John Knatchbull and the Murder of Ellen Jamieson – Sydney, 1844

On a Saturday night in January 1844, a widow named Ellen Jamieson was keeping her little shop open late on the corner of Kent Street and Margaret Place in Sydney. Her two young children were asleep upstairs. Just before midnight a man came in asking for vinegar, and a few minutes later a neighbour across the road heard a terrible noise from inside. The man was John Knatchbull, a former Royal Navy commander from one of the best-known families in Kent, by then a ticket-of-leave convict with a long record behind him. Ellen died of her injuries twelve days later. Knatchbull was tried, found guilty, and on 13 February 1844 he became the first man hanged at the new Darlinghurst Gaol, in front of one of the biggest crowds Sydney had ever seen.

I've mentioned Knatchbull briefly in my post on Darlinghurst Gaol & Darlinghurst Court, and he heads the list in my page on the Hangings at Darlinghurst Gaol, but his story deserves a page of its own. It takes in a baronet's household in Kent, the Napoleonic Wars, a pickpocketing charge at Vauxhall Gardens, the Bathurst road, Norfolk Island, and finally a courtroom where his barrister tried a defence no colonial judge had heard before. Most of all, though, it is about Ellen Jamieson and the two children she left behind, and I've tried to keep them in view the whole way through.

John Knatchbull, from an 1844 lithograph now held by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Credit: Unknown artist, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A Baronet's Son from Kent

Even Knatchbull's birth year isn't settled. The Australian Dictionary of Biography gives "1792?" and says he was probably the John Knatchbull baptised on 24 January 1793 at Norton, near Provender, in Kent. His biographer Colin Roderick, whose 1963 book is the standard account, puts his birth in 1789. The plate on his coffin in 1844 read "aged fifty-six". So take your pick, but somewhere between about 1787 and 1793.

His father was Sir Edward Knatchbull (1758–1819), 8th Baronet, of Mersham Hatch in Kent, and his mother was Sir Edward's second wife, Frances, daughter of Thomas Graham. The ADB describes Sir Edward as "a rollicking squire who married three times and had at least twenty children". John was a younger son in a very crowded house. According to Roderick (as summarised on Wikipedia), his mother died in 1799, and the children were left in the care of a governess. He went to school at Ashford and later to Dr Charles Burney's school at Greenwich, and the ADB says he also went to Winchester.

John Singleton Copley's oil sketch for his big portrait of Sir Edward Knatchbull, 8th Baronet, with his children, painted between 1800 and 1803. John was still a boy then and is probably one of them, though I can't tell you which figure he is. Credit: John Singleton Copley, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

When Sir Edward died in 1819 the baronetcy went to John's elder half-brother, also Sir Edward Knatchbull, who followed his father into Parliament. That half-brother's name will come up again, right at the end of the story, on the papers found in John's pockets.

The Navy, and How It Ended

In August 1804, as a boy, Knatchbull joined the Royal Navy as a volunteer, the usual way in for a gentleman's younger son. Over the next few years he served in a string of ships: the ADB lists the Ardent, Revenge, Zealand, Sybille, Téméraire, Leonidas, Cumberland, Ocean and Ajax. He passed his lieutenant's examination in November 1810 and served in the Shearwater off Spain until he was invalided home in August 1812.

In December 1813 he was commissioned to command the sloop Doterel in the West Indies, but he missed the ship. Roderick's research found that he went down with yellow fever in Barbados while trying to catch up with her. He was reappointed to the Doterel in September 1814, and in 1815 he brought her from Bermuda by way of the Azores back to Portsmouth. Then came Waterloo, the navy was cut back hard, and Knatchbull was retired on half-pay.

What finished his naval career wasn't a battle. It was a wine bill. While the Doterel was at the Azores in April 1815 he had run up a debt with the British vice-consul at Fayal, Thomas Parkin, and the bills he gave in payment were not honoured. Parkin complained to the Admiralty, and in 1818, as the ADB puts it, his pay "was stopped by the Admiralty because of a debt he had incurred in the Azores". Roderick found that the Admiralty decided his "conduct was unbecoming the character of an officer" and took his name off the navy list. I couldn't find any record of a court-martial. For what it's worth, the Sydney paper The Australian told a different story in 1844, claiming he was dismissed from the service for tyranny. I've found nothing in the official record to back that up.

"John Fitch" at Vauxhall Gardens

Not much is known about his life between 1818 and 1824. In his own memoir he claimed he fought in South America, but there's no proof of it. What is certain is that on the evening of 30 June 1824, at a crowded fireworks night at Vauxhall Gardens in London, a gentleman named de Dompierre found that his coat pocket had been cut and his pocket-book taken. A man calling himself John Fitch was already in police hands on suspicion of picking pockets, and he had a blank cheque and several sovereigns on him.

"Fitch" was tried at the Surrey Assizes in Guildford in August 1824. The ADB and The Times report give the date as 21 August, while the ship's muster for the convict transport (quoted by Museums of History NSW) says 19 August. The Times reported that the judge, Justice Burrough, "perfectly knew who" the prisoner really was. He was found guilty of what the ADB calls "stealing with force and arms" and was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years.

Transported to New South Wales

Knatchbull sailed on the convict ship Asia and arrived in Sydney in April 1825; Roderick gives the date as 29 April. He was sent to Bathurst, where official records called him "John Fitch" or "John Fitch, alias Knatchbull". In November 1826 he was made a constable to the mail service, carrying the mail on foot between Bathurst and Mount York. He was given a ticket-of-leave on 24 August 1829 after helping to catch eight runaway convicts. His ticket was then moved to Liverpool, and by 1831 he was an overseer on the Parramatta Road.

For a while it looked as if he might settle down. He didn't. In December 1831 he paid for clothes at Charles Bailey's shop in George Street with a cheque signed, supposedly, by Judge James Dowling. The cheque was a forgery. Bailey later spotted him in the market and had him arrested. On 22 February 1832 the Supreme Court found him guilty and sentence of death was recorded against him. It was commuted to seven years at Norfolk Island.

The forged cheque, made out in Judge James Dowling's name, that was used as evidence against Knatchbull in February 1832. Credit: State Records of New South Wales (now Museums of History NSW), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Norfolk Island: Poison and Mutiny

Knatchbull spent several months on the prison hulk Phoenix in Sydney Harbour before sailing for Norfolk Island on the Governor Phillip in October 1832. During the voyage some of the convicts plotted to poison the crew and guards and seize the ship, with Knatchbull, the one man aboard who could navigate, meant to sail her to South America. The plot was betrayed and failed. The ADB records it simply as "a conspiracy... to poison the ship's company".

