The corner of Essex and Harrington Streets in The Rocks is a steep little intersection with a green disc on it, and the disc is doing a lot of work. Thomas Barrett — a First Fleet convict, a convicted forger, and the man generally credited with engraving the Charlotte Medal — was hanged here, or as near as anyone can now point, on the evening of 27 February 1788. He had been in the colony a month. It was the first civil execution in New South Wales.
The charge was stealing from the government stores — the traditional list is butter, peas and pork — at a moment when Phillip had already warned that theft of rations would be capital. Barrett was tried with others the same day; one man was flogged, two who had also been sentenced to hang were reprieved, and Barrett went to a gallows tree on the rise between the male and female camps on the western side of Sydney Cove. The body hung an hour and was buried nearby. Later memory called the slope Hangman's Hill. The Royal Australian Historical Society marked it as Green Plaque 5: Thomas Barrett was hanged near this place on 27 February 1788 for stealing provisions and was buried nearby.
The other Barrett, the one worth holding in the same paragraph, is the medallist. On board Charlotte at Botany Bay, Surgeon-General John White is believed to have set him to engrave a silver kidney dish with the ship and the voyage — Australia's first colonial artwork, now at the Australian National Maritime Museum. Spell Barrett, spell Charlotte. A month in, the stores were the law, and this corner is where the law showed itself.