If you have ever walked along Forbes Street or up Darlinghurst Road past the long sandstone walls of the National Art School, you have walked past the place where Sydney hanged its condemned prisoners for more than sixty years. In my earlier post on Darlinghurst Gaol and Darlinghurst Court I covered the buildings themselves: the convict-quarried sandstone, the radial wings, and how the old gaol became the art school. This time I wanted to look at the darker side of the place, the hangings, and the people who are remembered because of it.
Before I start, a word about how I have gone about this. Nearly every name here belongs to someone who was killed or badly hurt, and to families who had to live with it. Where the records name the victims I have used their names, except for children who were sexually assaulted. Where my sources disagree, I say so.
From George Street to Darlinghurst
In the years before 1841, Sydney's hangings were carried out at the old Sydney Gaol on the corner of George and Essex Streets in The Rocks. The last man hanged there was Michael Lynch, a sawyer from the Illawarra, on 4 June 1841. Three days later, on 7 June, the prisoners were walked in chains from the old gaol to the new one on Darlinghurst hill, 407 men and 39 women, by one count.
That date matters, because plenty of lists online mix the two gaols up. You will sometimes see the seven men hanged for the Myall Creek massacre listed as executed at Darlinghurst. They were hanged at the old Sydney Gaol on 18 December 1838, nearly three years before Darlinghurst opened, so it always pays to check a date against 1841.
The public hangings, 1841 to 1852
The first hangings
The first two men hanged at Darlinghurst went to the gallows together on 29 October 1841. George Stroud (sometimes spelt Stroode) had murdered his wife Sarah at Concord, and Robert Hudson had killed a fellow convict, Dean West, at the General Hospital in Macquarie Street. The scaffold was put up in the gaol yard and the public were let in to watch: between five and six hundred people, the papers said.
A year later the gaol tried something different. On 8 November 1842 four men convicted of piracy at Norfolk Island, George Beavor, John Jones, Henry Sears and Nicholas Lewis (alias Head), were hanged in the yard, but only people with a written order from the Sheriff, the visiting magistrate or the gaol governor were let in. The Colonial Observer approved: the more private such "disgusting and demoralising spectacles" were, the better. The next morning Stephen Brennan, convicted of murdering Pat Lynch on Norfolk Island, was hanged in the same yard before eighty to a hundred ticket-holders.
John Knatchbull and the scaffold outside the gate
That early attempt at privacy did not last. The first hanging held outside the gaol walls was the one people still talk about, the execution of John Knatchbull on 13 February 1844.
Knatchbull had been a Royal Navy captain who served in the wars against France. He came down in the world, was transported to New South Wales in 1824 under the name John Fitch, and later did years on Norfolk Island for forgery. On the night of 6 January 1844 he went into the little shop Ellen Jamieson ran from her home on the corner of Kent Street and Margaret Place and attacked her with a tomahawk to rob her. Ellen was a widow of about 35 with two small children, Mary and Robert. A neighbour, John Shalless, raised the alarm and the locals broke in and found Knatchbull hiding behind the door. Ellen died eleven days later, on 18 January.
His barrister, Robert Lowe (later a British cabinet minister), tried what the judge called a brand-new defence, that Knatchbull had acted under an "irresistible impulse", a kind of moral insanity. The jury did not even leave the box. Knatchbull later confessed in writing, "I am Guilty of the Horrid Deed for which I am justly to suffer Death".
The gallows were built outside the gaol in Forbes Street, by the gate. The crowd that came up Darlinghurst hill on the morning of the hanging was put at about ten thousand: men, women and children, held back by soldiers and police. The rope was not set properly and he took at least two minutes to die. Afterwards a plaster cast was taken of his head "for phrenological purposes", and printers sold pictures of him and of Ellen Jamieson for a shilling.
The hangman in the hut by the wall
The man who hanged Knatchbull, and nearly everyone else in New South Wales for twenty-one years, was Alexander Green. He had arrived as a convict in 1824, worked for years as a flogger, and became the colony's executioner in February 1834. The older biography of him claimed he hanged 490 people, but the historian Pamela Harrison, working from the NSW Capital Convictions Database, puts it at about 251, which is still a frightening number.