On the island he had a stroke in 1833 that left him partly paralysed. In January 1834, when a large group of convicts rose against the guards, Knatchbull said he was too ill to take part, though he had offered to command a ship if they captured one. When the rising was put down, he turned informer for the acting commandant, Captain Foster Fyans. At the trials that followed, twenty-nine men were sentenced to death, and the judge, William Burton, gave Fyans a serve for taking Knatchbull's confession. The ADB quotes him:

"He was the chief of the mutineers, the man you should have named first in the Calendar. You have saved his life, or prolonged it. He never can do good."

Keep Justice Burton in mind. Ten years later, he would be the judge at Knatchbull's murder trial.

Port Macquarie, the Ticket-of-Leave, and Back to Sydney

Knatchbull's Norfolk Island sentence came on top of his original fourteen years, so when he got back to Sydney in May 1839 he still had time to serve. He was in poor health and was sent to Port Macquarie as an invalid. Roderick says he was later put in charge of the punt across the Hastings River. On 8 July 1842 he received a new ticket-of-leave, and in July 1843 it was altered to Sydney so he could work on the coaster Harriet for its owner, Thomas Lewis.

Hyde Park, Museum, Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney Grammar School, Burdekin's and Lyons' Terraces, 1842, by John Rae. This was the Sydney Knatchbull came back to. Credit: John Rae, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By the end of 1843 Lewis was insolvent and Knatchbull was out of work. He was lodging with Charles Hollowell in Clarence Lane, and he told Hollowell he owned the Harriet and was only waiting for her to be sold to pay his rent. He had also become engaged to a young widow named Harriet Craig, who had introduced him to Hollowell as a free man. The wedding was very close. His barrister said in court that it was to be the next morning; The Dispatch, as quoted by the Dictionary of Sydney, said the Monday. Either way, he had no money to pay for it.

Saturday Night, 6 January 1844

Ellen Jamieson ran a small shop from her home on the corner of Kent Street and Margaret Place, a few streets back from the harbour. That's how the Sydney Morning Herald described the location in its trial report. The Dictionary of Sydney puts her home in Erskine Street, which is close by, but I've gone with the address given in the 1844 papers. She had been widowed just over a year earlier, when her husband Robert, a steward on the Rose steamer and a native of Glasgow, died in December 1842. She had two small children, Mary, known as Polly, and Robert, known as Bobby. Her age isn't certain: the Herald reporter at the inquest thought she was about 30, while Wikipedia, citing her NSW death record, gives 35. Neighbours said she did a good trade, and one woman told the inquest that Ellen often changed banknotes for her. People knew she had money in the house.

John Shalless, a builder who lived opposite in Margaret Place, wasn't well that night. At about ten o'clock his wife warned him that a boy had seen a suspicious-looking man hanging about. Shalless went out onto his verandah and watched him walk up and down outside Mrs Jamieson's shop for more than an hour and a half. He saw the man go in and out, sit on the kerb, and throw something at her little white dog. At about twenty to twelve a customer, Mrs Elizabeth Brown, went into the shop and found a man behind the door "getting some vinegar". He bade them both good night and left.

A few minutes later Ellen came to her door, wiping her hands, and the man stepped up, spoke to her and followed her in, pushing the door shut behind him. Shalless told his wife, "I hope he does not mean to rob her." Then he heard the door slam and something fall. He ran across the road and found the door locked, and from inside he heard what he described as "some strokes given as of some one breaking a cocoanut with a hammer". He saw a light moving upstairs and the man pulling back the blind to look out.

Shalless asked a private watchman for help and was told, "Well, what is that to me?" So he roused the neighbours himself. While some watched the front, others broke in the back door. They found Ellen lying unconscious and bleeding heavily from wounds to her head, and the man standing behind the front door. He didn't fight. As they grabbed him he called out, "O! don't strike me." Constable Bryan Norton took him to the watch-house. Upstairs, the neighbours found Ellen's two children in bed, crying.

The weapon took a while to find. About two hours later Mrs Jaques, a neighbour, lifted the mattress on Ellen's bed and found a tomahawk hidden between the mattress and the battens, with fresh blood on it. Charles Hollowell knew it at once. It was his, and it had been lying in his back yard, where his lodger could get at it.

At the station Inspector Molloy searched the prisoner. In his trousers and pockets were a woman's pocket, which looked as if it had been torn from her clothes, and money totalling £17 2s 8d. He also had three bills of exchange for £50 each, made out to be drawn on his half-brother, Sir Edward Knatchbull, along with three blank ones. There was blood on his trousers and on his boots.

Twelve Days

Ellen Jamieson didn't die that night. The surgeon, Mr Jones, found several fractures of her skull. Her neighbours nursed her for twelve days, and she died between seven and eight o'clock on the morning of Thursday 18 January 1844. Mrs Brown, who used to do her mangling and mending, was with her at the end.

The inquest was held the same day at M'Kenzie's public house on the corner of Clarence Street and Margaret Place. Knatchbull was there and cross-examined the witnesses himself. The jury took about a minute to return a verdict of wilful murder, and the coroner made a point of praising Shalless "for the praiseworthy manner in which he had acted". The Herald said four or five hundred people waited outside. When Knatchbull was bundled into a hackney coach to go back to gaol, the crowd hooted and hissed.

The Trial: 24 January 1844

Knatchbull came to trial in the Supreme Court only six days after the inquest, on Wednesday 24 January 1844, before Justice William Burton, the same judge who had dealt with him on Norfolk Island. The Attorney-General, John Plunkett, prosecuted. His barrister was Robert Lowe, a newcomer to the colony who would later become a well-known figure in British politics.

"Knatchbull, as he appeared on his Trial", a woodcut from the booklet The Life of J. Knatchbull, published in Sydney in 1844. Credit: Unknown artist, H. Evers (publisher), State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Lowe started on the indictment itself. Knatchbull had been charged as "John Fitch alias John Knatchbull", and Lowe objected to the name. The court amended the indictment to "John Knatchbull" only, and he pleaded not guilty. Lowe then asked for the trial to be put off, saying a settler from the Clarence River named John Tattersal could give Knatchbull an alibi. Justice Burton refused, as the affidavit didn't say clearly what Tattersal could prove.

