Aboriginals hanged in public near crime scene; Europeans executed outside or inside the Adelaide Gaol
All hangings of Europeans in South Australia took place in front of, or later inside, Adelaide Gaol, until the last one in 1964.
Thomas Donnelly, an ex convict, was hanged outside Adelaide Gaol in 1847 for murdering Kingberrie at Rivoli Bay – the only European hanged for killing an Aboriginal person in colonial South Australia.
Aside from the contrast of 23 Aboriginals being hanged in South Australia up until 1862, the location of their executions was different.
The first Aboriginals hanged for murder in South Australia were Yerr-i-Cha (for murdering shepherd William Duffell on the River Torrens banks) and Wang Nucha (for killing James Thomson while minding sheep near the Little Para River) in 1839 in the Adelaide parklands. The Register newspaper said that the double execution "will act as a terror" to the Aborigines and "be a means of deterring them in future from interfering in any way with the property or lives of the settlers”.
Police commissioner Major Thomas O’Halloran set the new norm at the Coorong scene of the massacre of 26 passengers after they were rescued by Aboriginals the brig Maria that had run aground in 1840. He was acting under martial law invoked by governor George Gawler who ordered at least three executions at the scene. (O'Halloran also ordered that the bodies be left hanging until they fell to pieces.)
From then on, while public hangings of Europeans continued outside Adelaide Gaol, Aboriginals were taken back to be executed near the scene of the crime with fellow tribesmen encouraged, and sometime forces, to watch.
South Australian abolished all public hangings in 1858. But the parliament’s ideals were tested next when Mary Ann Rainbird and her two children were murdered near Kapunda. Four Aboriginal men were hanged privately within Adelaide Gaol for this in 1861.
While the “Maria massacre” was the biggest in Australian colonial history, the murder in 1859 of Mary Ann Rainbird and her two children, found ‘doubled up and thrust into a wombat hole’ near Kapunda, provoked a fiercer public reaction because Pitta Miltinda, Tankawortya and two named Warretya were privately executed on a scaffold erected inside the walls of Adelaide Gaol in June 1861. Kapunda’s Norther Star newspaper freely used the word “Niggers” in condemning that they hadn’t been hanged locally “or they should have been placed at the rifle target for the volunteers to shoot at, so they would have a lingering death … We have been cheated.”
Due to the public reaction, the 1858 act was changed to allow that "any aboriginal native … may be publicly carried into execution at the place at which the crime … was committed, or as near to such place as conveniently may be".
The offender’s body was also to be buried at or nearby the place of execution. Edward Grundy, the MP for Barossa District, argued for gibbeting or permanent display of the bodies. For European offenders, private executions continued inside the gaol walls until the last in 1964.
After public local hangings of Aboriginals were restored in 1861, the Yatala sailed for Fowlers Bay, on the Nullarbor Plain, taking Nilgerie and Tilcherie who had killed shepherd Theodore Gustavus Berggoist. They were executed in front of nearly 100 Indigenous men, women and children that The Register called “among the most uncivilized of Australian savages, and utterly without clothing”.
After hanging on the scaffold for an hour, Nilgerie and Tilcherie were cut down and buried beneath the spot where the shepherd was speared. The Yatala next went for Venus Bay, on west Eyre Peninsula, with Karabidne and Mangeltie, who were hanged for murdering shepherd’s wife Margaret Ann Impett, before local Aboriginals and Europeans.
Although the last Aboriginal was executed in South Australia in 1862, the right for judges to sentence an Aboriginal to public hangings remained on the statute books until 1972.