In 1842 Green was allowed to build a whitewashed hut at his own expense outside the eastern wall of the gaol, and he lived there for about ten years. The spot later became Green Park, but here is the twist: the park is named after James Green, the local alderman from 1869 to 1883, not the hangman. Alexander Green drank heavily, did a stint as a prisoner in Darlinghurst himself in 1850, was certified insane in 1855 and died in 1879.
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The last public hanging at Darlinghurst
Through the 1840s the public hangings went on; John Ahern in 1845, William Fyfe in 1848 and Owen Molloy in 1849 are all recorded as public, Molloy dying "on the drop in front of Darlinghurst Gaol". The last public hanging there was Francis Thomas Green (no relation to the hangman) on Tuesday 21 September 1852. He was a sly-grog seller who had shot his partner, John Jones, "the Tinker", at Buckley's Creek on the goldfields near Bathurst. A neat dresser to the end, he changed his shoes because they had got dirty and went up the scaffold dressed in white with a small cross around his neck.
It was a drizzly morning, and Bell's Life was more interested in the crowd than the prisoner, complaining that women outnumbered men nearly three to one, including a carriage full of "women of respectable exterior" parked right in front of the drop. That sort of reporting tells you which way public opinion was moving.
You will often read that Francis Green was the last person publicly hanged in New South Wales. He was the last at Darlinghurst, but not in the colony. Public hangings carried on at country gaols for a while; Patrick McCarthy and an Aboriginal man recorded only as Paddy were hanged outside Bathurst Gaol in April 1853, for example. Darlinghurst simply had no more hangings until the law changed.
The law changes: executions move inside the walls
The NSW Legislative Council passed An Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals on 17 August 1853. Because it changed British law it had to wait for the Queen's assent, and it only took effect in January 1855: the Sydney Law Review says 11 January, while Rachel Franks of the State Library, writing for the Dictionary of Sydney, says it was proclaimed on 10 January. From then on, hangings had to happen inside a gaol before officials and a few witnesses. Britain did not follow until 1868.
The first private hanging under the new law, and according to the historian Steven Anderson the first on the Australian continent, was at Darlinghurst on 28 February 1855. William Ryan had murdered his wife Catherine near the corner of Hay and Castlereagh Streets. The date was kept so quiet that hardly anyone knew, and the women and children gathered outside saw nothing: "the new arrangements prevented the gratification of their curiosity". It was Alexander Green's last job. When Samuel Wilcox and William Rodgers were hanged on 5 July 1855, the rope was handled by his successor, Robert Elliott.
Where the gallows stood
This is something I wanted to pin down, because you will see different answers. From what I have found, there were really four places over the years:
- 1841 and 1842: temporary gallows in the gaol yard, open to the public in 1841 and ticket-only in 1842.
- 1844 to 1852: the public scaffold outside the main gate on Forbes Street, on the north-west side. Wikipedia adds that it was later replaced by a platform above the gate, which I have not been able to confirm.
- 1869 to 1886: a permanent gallows inside the walls at the north-east corner, near Burton Street and Darlinghurst Road: a small platform in the angle of a building, so a prisoner could walk straight from the cell to the drop. Thomas Kelly was the first hanged on it, on 2 January 1872, and the names of those hanged there were recorded on the beam above.
- 1887 onwards: a new gallows in E wing, built by Hudson Brothers just before the Mount Rennie hangings in January 1887. The old one could be seen from high ground outside the walls, it was within earshot of any crowd outside, and it was too small to hang several people at once.
Between 1855 and 1869 the papers only say the hangings took place "within the grounds" or "within the precincts". In later years, witnesses with a Sheriff's order came in through the courthouse and signed a book before being led through to the gaol.
Bushrangers on the Darlinghurst gallows
In the 1860s the bushrangers filled the condemned cells. Henry Manns was hanged on 26 March 1863 for his part in the Eugowra Rocks gold escort robbery planned by Frank Gardiner's gang. John Dunn of Ben Hall's gang shot dead Constable Samuel Nelson, the only policeman at Collector, during a hold-up in January 1865. Dunn was hanged on 19 March 1866, aged 19.