The Crown's witnesses told the same story they had told at the inquest. Then Lowe did something unusual. He didn't really argue that Knatchbull hadn't done it. Instead he told the jury that even if every witness was right, Knatchbull was one of those people "for whom laws had not been made". Insanity, he said, could affect the will without touching the intellect, so that a man could know perfectly well what he was doing and still be driven to it by something he couldn't resist. He pointed to the recent M'Naghten case in England. He asked how a man born into a noble family, with every advantage, could have "fallen, step by step, into the lowest depths of disgrace, unless urged on by some resistless demon of insanity". And he asked why a man about to be married would do such a thing, when he had bills on his brother in his pocket that he could have cashed.

This was what came to be called the plea of "moral insanity". The ADB says Lowe raised it "for the first time in a British court", and the Dictionary of Sydney calls it the first time insanity ideas like these were tested in an Australian court. What we do know for sure is what Justice Burton said. He told the jury it was "the first time he (the Judge) had ever heard a doctrine of this kind broached in a Court of Justice", and that it had no place in the law of England, "nor... either in common sense or morality". Lowe had no witnesses to back it up. The two men he called, the Colonial Surgeon Patrick Harnett and a priest who had known Knatchbull in 1817 and 1818, both said they had never been in a position to judge his state of mind.

On motive, Burton told the jury that the money found on the prisoner, if they believed it came from Ellen's house and person, gave them "a probable motive for his conduct". In other words, robbery.

Robert Lowe, Knatchbull's barrister, as Vanity Fair saw him in 1869, by which time he was a big name in British politics. Credit: Carlo Pellegrini, Vanity Fair, 27 February 1869, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Verdict and Sentence

The jury found him guilty without even leaving the box. Asked if he had anything to say, Knatchbull spoke of his upbringing and his naval service, claiming he had been in "twenty-one general engagements" and received "eleven wounds", and asked whether such a man would murder "a defenceless woman". Justice Burton sentenced him to death. He told Knatchbull that he had complained of too little time to prepare for his trial, yet he had given the woman he killed far less time to prepare for hers before her Maker.

Before the court rose, Plunkett suggested that the money found on Knatchbull should go to Ellen's children, and Burton agreed to recommend that it be placed in the Savings Bank for them. He also had harsh words for the police, who hadn't marked the tomahawk or the pocket as evidence, and for the watchman who had refused to help. "The public were mainly indebted to Mr. Shalless," he said.

The Appeal and the Plea for Mercy

Lowe wasn't finished. A few days after the trial he went back to the Supreme Court arguing that the sentence was illegal, because the judge hadn't directed that Knatchbull's body be dissected after execution (or, as Wikipedia summarises the petition, buried within the prison). The ADB says the appeal failed, and Wikipedia says the judges gave their decision on 1 February 1844.

There was one more try. According to Roderick, an attorney named Parry Long put a submission to the Governor, Sir George Gipps, on 8 February asking that a petition go to Queen Victoria. On 10 February Knatchbull was told it had failed. The Australian also reported that his two nephews in Sydney had kept him supplied with comforts in gaol and had "used every exertion" to save him. The Sheriff's Office, meanwhile, was writing to the Colonial Secretary on 6 February asking for extra armed guards for the execution. That letter is now in the NSW State Archives collection.

The Confession

Right up to the last weekend, Knatchbull denied the murder. Then he signed a short written confession, which The Australian printed:

"Condemned Cell, Woolloomooloo Gaol, 10th February, 1844. In the name of the Almighty God, Amen. I am guilty of the horrid deed for which I am to suffer death; and may the Lord have mercy on my soul. Amen. JOHN KNATCHBULL."

The papers didn't agree on exactly when or to whom he confessed. The Australian linked it to the "condemned sermon" on the Sunday, while The Dispatch said he confessed fully to Henry Keck, the keeper of the gaol, on the Monday night. The Dispatch added that he said he could not account for what had driven him to it. He also spent his last weeks writing the story of his life, finishing it on the morning of his execution and handing the manuscript to the gaol's governor.

Henry Keck, Governor of the gaol at Darlinghurst, drawn in 1847. Knatchbull wrote his life story in Keck's gaol and gave him the manuscript. Credit: William Nicholas, National Library of Australia, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

13 February 1844: The Hanging at Darlinghurst

The gaol at Darlinghurst had only been taking prisoners since 1841, and Knatchbull was the first man hanged there, and the first to go to a gallows built outside its walls, in full public view. Hangings had been public in Sydney for decades, but this was a new stage for them. The Dispatch said it stood "in front of the north gate", on ground so high it "could be seen from almost any part of Sydney". The ADB entry for the hangman puts it "outside the main gate". In my Darlinghurst Gaol post I placed the early public hangings at the main gate on Forbes Street.

People began walking across the Racecourse (today's Hyde Park) from six in the morning: men, women and children, on foot and in carts and carriages. Mounted police and soldiers kept the crowd back behind a chain. The crowd figures vary even within a single newspaper. The Australian's main report estimated "about ten thousand", but a second account printed in the same issue reckoned "between four and five thousand". Later writers, including the Dictionary of Sydney, have gone with more than ten thousand. Either way, it was an enormous number of people for a town the size of Sydney in 1844.

"Woolloomooloo Gaol", Execution of John Knatchbull: the crowd outside the gaol on 13 February 1844. Credit: Artist unknown, State Library of New South Wales, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Just before nine the Sheriff, Keck and Captain Innes went to the condemned cell. Knatchbull walked out between the gaol chaplain, the Rev. Mr Elder, and the Rev. Mr Sharpe of Bathurst, joining in the burial service as it was read. He was dressed in a mourning suit with black gloves and held a white handkerchief. At the foot of the scaffold he knelt and prayed for about five minutes. Then he climbed up, helped by the executioner, Alexander Green, the colony's long-serving hangman. The ADB entry on Green calls this the most famous of the executions he carried out at Darlinghurst.

The cap was drawn over his face. The Australian heard him saying, "Lord have mercy on my soul! Christ have mercy on my soul!" when the bolt was drawn. The two papers don't agree about what happened next. The Australian's second account suggests death came quickly, but The Dispatch reported that the knot had slipped round to the back of his neck, "and the struggles of expiring strength were long and painful". Both said the crowd was quiet throughout. There was no jeering, and afterwards people simply went home.

