The Scaffold Crowd
Not much is currently known about those who watched Australian executions. This Chapter seeks to understand basic facts about the ‘scaffold crowd’—its size, composition, demeanour and reputation—across the colonies. At public hangings elites were concerne
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The Australian colonies, like England before it, saw the free and unhindered access of the general public to the death of a criminal as the central guarantor of due process. As the South Australian Register put it in 1854: ‘The execution being in the open face of day, the whole community can testify – first, that the sentence of the law has really been carried out; and next, that no unnecessary or extra-judicial sufferings have been inflicted on the criminal’.1 The execution crowd was the prized English principle of transparency in action, providing a check and balance on both the punished and the punisher. However, as we shall see, such noble ends of the scaffold crowd in the era of public executions were rarely acknowledged. This Chapter details the Australian ‘scaffold crowd’ and the changing way that people consumed an execution over the colonial period. Across the colonies the crowd at public executions was perceived to consist largely of women, children and lower class spectators. This was something deeply concerning to the middle and upper echelons of colonial society who believed that public displays of 1 South
Australian Register, 28 December 1854.
© The Author(s) 2020 S. Anderson, A History of Capital Punishment in the Australian Colonies, 1788 to 1900, Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53767-8_5
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violence only served to harden the onlooker. The attendance of these three impressionable groups at the public scaffold also conflicted with their culturally defined role in society as idealised by these same elites. Colonial anxieties were tempered once public executions finally gave way to private ones. Now the transparency of a criminal’s death could be guaranteed by a select group of witnesses signing off on the fact. Or, by the journalist who cared to witness it alongside the government officials. The much-criticized masses, offering their range of emotional responses to each and every execution, were doomed to be a relic of the past.
Colonial Elites, Public Executions, and the Crowd Elites played a key role in the exchange of ideas between the Australian colonies and elsewhere. For a start they were the most transient and mobile set of colonists who were able, over the course of a lifetime, to move between different colonies. Some even arrived in Australia with an eye to returning home to Britain after only staying for a fixed number of years. Education and a degree of wealth enabled privileged access to a communicative exchange going on between ‘Home’ and the colonies in the form of book and periodical purchases. For example, John Dunmore Lang, one opponent of public executions discussed below, had a private library that numbered over six hundred volumes.2 After listing off almost every conceivable genre of book in his possession, one historian remarked: ‘It seemed to comprise almost everything a nineteenth-century scholar could have wished to read’.3 Moreover, Lang moved between the colony of New South Wales and Britain si
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