Thomas and John Clarke, brothers from the Braidwood district, ran the last big organised bushranging gang in New South Wales. After four special constables were ambushed and killed near Jinden in January 1867, the brothers were hunted down, and they were hanged side by side at Darlinghurst on 25 June 1867.
Captain Moonlite
The bushranger most people have heard of is Andrew George Scott, "Captain Moonlite". Irish-born and raised partly in New Zealand, he had already served time in Pentridge prison in Victoria. In November 1879 he and a band of young men, hungry and broke after being refused work, held up Wantabadgery station near Wagga Wagga. In the shootout with police at McGlede's farm that followed, Senior Constable Edward Webb Bowen was fatally wounded, and Scott's close companion James Nesbitt was shot dead.
Scott and Thomas Rogan were hanged together at Darlinghurst at 8 o'clock on the morning of 20 January 1880. Scott went to the gallows wearing a ring woven from a lock of Nesbitt's hair, and asked to be buried beside him: "My dying wish is to be buried beside my beloved James Nesbitt". The authorities refused. In January 1995 his remains were finally taken from Rookwood and reburied at Gundagai, near Nesbitt's grave. Another gang member, Thomas Williams (alias Frank Johns), was spared in 1880, but after he stabbed a fellow prisoner at Parramatta Gaol he was hanged at Darlinghurst on 14 July 1885.
The man who shot a prince
One of the strangest cases is Henry James O'Farrell. On 12 March 1868, at a picnic at Clontarf, he shot and wounded Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria's second son. The prince recovered. O'Farrell pleaded insanity but was convicted of wounding with intent to murder and hanged at Darlinghurst on 21 April 1868, after the first attempted political assassination in Australia.
"Nosey Bob", the hangman everyone knew
For most of the later hangings at Darlinghurst the hangman was Robert Rice Howard, known to all of Sydney as "Nosey Bob". He was born around 1832 at Marham in Norfolk, England, came out to Queensland in 1866 and drove a cab in Sydney. In the mid-1870s, while he was still working as a cabman, he lost his nose. He became assistant hangman in 1875 and chief executioner from 1877.
Over twenty-eight years he took part in 62 executions around the state, 59 of them as the man in charge. Rachel Franks, in her 2022 biography of him, counts twelve as bungled, where the prisoner strangled rather than died from the drop. From about 1887 he lived in a weatherboard cottage on Ben Buckler at North Bondi, where he kept bees, fished for sharks, and was said to have trained his horse to fetch beer from the Cliff House Hotel. In November 1887 a gang of young men set on him at Bondi and threatened to hang him. He retired in May 1904, died at North Bondi on 3 February 1906 and is buried at Waverley Cemetery. His assistant George Russell took over as hangman.
The Mount Rennie hangings, 1887
On 9 September 1886 a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary Jane Hicks was tricked into a hansom cab by the driver, Charles Sweetman, and taken to scrubland at a spot called Mount Rennie, in what is now the Moore Park and Waterloo area. There she was set upon and raped by a gang of young larrikins. A passer-by, William Stanley, tried to help her, was driven off with bricks and bottles, and ran all the way to Redfern police station.
Eleven young men were tried before Justice Windeyer in November 1886 and nine were sentenced to death. After a big public campaign five sentences were commuted. The other four, George Duffy, Joseph Martin, William Boyce and Robert Read, aged 17 to 20, were hanged together on the new E wing gallows on 7 January 1887, with about two thousand people waiting outside the gates. Howard made a mess of it: only Duffy's neck was broken, and Martin is thought to have lived for about ten minutes.
It is hard to read about now from either side. A teenage girl went through something terrible and then had her character dragged through some of the newspapers, and four young men died badly on the end of a rope. The reprieved men were all released in November 1896, ten years after their trial.