The scaffold outside Darlinghurst Gaol for Knatchbull's hanging, as drawn for the Truth newspaper more than fifty years later, on 8 August 1897. Credit: Unknown artist, Truth (Sydney), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Afterwards

Before his body was handed over to his family, a cast was taken of his head and face "for phrenological purposes", watched by many of Sydney's doctors. On 28 February The True Sun printed a woodcut of the cast. Early on the Wednesday morning a hearse and mourning coach took the coffin to what The Dispatch called "the Dissenting burial ground". The plate on it read "John Knatchbull, aged fifty-six". The Rev. Dr Ross of the Independent Chapel read the service. The mourners were two gentlemen and two ladies in deep mourning, and one more woman in black who stood apart from them.

What Became of Ellen Jamieson's Children

This is the part of the story I find hardest to read. Polly and Bobby Jamieson had lost their father in December 1842 and their mother in January 1844. A committee was formed to collect money for them, and its members included the Presbyterian minister Dr John Dunmore Lang and John Shalless, the neighbour who had raised the alarm. Lists for donations were left at the banks and on board the Hunter's River steamer.

Then, on 8 March 1844, Robert Lowe, Knatchbull's own barrister, applied to the Supreme Court to be made the children's guardian. The application was unopposed and was granted by the Chief Justice, Sir James Dowling, the same judge whose name Knatchbull had forged on that cheque back in 1831. Lang was furious that the man who had tried to save the murderer was now raising the victim's children, and he attacked Lowe in print.

The children lived in the Lowe household, and Wikipedia's account, drawing on Lowe's biographers, says their place there was somewhere between adopted children and servants. When the Lowes sailed for England on the Kate in January 1850, Polly and Bobby went with them. After that the accounts don't agree. A biography of Lowe from 1893 says Polly died young, soon after reaching England, and that Bobby went on to serve in New Zealand. A later biography from 1976 says Bobby died young in an asylum, and that Polly probably married and came back to Australia. I can't tell you which is right, and I'd rather leave it there than guess.

How Sydney Remembered Him

Sydney couldn't get enough of the story at the time. In the days before the execution a King Street printer advertised a lithograph of "John Knatchbull, the Murderer; and Mrs. Ellen Jamieson, his Victim" for a shilling. The Sydney Morning Herald grumbled that "the sooner he is forgotten the better". Four days after the hanging a booklet called The Life of J. Knatchbull was on sale, and the State Library of NSW still holds a copy. Roderick later wrote that many of the versions that followed painted Knatchbull "as a monster of bloody appetites". His own manuscript life story was eventually published in Roderick's 1963 biography, John Knatchbull: From Quarterdeck to Gallows. More than fifty years on, in 1897, the Truth newspaper was still printing pictures of his scaffold.

For the law, Lowe's "moral insanity" defence is still the part people write about, and it has been studied as an early attempt to bring that idea into an Australian courtroom. For Darlinghurst, Knatchbull was the first of the many people hanged at the gaol. The walls are still there in Forbes Street, and these days they're full of art students rather than prisoners.

The sandstone entrance of the former Darlinghurst Gaol, now the National Art School. Credit: Sardaka, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

For me, the people worth remembering from that Saturday night are John Shalless, who wouldn't look away when the watchman did, the neighbours who broke down the back door, the women who nursed Ellen for twelve days, and Ellen Jamieson herself, a hard-working widow trying to keep a roof over two little children in 1840s Sydney.

Timeline

• c.1789–1793 – John Knatchbull born in Kent; the ADB says probably baptised at Norton on 24 January 1793, while Roderick gives 1789.
• August 1804 – Joins the Royal Navy as a volunteer.
• November 1810 – Passes his lieutenant's examination.
• 1814–1815 – Commands the sloop Doterel; retired on half-pay after Waterloo.
• 1818 – Half-pay stopped over the Azores debt, and his name is removed from the navy list.
• 30 June 1824 – Arrested at Vauxhall Gardens, London, as "John Fitch".
• August 1824 – Convicted at the Surrey Assizes and sentenced to fourteen years' transportation.
• April 1825 – Arrives in Sydney on the Asia; sent to Bathurst.
• 24 August 1829 – First ticket-of-leave.
• 22 February 1832 – Convicted of forging Judge Dowling's name; death recorded, commuted to seven years on Norfolk Island.
• October 1832 – Poison plot on the Governor Phillip fails.
• January 1834 – Norfolk Island rising; Knatchbull turns informer.
• May 1839 – Returns to Sydney; later sent to Port Macquarie.
• 8 July 1842 – New ticket-of-leave, altered to Sydney in July 1843.
• Saturday 6 January 1844 – Ellen Jamieson attacked in her shop near midnight; Knatchbull caught inside.
• Thursday 18 January 1844 – Ellen Jamieson dies; inquest returns wilful murder.
• Wednesday 24 January 1844 – Trial before Justice Burton; guilty; sentenced to death.
• 1 February 1844 – Appeal over the wording of the sentence rejected.
• 10 February 1844 – Petition for mercy fails; written confession signed.
• Tuesday 13 February 1844 – Hanged outside Darlinghurst Gaol.
• 8 March 1844 – Robert Lowe appointed guardian of the Jamieson children.
• January 1850 – The Lowes leave for England with Polly and Bobby.

Sources

• Australian Dictionary of Biography, "Knatchbull, John (1792–1844)", Vol. 2, 1967: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/knatchbull-john-2313
• Ken Macnab, "Green, Alexander (1802–?)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplementary Volume, 2005: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/green-alexander-12949
• Australian Dictionary of Biography, "Lowe, Robert (1811–1892)": https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lowe-robert-2376
• Museums of History NSW, "Convict case study – John Knatchbull": https://mhnsw.au/stories/general/convict-case-study-john-knatchbull/
• Museums of History NSW, "John Knatchbull" (Convict Sydney): https://mhnsw.au/stories/convict-sydney/john-knatchbull/
• Rachel Franks, "A huge crowd for a hanging: the end of John Knatchbull", Dictionary of Sydney blog, 2021: https://dictionaryofsydney.org/blog/a_huge_crowd_for_a_hanging_the_end_of_john_knatchbull
• Wikipedia, "John Knatchbull (Royal Navy officer)" (summarising Colin Roderick, John Knatchbull: From Quarterdeck to Gallows, 1963): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Knatchbull_(Royal_Navy_officer)
• "Death" (Robert Jamieson), Sydney Morning Herald, 20 December 1842, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12423195
• "Domestic Intelligence", Weekly Register (Sydney), 13 January 1844, p. 373: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228135480
• "Inquests", Sydney Morning Herald, 19 January 1844, p. 2: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12412784
• "Supreme Court – Criminal Side", Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 1844, p. 2: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12411912
• "Criminal Sessions", Sydney Record, 27 January 1844, p. 131: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228141580
• Advertisement, "John Knatchbull, the Murderer; and Mrs. Ellen Jamieson, his Victim", Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February 1844, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12426132
• "Execution of John Knatchbull", The Australian, 15 February 1844, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/37123826
• "Execution of John Knatchbull the Murderer of Mrs. Jamison", The Dispatch, 17 February 1844, p. 2: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228250767
• "Funeral of Knatchbull", The Dispatch, 17 February 1844, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228250769
• "The Late Mrs. Jamison" (subscription committee notice), Sydney Morning Herald, 17 February 1844, p. 3: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12422462
• "Cast of Knatchbull's Head", The True Sun and New South Wales Independent Press, 28 February 1844, p. 154: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/228133935
• "Law Intelligence – In the Matter of the Orphans Jamieson", Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 1844, p. 2: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12415103
• National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, "Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke": https://portrait.gov.au/people/robert-lowe-1811
• All images: Wikimedia Commons, with the original holding institutions credited under each picture.

