition of transportation to Australia, and these appeared to pose the most immediate threat.

A mixed bunch most poor illiterates, others were educated men; General Joseph Holt a militant Protestant, Rev. Henry Fulton an Episcopalian minister and Father James Harold a Catholic priest with two (2) British army officers Captains Alcock and St. Ledger.

1800 – 11 January, Sydney: At the beginning of 1800 these five (5) men were among one hundred and ninety-one (191) prisoners, twenty-six (26) of them women, who arrived aboard the convict transport Minerva in January 1800. See: G for Gender

Minerva and another convict ship Friendship sailed together from Cork on 24 August 1799. Friendship with one hundred and thirty-three male (133) prisoners. During the voyage of one hundred and forty (140) days via Rio one (1) in seven (7) prisoners died. Father James Dixon a Catholic priest and Paddy Galvin were among the survivors. See: G for Genocide

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‘A knowledge of the position of the military and their immediate friends occupied from 1792-1810, affords a key to the whole history of the colony; and without this knowledge many important transactions, affecting the civil, social and political  interests of the community would appear almost incomprehensible’. Samuel Bennett,Australian Discovery and Colonisation, Vol. 1 to 1800.

Sydney -1800 – 15 April: Lieutenant Phillip Gidley King RN, Britain’s third naval governor of New Holland, now Australia, arrived here in the middle of April 1800 aboard HMS Speedy.

Gidley King brought Governor John Hunter RN  bad news. A Home Office dispatch dated 5 November 1799 ‘severely censured Hunter and ordered him to return to England by the first safe conveyance’.

Whitehall: Tragically for Australia’s First Peoples, London could not have devised a more destabilising arrangement than King’s ‘anomalous…dormant commission’. It  became effective only if Governor Hunter ‘died or was absent from the colony’.  

‘It is probable, therefore, that the home department was not prepared to give King the full appointment of governor-in-chief in the year 1799…[His] limited commission was practically the appointment of a locum tenens or a  governor-in-chief on probation, and was recognised as such by both King and the English officials, when it became operative’. Commentary, Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Vol 3.

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‘A knowledge of the position of the military and their immediate friends occupied from 1792- 1810, affords a key to the whole history of the colony; and without this knowledge many important transactions, affecting the civil, social and political interests of the community would appear almost incomprehensible’. Samuel Bennett, Australian Discovery and Colonisation Vol. 1 to 1800, Facsimile Edition, 1981.

Sydney Cove – 1792, 12 December: Governor Arthur Phillip RN, after five (5) traumatic years as Britain’s first Governor of New South Wales and repeated requests for repatriation, sailed home to England in the Atlantic.

Whitehall: Though Phillip recommended Lieutenant Gidley King RN replace him as Governor government  failed to commission an immediate successor exposing the First Australians to the brutality of British infantry troops.

‘Twenty- five [25] regiments of British infantry served in the colonies between [June] 1790 and 1870 they participated in the great struggle at the heart of the European conquest of this continent…for the first half of their stay were probably more frequently in action than the garrison of any other colony besides that of southern Africa’. Dr Peter Stanley, The Remote Garrison, 1986, Kangaroo Press, 1986

Sydney  – 1790 June: First contingent of infantry, the infamous New South Wales Corps, had arrived in June 1790 aboard the second fleet Britain’s Grim Armada’. See: Dancing With Slavers – A Second Fleet

By default, between December 1792 and September 1795, ‘the plentitude of power’ Britain vested in its naval governors fell into the hands of the military.

‘For the length of the interregnum the British government was greatly at fault’. Hunter, J.J. Auchmuty, Australian Dictionary of Biography

Major Francis Grose the Corps’ commander remained in London to recruit and satisfy establishment requirements. There was intense dissension within officer ranks. Lieutenant John Macarthur, a junior officer, moved swiftly to fill the command vacuum. See: A Black Hole: The First Interregnum 1792-1795

London – 1794, 6 February,: Eventually Captain John Hunter RN,  hero of the ‘First Fleet’ expeditionary force, was ‘commission[ed] as captain-general and governor-in-chief’ at the beginning of February 1794 [but] did not sail until 25 February 1795′.

Sydney – 1795, September 7: Governor John Hunter RN arrived 7 September 1795 and assumed office four days later.   (more…)