Louisa Collins, the last woman hanged in New South Wales
Louisa Collins was born Louisa Hall on 11 August 1847 at Belltrees station near Scone. At Merriwa she met Charles Andrews, a butcher, and married him, and the family later moved to Sydney and settled at Botany, where they took in boarders. Charles Andrews died after a sudden illness on 2 February 1887. Two months later Louisa married one of the boarders, Michael Collins, and in July 1888 he too died, after an illness very like her first husband's. The Government Analyst found arsenic in his body. Charles Andrews was exhumed and arsenic was found in his remains as well.
Louisa was tried four times. Three juries could not agree. The fourth, in December 1888, found her guilty of murdering Michael Collins. There was a public meeting at Sydney Town Hall on 3 January 1889 to try to save her, petitions went to the Governor, Lord Carington, and on 7 January two of her daughters went to Government House to plead with him. He would not see them himself and sent his secretary to give them the answer.
She was hanged at Darlinghurst on the morning of 8 January 1889. Even then it went wrong. The lever would not move because the pin holding it was stuck, and Howard's assistant had to knock it out with a mallet while she stood on the trapdoor with the cap over her head, "perfectly upright and motionless". She was buried at Rookwood that afternoon. No woman has been hanged in New South Wales since.
Other cases Sydney talked about
A few more of the Darlinghurst cases made headlines well beyond Sydney:
- John Makin, 15 August 1893. John and Sarah Makin were "baby farmers" who took in infants for money; babies' bodies were found at houses they had lived in, including Burren Street, Macdonaldtown. Sarah's death sentence was commuted. John was hanged for the murder of the infant Horace Murray.
- The Bridge Street burglars, 31 May 1894. Charles Montgomery and Thomas Williams were hanged together for wounding Constable Frederick Bowden with intent to murder, near Circular Quay.
- Alfred Grenon, 31 January 1895. A Frenchman who shot a watchman, Thomas Heavey, in Elizabeth Bay Road. Heavey lived; Grenon is said to be the last person executed in Australia for attempted murder.
- Frank Butler, 16 July 1897. Often called Australia's first serial killer. He advertised for mates to go prospecting, had them dig what they thought was a prospecting hole, then shot them and buried them in it. His known victims were Charles Burgess, Arthur Preston and Captain Lee Weller, at Glenbrook. On the scaffold he told Howard impatiently to "Let go!"
Jimmy Governor
Of all the people hanged at Darlinghurst, the one I most wanted to get right is Jimmy Governor, because his story is so often told badly.
Jimmy was born about 1875 on the Talbragar River, near Denison Town, in the central west of New South Wales; that is where the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Dictionary of Sydney place his birth. His father Tommy Governor (or Grosvenor) was an Aboriginal man from the Namoi River country, and his mother Annie Fitzgerald was raised near Mendooran. The eldest of eight children, Jimmy went to school at Denison Town, Wollar and Gulgong, worked as a fencer and horse-breaker, and was a police tracker at Cassilis from 1896 to 1897. In December 1898 he married Ethel Page, a sixteen-year-old white girl, at Gulgong. At his trial he said, "I always worked, and paid for what I got, and I reckon I am as good as a white man."
The Gilgandra district has a strong claim on his story, and people out that way rightly count him as part of their history. It was while he was breaking horses around Gilgandra that Jimmy met John Mawbey, who gave him a fencing contract at Breelong, on Wallumburrawang Creek about ten miles south-east of Gilgandra. Jimmy, Ethel, their baby, his brother Joe and their friend Jacky Underwood camped on the property. By the accounts given after the event, Jimmy and Ethel put up with plenty of small humiliations from the household: the women laughing at Ethel's baby, complaints about the rations bill, posts rejected.
On the night of 20 July 1900 Jimmy and Jacky Underwood attacked the Mawbey household. They killed or fatally wounded Sarah Mawbey, her children Grace, Percy and Hilda, and the young schoolteacher Ellen (also called Helen) Kerz, who boarded with the family and taught the children. The inquest was held at the homestead, Ethel was locked up at Gilgandra police station, and Underwood was later committed for trial at the Gilgandra Police Court.