Jimmy Governor and Gilgandra – The Breelong Murders and the Manhunt of 1900

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this post names Aboriginal people who have died, and includes historical photographs of them. It also describes murders and an execution.

If you drive north-west from Sydney through the Central West, past Mudgee and out towards the Castlereagh, you come into Gilgandra Shire – wheat country, river flats, and quiet roads. Just outside town, in the locality of Breelong, something happened on the night of 20 July 1900 that still sits heavy in local memory: the killings at the Mawbey family's place, the arrest and court hearings that followed in Gilgandra, and the long manhunt that carried Jimmy Governor and his brother Joe right across New South Wales.

I came at this post from two directions: from the Darlinghurst end, where Jimmy was tried and hanged, and from the Castlereagh end, where Gilgandra and Breelong still mark the ground. The distance between those places is more than kilometres. It is the distance between a Sydney sandstone gaol and a fencing camp on a creek, between Federation fireworks and a family murdered in their own house.

This post is the full story as far as the reliable sources will take us – Jimmy Governor's early life on the Talbragar, the family's years around Wollar and Gulgong, his marriage to Ethel Page, the fencing contract at Breelong near Gilgandra, the murders, the Gilgandra court proceedings, the chase, Joe's death by gunshot north of Singleton, Jimmy's trial and hanging at Darlinghurst, and what became of Ethel and the children. Where the sources disagree, I've said so. Where I couldn't verify a figure, I've left it out.

Jimmy Governor, photographed around the time of his capture in 1900. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Birth on the Talbragar – family and country

According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Jimmy Governor was born in 1875 on the Talbragar River in New South Wales. Wikipedia, drawing on Laurie Moore and Stephan Williams's book The True Story of Jimmy Governor, places that birth near the old gold-rush settlement of Denison Town. He was one of eight children of Sam (later known as Thomas or Tommy) Governor – also called Grosvenor – a bullock-driver of Aboriginal descent originally from the Namoi River country, and Annie Fitzgerald, from the Mendooran district. The ADB records that Annie's mother was of the Wanarruwa (Wonnarua) people.

Modern accounts often describe Jimmy and Joe as men of Wiradjuri and Wonnarua country. The Talbragar and Denison Town district sits in country long associated with the Wiradjuri, and the AIATSIS catalogue for Frank Clune's book on the Governors lists Wiradjuri, Wonnarua and Gamilaraay among the language groups connected with the story. The ADB itself is more cautious on labels and sticks to the family details above. Either way, Jimmy grew up moving with bush work, between river camps, stations and Aboriginal reserves, in a colony that was already fencing Aboriginal people out of their own country.

The Talbragar River at Cobbora, November 2009 – Jimmy Governor was born on this river in 1875. Photo by Mattinbgn, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The ADB says Jimmy was short, good-looking, with reddish hair. He went to a mission school and to school at Gulgong; Moore and Williams add Denison Town and Wollar, and say he may also have been at Coonabarabran and Allynbrook on the Paterson. A former Wollar schoolmate later recalled that Jimmy and his younger brothers Joe and Jackie "could read and write tolerably well". Schooling was patchy because the family moved whenever Tommy found bush work, and New South Wales education policy in those years made it easy for white parents' complaints to keep Aboriginal children out of local schools.

Wollar, Gulgong, and work

The family's path shows how hard it was for Aboriginal people to stay put and make a living on their own terms. After years of station work along the Paterson and a spell on the St Clair reserve north of Singleton, Tommy Governor moved the family west again to the Gulgong district and a camp on the Aboriginal reserve in the police paddock across the creek from Wollar. Jimmy worked around Wollar, then – from 15 July 1896 to 18 December 1897 – as a police tracker at Cassilis with the New South Wales Mounted Police. The ADB says he left and went back to Wollar, then cut wood at Gulgong and worked wool-rolling at Digilbar.

At his trial he would say something that still cuts through: he had always worked and paid for what he got, and he reckoned he was "as good as a white man". That pride, and the racism he met every day, are part of why Breelong exploded later. They do not excuse what he did.

Mayne Street, Gulgong, in 1873 – the gold town where Jimmy later cut wood, married Ethel Page, and went to school. Public domain (PD-Australia), via Wikimedia Commons

Marriage to Ethel Page, Gulgong, 1898

On 10 December 1898, at the Church of England rectory in Gulgong, Jimmy married Ethel Mary Jane Page, a sixteen-year-old New South Wales-born woman of English heritage. The ADB gives that date and place. Moore and Williams describe how they had met while Jimmy was cutting wood and Ethel was working at a bakery in Gulgong; Ethel was already pregnant, and her mother pressed for the marriage. Interracial marriage of this kind was rare and heavily judged. Ethel later told a reporter she was "very fond of Jimmy".

Their son Sidney (Sidney Golding Louis in later records) was born in early April 1899. Ethel's father disapproved, and the young couple faced cold looks in Gulgong. By the end of 1899 Jimmy was looking for work further out. The marriage that seemed, to him, proof he could live as an equal in colonial society became, to many white neighbours, a scandal to be sneered at – and that sneering followed them to Breelong.

Ethel Governor, as illustrated in the Evening News (Sydney), 23 November 1900. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Gilgandra, horse-breaking, and John Mawbey

Jimmy later said he had met John Thomas Mawbey of Breelong while breaking horses in the Gilgandra district. Mawbey offered him a fencing contract. The ADB dates the contract from April 1900; Moore and Williams say the work was to start in January and that Jimmy and Ethel arrived that month. Either way, early 1900 found them on Mawbey's place at Breelong, near Gilgandra, splitting and erecting posts (the ADB gives 10s. and 12s. a hundred for splitting and erecting).

How far is Breelong from Gilgandra? Sources give different bearings. Moore and Williams, followed by Wikipedia's Jimmy Governor article, place Mawbey's "Breelong West" (or "Old Breelong") on Wallumburrawang Creek near its junction with the Castlereagh River, about ten miles (16 km) south-east of Gilgandra. The modern Wikipedia page for the rural locality of Breelong lists it about 43 km (27 miles) north-east of the town. Both figures can be true of different reference points – the old coaching-inn / homestead site versus the wider parish boundary – so I am leaving both on the record rather than picking one.

Gilgandra from the air – the Castlereagh town that became the centre of the Breelong inquest and Jacky Underwood's Police Court hearing. Photo by Denysen, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By 1900 Mawbey's selection had grown (Moore and Williams say to about 1,500 acres). The family had moved into a newer house; the old Breelong Inn nearby still stood, and on the night of the murders the Mawbey men were sleeping there. John and Sarah Mawbey had a large family. Sarah's younger sister, Elsie Clarke (about eighteen), lived with them. A young schoolteacher – Helen Josephine Kerz in the ADB; Ellen, Helen or Helena in the newspapers and on later plaques – boarded at the house and taught at the provisional school known as West Breelong.

Jimmy camped up the creek with Ethel. The ADB says he got on well at first with Mawbey, drew rations from him, and played cricket with the small Mawbey boys. Brother Joe arrived, and so did Jacky Underwood (also known as Charlie Brown), later Jacky Porter and Jimmy's nephew Peter Governor. They all drew on Jimmy's rations. Tension built: Ethel did housework for the Mawbeys and was unhappy; there were disputes over rejected fence posts and overcharging for stores; and Jimmy heard that Mrs Mawbey and Miss Kerz had been taunting Ethel for marrying an Aboriginal man. As the winter deepened, the talk around the campfire turned – in Jimmy's later words – to bushranging.

The Breelong murders, 20 July 1900

On the night of Friday 20 July 1900, Jimmy and Underwood went to the Mawbey house. The women and children were there; the men were at the inn. What follows is drawn from the ADB and from Jimmy's own later account as reported at trial and in the press.

Moore and Williams record that the party first called at the inn and spoke with John Mawbey about rations; that exchange ended without violence. Jimmy then said he was going to see Mrs Mawbey about the words she had been saying. At the new house, he alleged, the women laughed at him, and Helen Kerz said words to the effect of: "Pooh, you black rubbish, you want shooting for marrying a white woman" (reported in the Singleton Argus and quoted by the ADB). He said he struck out, lost control, and with nulla-nullas (boondi) and a tomahawk he and Underwood attacked.

Those killed at Breelong, named carefully from contemporary reporting summarised by Wikipedia and from the ADB, were:

• Sarah Mawbey (often called Mrs Mawbey; the ADB names her "Grace", which may confuse her with her daughter – period portraits and later memorials call the mother Sarah), who was mortally wounded that night and died on 24 July;
• Helen / Ellen / Helena Josephine Kerz, the schoolteacher, killed that night;
• Grace Mawbey, about 16, who died of her wounds on 22 July;
• Percival ("Percy") Mawbey, about 14, killed that night;
• Hilda Mawbey, about 11, killed that night.

Elsie Clarke was seriously injured and survived, though later accounts say she was left permanently deaf. Young Bert Mawbey and cousin George Mawbey survived – George hid under a bed, and Bert got away to warn his father at the inn. John Mawbey and the other men arrived within minutes, but the attackers were gone.

Five people dead (counting those who died of their wounds in the following days), one young woman terribly hurt, and a farmhouse full of children – that is Breelong. Nothing in Jimmy's grievances, real as the racism was, makes that night anything but a massacre of a family.

The Mawbey residence at Breelong, illustrated in the press on 26 July 1900 from a photograph by Mr Lander of Dubbo. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mrs Sarah Mawbey, published in the Australian Town and Country Journal, 4 August 1900. Photo attributed to Mr Goodes of Mudgee; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Ellen (Helen / Helena) Kerz, the schoolteacher killed at Breelong, Australian Town and Country Journal, 4 August 1900. Photo attributed to Mr Lander of Dubbo; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Flight, Underwood, and Gilgandra Police Court

Jimmy, Joe, Underwood and others fled. Ethel, with the baby, was told to make for Dubbo; she was picked up by armed men on the road and held. An inquest at the Mawbey homestead on 23–24 July returned a verdict of wilful murder against Jimmy, Joe, Underwood, Porter and Ethel. Ethel and Porter were locked up at Gilgandra police station. Underwood was captured near Leadville a few days later (the ADB says he was "quickly caught") and, after a spell in Mudgee gaol, was brought to Gilgandra because that was where the principal witnesses lived.

On 22 August 1900, Jacky Underwood appeared before the Gilgandra Police Court charged with the Breelong murders. The courtroom was crowded; the Heritage NSW notes for the Breelong Historical Site record that a large crowd watched his arrival. He was committed for trial. Tried at Dubbo on 2 October 1900 for Percy's murder, he was found guilty – the jury saying they could not decide who struck the fatal blows – and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Dubbo Gaol on 14 January 1901, four days before Jimmy (ADB).

Jacky Underwood after his arrest near Leadville, July 1900 – later committed at Gilgandra Police Court and hanged at Dubbo on 14 January 1901. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Charges against Ethel were dropped so she could give evidence at Underwood's trial. She had been held at Gilgandra; that local lock-up is part of how Gilgandra sits in the middle of this story, not just as the nearest town to Breelong but as the place where the law first took formal hold of Underwood and of Ethel.

The manhunt – Breelong to Wollar to Singleton

Jimmy and Joe called themselves bushrangers and went on what the ADB calls a fourteen-week, roughly 2,000-mile (about 3,200 km) rampage across north-central New South Wales. Seeking people they believed had wronged them, they killed:

• Alexander McKay, near Ulan, 23 July 1900;
• Elizabeth O'Brien and her baby son, at Poggie (Poggy) near Merriwa, 24 July;
• Keiran (Kieran) Fitzpatrick, near Wollar, 26 July.