Jimmy and Joe then spent fourteen weeks on the run across a huge stretch of the state. Along the way they killed Alexander McKay near Ulan, Elizabeth O'Brien and her baby at Poggy near Merriwa, and Kieran Fitzpatrick, aged 74, near Wollar. Hundreds of police and volunteers hunted them. Jimmy was shot in the mouth in mid-October and caught near Bobin, inland from Wingham, on 27 October 1900. Joe was never hanged; he was shot dead a few days later north of Singleton.
Jacky Underwood was hanged at Dubbo on 14 January 1901. Howard went straight back to Sydney, and four days later, on the morning of 18 January 1901, Jimmy Governor was hanged at Darlinghurst for the murder of Ellen Kerz. Thomas Keneally based his 1972 novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith on his life, and Fred Schepisi made it into a film in 1978. However you read the story, nine people died, and the racism that Jimmy and Ethel lived with is part of it too.
The last hanging at Darlinghurst
After Howard's final double hanging of Digby Grand and Henry Jones in July 1903, for murdering Constable Samuel Long at Auburn, there was only one more execution at Darlinghurst. Nicholas Baxter murdered Mary MacNamara, an older woman, at 2 Sarah Street, Enmore, in July 1907, and was hanged at Darlinghurst on 29 October 1907. The reports said it was carried out "quietly and quickly", and that he died holding rosary beads.
The new State Penitentiary at Long Bay opened in 1914 and Darlinghurst closed the same year. From then on, Sydney's hangings were at Long Bay. The last person executed in New South Wales was John Trevor Kelly at Long Bay on 24 August 1939, and the death penalty for murder was abolished in this state in 1955.
Famous prisoners who walked out again
Not everyone famous at Darlinghurst went there to die. A few of the better-known guests:
- Henry Lawson. Our best-known writer was locked up at Darlinghurst seven times between 1905 and 1909, mostly for drunkenness and unpaid maintenance, 159 days in all. His poem "One Hundred and Three" (his prison number, 1908) gave the place its nickname, "Starvinghurst Gaol".
- J. F. Archibald. The founding editor of The Bulletin, the man the Archibald Prize is named after, also did time there.
- George Dibbs. The future Premier refused to pay £2,000 damages after losing a slander case, and spent a year in Darlinghurst from May 1880, entertaining visitors and working at a lathe supplied by Henry Parkes. He came out more popular than when he went in.
- Henry Louis Bertrand. The man convicted over the 1865 murder of Henry Kinder was not hanged. He served about 28 years, most of them at Darlinghurst, and in 1891 he painted the watercolour of the gaol below, which is now in the State Library.
People sometimes ask about Ned Kelly's gang. None of them were hanged at Darlinghurst. The closest link is Thomas Reilly, a cousin of Ned and Dan Kelly, who was hanged at Wagga Wagga in November 1889 for shooting a drover's overseer.
So how many were hanged at Darlinghurst?
This turned out to be the hardest question of all. There is no single official list that I could find online, and the figures do not agree:
- The Dictionary of Sydney says a total of 79 people were executed at the gaol.
- The Wikipedia article on the gaol, drawing on the old NSW Police history website, says 76.
- When I went through Wikipedia's List of people legally executed in New South Wales and picked out every hanging recorded at Darlinghurst between 1841 and 1907, I counted 76 names. That list is marked as incomplete, so the match with the 76 figure may be partly luck.
I checked as many entries as I could against the original newspaper reports on Trove and the biographies of the two hangmen, and corrected three dates along the way: James Morrison (20 August 1889, not 19 July), Alfred Grenon (31 January 1895, not 7 February) and Frank Butler (16 July 1897, not 17 July). If you know of a name I have missed, please tell me in the comments.