They robbed as far north as Narrabri and through the Quirindi country, then into the headwaters of the Manning and Hastings. Queensland Aboriginal trackers, bloodhounds, police and civilians hunted them. The brothers left derisive notes and advertised their whereabouts. The government reward rose to £1,000 each – the ADB dates that offer to 8 October; Wikipedia, citing the Gazette, puts the increase at 25 September. They were proclaimed outlaws on 23 October 1900, among the last people so declared in New South Wales.

One more thing about the manhunt that is easy to miss from Sydney: it emptied the bush. Contemporary papers described farms deserted, women and children crowded into Merriwa, Cassilis, Coolah and Wollar, stores sold out of rifles, and Aboriginal people at Wollar locked in a hall at night under police watch. Meg Foster's later historical work has shown how fear of a wider Aboriginal rising sat alongside the Federation moment. That atmosphere – panic as much as pursuit – is part of why Gilgandra and Breelong still talk about July 1900.

Mounted police, Aboriginal trackers and volunteers hunting the Governor brothers – sighted at Stewarts Brook, 12 September 1900. State Library of New South Wales collection; no known copyright restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

On 13 October Jimmy was shot in the mouth by Herbert Byers, a hunter, on the Forbes River country. Weakened – he later said he lived for days on honey and water – he was captured by settlers at Bobin, near Wingham, on 27 October 1900. Four days later, on 31 October, Joe was shot dead by John Wilkinson north of Singleton – not hanged, not taken alive. That matters for anyone writing about Darlinghurst: Jimmy went to the gallows there; Joe never did.

Jimmy was taken by steamer to Sydney and lodged in Darlinghurst Gaol. His prison photograph and description book entry are dated early November 1900.

Trial at Darlinghurst, and the hanging

Jimmy stood trial at the Central Criminal Court, Darlinghurst, on 22–23 November 1900, before Justice Owen, for the murder of Helen Kerz. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the opening "at the old court, Darlinghurst", as the neighbouring belfry struck ten. His barrister, Francis Stewart Boyce, argued that because Jimmy had been outlawed he was already attainted and could not be tried – the old pleas of autrefois acquit and autrefois attaint. The judge rejected that, holding that outlawry was meant to bring a man in for trial, not to replace the trial. After evidence from John Mawbey, young George and Albert Mawbey, Ethel and others, and after Jimmy read a statement to the court, the jury took about ten minutes to find him guilty. He was sentenced to death.

An appeal failed. The ADB says he spent his last days reading the Bible, singing, and blaming his wife. He was hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol on the morning of 18 January 1901 – days after Federation, and four days after Underwood's hanging at Dubbo. The hangman was Robert "Nosey Bob" Howard. Jimmy was about twenty-five or twenty-six. The ADB says he was buried in an unmarked grave in the Anglican section of Rookwood Cemetery.

I've written more about the gaol and the court in my post on Darlinghurst Gaol & Darlinghurst Court, and about the hangings there in Hangings at Darlinghurst Gaol. Jimmy's trial and hanging are part of that story; his brother Joe, again, was shot in the bush north of Singleton and was never hanged at Darlinghurst or anywhere else.

For Sydneysiders, the end of the story is local. The Central Criminal Court at Darlinghurst, the tunnel from the gaol, the morning of 18 January 1901 – those are Forbes Street and Taylor Square places. Jimmy's body went to Rookwood. Joe's body never came to Sydney. If you walk the old gaol walls at the National Art School today, you are walking past the place where one brother died by the rope and where the other brother's outlawry had already been sealed by a bullet in the Singleton hills.

Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney – where Jimmy Governor was held, tried next door, and hanged on 18 January 1901. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Jimmy Governor in the dock as sentence of death was passed – Evening News (Sydney), 18 January 1901. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Aftermath – Ethel and the children

Jimmy was survived by Ethel and their son Sidney. Ethel was pregnant at the time of the hanging; a daughter, Thelma Violet, was born in April 1901. The ADB says Ethel married Francis Joseph Brown on 23 November (Wikipedia, following Moore and Williams, places that second marriage in November 1901) and had more children with him – the ADB says nine more; other summaries describe a large Brown family. She died in Sydney in 1945: the ADB gives 31 December 1945; Wikipedia gives October 1945. I am recording both rather than forcing a choice.

The racist press of 1901 had plenty to say about Ethel's second marriage. Reading those columns now is a reminder of the world Jimmy and Ethel were trying, and failing, to live in. For the Mawbey survivors – John Mawbey, the remaining children, Elsie Clarke – there was no tidy ending either. Mawbey closed the Breelong Inn and left the district; the little post office there shut in 1901 when he moved away.

Short timeline

• c.1875 – Born on the Talbragar River (near Denison Town).
• 15 Jul 1896 – 18 Dec 1897 – Police tracker at Cassilis.
• 10 Dec 1898 – Marries Ethel Page at Gulgong.
• Early 1900 – Fencing for John Mawbey at Breelong, near Gilgandra (ADB: from April; Moore & Williams: from January).
• 20 Jul 1900 – Breelong murders.
• 23–26 Jul 1900 – Further killings near Ulan, Merriwa and Wollar.
• 22 Aug 1900 – Underwood committed at Gilgandra Police Court.
• 2 Oct 1900 – Underwood sentenced to death at Dubbo.
• 13 Oct 1900 – Jimmy shot in the mouth.
• 23 Oct 1900 – Brothers proclaimed outlaws.
• 27 Oct 1900 – Jimmy captured near Wingham (Bobin).
• 31 Oct 1900 – Joe shot dead north of Singleton (not hanged).
• 22–23 Nov 1900 – Jimmy tried at Darlinghurst; sentenced to death.
• 14 Jan 1901 – Underwood hanged at Dubbo.
• 18 Jan 1901 – Jimmy hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol.

Cultural memory – novel and film

Thomas Keneally's novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) is fiction based on Jimmy Governor's life, written in the context of Aboriginal dispossession and white racism. Fred Schepisi's 1978 film of the same name is an adaptation of the novel. Both are powerful; neither is a documentary. Names, scenes and motives are reshaped for the story. If you read the book or watch the film after this post, treat them as art that grew out of the case, not as a substitute for the ADB, the court reports, or the local record at Gilgandra and Breelong.

Les Murray also wrote a poem, "The Ballad of Jimmy Governor". Frank Clune's earlier book Jimmy Governor (1959) was one of the first long popular accounts. More recently, the podcast and book The Last Outlaws (Impact Studios / UTS, made with Governor-family descendants) have retold the story with First Nations voices at the centre, and Meg Foster's work has put Wollar's Aboriginal community back into the frame.