The executions at Darlinghurst Gaol, 1841 to 1907
This list is based on Wikipedia's List of people legally executed in New South Wales, checked against Trove newspaper reports, the Dictionary of Sydney, and the Wikipedia biographies of Alexander Green and Robert Howard. Up to September 1852 these were the years of public hangings at Darlinghurst. From February 1855 every hanging was held privately inside the walls.
| # | Date | Name | Crime |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 29 Oct 1841 | Robert Hudson | Murder of fellow convict Dean West at the General Hospital, Macquarie Street |
| 2 | 29 Oct 1841 | George Stroud (Stroode) | Murder of his wife Sarah at Concord |
| 3 | 8 Nov 1842 | George Beavor | Piracy at Norfolk Island |
| 4 | 8 Nov 1842 | John Jones | Piracy at Norfolk Island |
| 5 | 8 Nov 1842 | Henry Sears | Piracy at Norfolk Island |
| 6 | 8 Nov 1842 | Nicholas Lewis (alias Head) | Piracy at Norfolk Island |
| 7 | 9 Nov 1842 | Stephen Brennan | Murder of Pat Lynch on Norfolk Island |
| 8 | 13 Feb 1844 | John Knatchbull | Murder of Ellen Jamieson, Kent Street |
| 9 | 13 Aug 1844 | George Vigors | Murder of James Noble in Clarence Street |
| 10 | 13 Aug 1844 | Thomas Burdett | Murder of James Noble in Clarence Street |
| 11 | 7 Feb 1845 | John Vidall | Murder of Thomas Warne in George Street |
| 12 | 12 Aug 1845 | John Ahern | Murder of his niece Mary-Anne Clark, near today's Railway Square |
| 13 | 30 Apr 1847 | John Kean (Liddell) | Murder of Ellen Hyndes near Campbelltown |
| 14 | 4 Jul 1848 | William Fyfe | Murder of Robert Cox at Kangaroo Point, Moreton Bay |
| 15 | 22 Sep 1848 | Francis Dermott | Rape, Shoalhaven district |
| 16 | 7 May 1849 | James Richardson | Murder of his wife Elizabeth at Campbelltown |
| 17 | 18 Sep 1849 | Owen Molloy | Murder of John Leonard at Moreton Bay |
| 18 | 5 Nov 1850 | Mogo Gar (Bundjalung man) | Murder of Daniel Page on the Bellinger River |
| 19 | 5 Nov 1850 | James Whelan | Murder of Catherine Byrnes near Kent Street |
| 20 | 21 Sep 1852 | Francis Thomas Green | Murder of John Jones at Buckley's Creek near Bathurst (last public hanging at Darlinghurst) |
| Public hangings end. The Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals takes effect in January 1855. | |||
| 21 | 28 Feb 1855 | William Ryan | Murder of his wife Catherine near Hay and Castlereagh Streets (first private hanging) |
| 22 | 5 Jul 1855 | William Rodgers | Murder of Joseph Allsopp at Baulkham Hills |
| 23 | 5 Jul 1855 | Samuel Wilcox | Murder of Johanna Smith in Liverpool Street |
| 24 | 7 Sep 1858 | James Moyes | Murder of William Alden aboard the ship Oliver Jordan in Sydney |
| 25 | 22 Jul 1859 | John Norris | Rape of a six-year-old girl near Prospect |
| 26 | 16 May 1860 | William Goodson | Murder of his wife Mary at Kissing Point |
| 27 | 18 Mar 1863 | Alexander Ross | Highway robbery and attempted murder of Harry Stephens at Caloola |
| 28 | 18 Mar 1863 | Charles Ross | Highway robbery and attempted murder of Harry Stephens at Caloola |
| 29 | 26 Mar 1863 | Henry Manns | Eugowra gold escort robbery |
| 30 | 1 Feb 1864 | Thomas McCann | Highway robbery and attempted murder of William Saville near Berrima |
| 31 | 19 Mar 1866 | John Dunn | Murder of Constable Samuel Nelson at Collector |
| 32 | 14 Apr 1866 | James Crookwell | Murder of Constable William Raymond in the Bargo Brush |
| 33 | 11 Jun 1866 | Michael Green | Murder of Andrew Shearer at Rushcutters Bay |
| 34 | 18 Mar 1867 | William Henry Scott | Murder of Anne Ramsden (Scott) in Sussex Street |
| 35 | 25 Jun 1867 | Thomas Clarke | Bushranging; attempted murder of Constable William Walsh at Jinden |
| 36 | 25 Jun 1867 | John Clarke | Bushranging; attempted murder of Constable William Walsh at Jinden |
| 37 | 21 Apr 1868 | Henry James O'Farrell | Shooting Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, at Clontarf |
| 38 | 2 Jan 1872 | Thomas Kelly | Attempted murder of William McLaren at Parramatta Gaol (first on the 1869 gallows) |
| 39 | 18 Jun 1872 | George Robert Nichols | Murders of William Percy Walker and John Bridger (Parramatta River murders) |
| 40 | 18 Jun 1872 | Alfred Lester (alias Froude) | Murders of William Percy Walker and John Bridger (Parramatta River murders) |
| 41 | 8 Apr 1873 | William McCrow | Murder of Margaret Ward at Woolloomooloo |
| 42 | 8 Apr 1873 | John Scource | Murder of Elizabeth Lee on Sydney Harbour |
| 43 | 1 Jul 1873 | Julius Krauss (William Cross) | Murder of Captain Longmuir aboard the Rifleman |
| 44 | 23 Dec 1873 | Henry Vincent Jarvis | Murder of James Muggeridge near Evans Plains Creek |
| 45 | 10 Sep 1875 | John McGrath | Rape near Bega |
| 46 | 18 Apr 1876 | Ah Chong | Murder of Po Tie at Parramatta Gaol |
| 47 | 20 Jan 1880 | Andrew George Scott ('Captain Moonlite') | Murder of Senior Constable Edward Webb Bowen, Wantabadgery |
| 48 | 20 Jan 1880 | Thomas Rogan | Murder of Senior Constable Edward Webb Bowen, Wantabadgery |
| 49 | 29 Mar 1881 | William Brown | Rape of his twelve-year-old daughter, Manning River district |
| 50 | 23 Apr 1884 | William Rice | Murder of James Griffin in Surry Hills |
| 51 | 14 Apr 1885 | Charles Watson | Murder of William Matthews near Hillston |
| 52 | 14 Jul 1885 | Thomas Williams (alias Frank Johns) | Attempted murder of prisoner William Roberts at Parramatta Gaol |
| 53 | 8 Oct 1886 | Alfred Reynolds | Murder of his wife Rhoda at Newtown |
| 54 | 7 Jan 1887 | George Duffy | Mount Rennie rape of Mary Jane Hicks |
| 55 | 7 Jan 1887 | Joseph Martin | Mount Rennie rape of Mary Jane Hicks |
| 56 | 7 Jan 1887 | William Boyce | Mount Rennie rape of Mary Jane Hicks |
| 57 | 7 Jan 1887 | Robert Read | Mount Rennie rape of Mary Jane Hicks |
| 58 | 11 Sep 1888 | Robert Hewart | Murder of Thomas Park in a cell at the Central Police Station |
| 59 | 8 Jan 1889 | Louisa Collins | Murder of her husband Michael Collins at Botany |
| 60 | 20 Aug 1889 | James Morrison | Murder of Constable David Sutherland at Potts Point |
| 61 | 17 Nov 1891 | Maurice Dalton | Murder of his wife Catherine in Foveaux Street, Surry Hills |
| 62 | 13 Jun 1893 | Edward Smedley | Murder of his wife Phoebe at Quirindi |
| 63 | 11 Jul 1893 | George Archer | Rape and murder of Emma Harrison in Bourke Street, Darlinghurst |
| 64 | 15 Aug 1893 | John Makin | Murder of the infant Horace Murray (baby farming) |
| 65 | 31 May 1894 | Charles Montgomery | Wounding Constable Frederick Bowden with intent to murder |
| 66 | 31 May 1894 | Thomas Williams | Wounding Constable Frederick Bowden with intent to murder |
| 67 | 31 Jan 1895 | Alfred Grenon | Shooting watchman Thomas Heavey with intent to murder, Elizabeth Bay Road |
| 68 | 7 Jan 1896 | Thomas Meredith Sheridan | Death of Jessie Nicholls after an illegal operation |
| 69 | 16 Jul 1897 | Frank Butler | Murder of Captain Lee Weller at Glenbrook |
| 70 | 5 Apr 1899 | Stuart Wilson Christopher Briggs | Murders of Margaret Dutt and her grandmother Margaret Millar at Petersham |
| 71 | 18 Jan 1901 | Jimmy Governor | Murder of Ellen (Helen) Kerz at Breelong, near Gilgandra |
| 72 | 20 Dec 1901 | Joseph Campbell | Rape of a nine-year-old girl near Queanbeyan |
| 73 | 14 Apr 1903 | Thomas Moore | Rape and murder of ten-year-old Janet (Janey) Smith at Ramsay's Bush |
| 74 | 7 Jul 1903 | Digby Grand | Murder of Constable Samuel Long at Auburn |
| 75 | 7 Jul 1903 | Henry Jones | Murder of Constable Samuel Long at Auburn |
| 76 | 29 Oct 1907 | Nicholas Baxter | Murder of Mary MacNamara at Enmore (last hanging at Darlinghurst) |
It is strange to walk past those gates today, with art students sitting on the steps with their coffee. Most of the people on that list are forgotten now, and so are most of the people they hurt. I think it is worth knowing their names.