Gilgandra and Breelong today

Breelong is still a rural locality in Gilgandra Shire. On the Castlereagh Highway at a roadside rest area known as Happy Valley, the Gilgandra Rotary Club put up the Breelong Historical Monument on the club's 50th anniversary. Monument Australia and the NSW State Heritage Inventory describe a small concrete hexagonal obelisk with a brass direction plaque pointing to sites linked with the Mawbey murders and the hunt, and a memorial plaque placed by a Mawbey family reunion on 24 April 2000 in memory of Sarah, Grace, Hilda and Percy Mawbey and Helena Kerz.

Nearby, the old Breelong Inn site – once a Cobb & Co changing station on the Mendooran–Gilgandra run, licensed for years by John Mawbey – is separately listed on the local heritage inventory. The inn was a slab building with a shingle roof; Mawbey closed it after the tragedy.

Gilgandra itself remembers the story as part of its local history: the Police Court commitment of Underwood, Ethel's detention at the police station, the inquest witnesses who came into town. If you are out that way, the highway rest area and the heritage listings are the verified public markers I could confirm. Stand there with the wheat paddocks around you, and it is not hard to feel how close Breelong still is to Gilgandra – whether you measure it as ten miles south-east to the old homestead country, or as the wider locality on the map.

I have not tried to turn Jimmy into a hero or to soften what happened to the Mawbey household. The racism he faced was real. The murders were real. Holding both truths at once is the only honest way I know to write this for a Sydney local-history blog that also cares about country towns like Gilgandra.

This is a hard story. It has Aboriginal people living under insult and dispossession; it has a young interracial marriage that the colony would not accept; and it has the murder of women and children at Breelong and more deaths on the road. Jimmy Governor was hanged at Darlinghurst. Joe Governor was shot in the bush. The Mawbey family and Miss Kerz never came home. Gilgandra and Breelong still hold all of that in the same landscape.

Sources

• G. P. Walsh, "Governor, Jimmy (1875–1901)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University – https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/governor-jimmy-6439
• ADB life summary – https://adb.anu.edu.au/lifesummary/governor-jimmy-6439
• Dictionary of Sydney, "Governor, Jimmy" – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/person/governor_jimmy
• State Library of NSW, "The Governor Brothers" – https://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/discover_collections/people_places/caergwrle/bushrangers/governor/index.html
• State Library of NSW, "Jimmy Governor's trial" – https://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/discover_collections/people_places/caergwrle/bushrangers/governor/capture.html
• Wikipedia, "Jimmy Governor" (cross-check; cites Moore & Williams and contemporary press) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Governor
• Wikipedia, "Breelong, New South Wales" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breelong,_New_South_Wales
• Laurie Moore and Stephan Williams, The True Story of Jimmy Governor (Allen & Unwin, 2001) – cited via ADB bibliography and Wikipedia
• NSW State Heritage Inventory, Breelong Historical Site (ID 1590040) – https://apps.environment.nsw.gov.au/dpcheritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=1590040
• NSW State Heritage Inventory, Breelong Inn Site (ID 1590065) – https://apps.environment.nsw.gov.au/dpcheritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=1590065
• Monument Australia, "Breelong Historical Monument" – https://www.monumentaustralia.org/themes/culture/crime/display/95491-breelong-historical-monument
• Sydney Morning Herald, "The Breelong Tragedy: Trial of the Aboriginal Jimmy Governor", 23 November 1900 (Trove) – cited in ADB and in my Darlinghurst Gaol post
• Singleton Argus, trial report, 24 November 1900 – quoted in ADB
• AIATSIS catalogue entry for Frank Clune, Jimmy Governor (language groups) – https://aiatsis.gov.au/collections/item/r000000112378
• Meg Foster, "The Forgotten War of 1900: Jimmy Governor and the Aboriginal People of Wollar", Australian Historical Studies 50:3 (2019)
• The Last Outlaws (Impact Studios / UTS) – https://thelastoutlaws.com.au/
• Wikimedia Commons, Category:Jimmy Governor – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Jimmy_Governor
• My earlier posts: Darlinghurst Gaol & Darlinghurst Court; Hangings at Darlinghurst Gaol

My Country - Dorathea McKeller - Well Known Australian Poem - i Love A Sunburnt Country

Transcription (from the pictures above; author line as shown: Dorothea Mackellar)

My Country

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold –
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

-- Dorothea Mackellar

 

My Country 

The Love Of Field & Coppice, 
Of Green Shaded Lanes 
Of Ordered Woods And Gardens
Is Running Through Your Veins 
Strong Love Of Blue Grey Distance
Brown Streams & Soft Dim Skies
I Know But Cannot Share It
My Love's Otherwise 


I Love A Sunburnt Country
A Land Of Sweeping Plains
Of Ragged Mountain Ranges 
Of Droughts And Flooding Rains
I Love Her Far Horizons
I Love The Jewel Sea

Hangings at Darlinghurst Gaol – The Executions and Famous Prisoners

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.

Darlinghurst Gaol from the air in 1930, with the courthouse at the front and the radial wings behind the walls. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (scan uploaded by Adam.J.W.C.), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

John Knatchbull, from a lithograph sold in Sydney around the time of his execution in 1844. National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, unknown artist, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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 crowd outside the gaol (then often called Woolloomooloo Gaol) for the hanging of John Knatchbull, February 1844. State Library of NSW, artist not recorded, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

The old gaol gates, now the way in to the National Art School. Photo: Sardaka, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

'The Gallows from the Keep Yard: The Scaffold at Darlinghurst, Drawn by a Confinee', 19th century. State Library of NSW, unknown artist, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Andrew George Scott, 'Captain Moonlite', around 1879. Believed to be by Charles Nettleton; National Portrait Gallery (Victoria Police Historical Collection), restored by Adam Cuerden, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Robert 'Nosey Bob' Howard, as drawn in Truth two days after the hanging of Jimmy Governor, 20 January 1901. Truth (Sydney), unknown artist, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Louisa Collins, prison photograph dated 28 July 1888, not long after her arrest. Museums of History NSW, unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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."

Jimmy Governor in 1900. NSW State Archives, unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Darlinghurst Gaol in watercolour, signed 'H.L. Bertrand 1891', painted by a long-term prisoner of the gaol. Henry Louis Bertrand, State Library of NSW, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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).