Sources
- Wikipedia – List of people legally executed in New South Wales
- Wikipedia – Darlinghurst Gaol
- Wikipedia – Alexander Green (executioner)
- Wikipedia – Robert 'Nosey Bob' Howard
- Wikipedia – John Knatchbull
- Wikipedia – Louisa Collins
- Wikipedia – Mount Rennie rape case
- Wikipedia – Jimmy Governor
- Wikipedia – Captain Moonlite
- Wikipedia – Henry O'Farrell
- Wikipedia – Clarke gang
- Wikipedia – John Dunn (bushranger)
- Wikipedia – Henry Lawson
- Wikipedia – George Dibbs
- Dictionary of Sydney – Darlinghurst Gaol
- Dictionary of Sydney – Rachel Franks, The last public hanging at Darlinghurst Gaol
- Dictionary of Sydney – Rachel Franks, Australia's first serial killer
- Dictionary of Sydney – Governor, Jimmy
- Australian Dictionary of Biography – Jimmy Governor
- Australian Dictionary of Biography – Sir George Richard Dibbs
- Jo Lennan & George Williams, 'The Death Penalty in Australian Law', Sydney Law Review (2012)
- Steven L. Anderson, 'Death of a Spectacle' (PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 2016) (University of Adelaide digital library)
- Trove – 'The Norfolk Island Pirates', Colonial Observer, 9 November 1842
- Trove – 'Execution of Stephen Brennan, for Murder', Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November 1842
- Trove – 'Execution of Owen Molloy', Bell's Life in Sydney, 22 September 1849
- Trove – 'Confession and Execution of Francis Thomas Green', Bell's Life in Sydney, 25 September 1852
- Trove – 'Execution of Ryan, the Murderer', Bell's Life in Sydney, 3 March 1855
- Trove – 'Execution at Darlinghurst', Freeman's Journal, 7 July 1855
- Trove – 'Execution of James Moyes', Sydney Morning Herald, 8 September 1858
- Trove – 'Execution of Kelly in Darlinghurst Gaol', Australian Town and Country Journal, 6 January 1872
- Trove – 'Execution of the Wantabadgery Bushrangers', Yass Courier, 23 January 1880
- Trove – 'The Execution of Louisa Collins', Sydney Morning Herald, 9 January 1889
- Trove – 'The Execution' (James Morrison), Evening News, 20 August 1889
- Trove – 'Grenon's End', Evening News, 31 January 1895
- Trove – 'Execution of Frank Butler', Sydney Mail, 24 July 1897
- Always Askew – The Execution of Nicholas Baxter 1907 (quotes contemporary newspaper reports)
- Wikimedia Commons (image sources, as credited under each picture)
Further reading, not online: Deborah Beck, Hope in Hell: A History of Darlinghurst Gaol and the National Art School (Allen & Unwin, 2005); Rachel Franks, An Uncommon Hangman: The Life and Deaths of Robert 'Nosey Bob' Howard (NewSouth, 2022).