| At 8.00am on Thursday the 20th of
January 1842, over 5,000 people, a quarter of Victoria’s white
population, gathered at the outskirts of Melbourne crowding round
the gallows erected on a small rise east of Swanston Street and north
of LaTrobe Street. The land where the execution took place was only
partly cleared. The crowd, in a carnival mood, had come to see the
public execution of Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner – the
first two people executed in Victoria.
Early in October 1841, Tunnerminnerwait, Maulboyheenner, Pyterrunner,
Truganini and Planobeena – 5 of 16 Tasmanian Aborigines who
had been brought to Melbourne by Robinson in 1839 to ‘civilise’
the Victorian ‘blacks’, stole two guns and some ammunition
from a settler’s hut at Bass River. Over the next seven weeks,
they robbed many stations in Dandenong and Mornington, wounding
four white men and killing two sealers ‘Yankee’ and
William Cook. All five were captured by a party of police, settlers
and soldiers on the 20th of November 1841. Five days later when
they arrived in Melbourne, they were charged
with murder. They appeared before Judge Willis on the 20th December
1841. The five were defended by Redmond Barry – the standing
Defence Council for Aborigines (as Chief Justice he sentenced Ned
Kelly to hang 39 years later in 1880). He argued that as they were
not naturalised citizens, half the jury should have been made up
of people not subjects of the Queen.
The only evidence to link the party of Aborigines with the murders
was the confessions of the Aborigines themselves. Barry, the Defence
Council, continued to question the legal basis of British authority
over Aborigines. He claimed the evidence was dubious and circumstantial.
Truganini turned Queen’s evidence and claimed the men had
killed the sealers. Unlike Truganini, Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner
refused to shift the blame on the others. Later that night, the
jury took only 30 minutes to find the two men guilty of murder;
they acquitted the women. The jury made a very strong plea for clemency
“on account of general good character and the peculiar circumstances
under which they were placed” acknowledging that they believed
Trugannini’s story that one of the sealers had killed her
husband in Tasmania and they understood why Tunnerminnerwait and
Maulboyheenner killed the sealers.
Judge Willis ignored the plea for clemency. On the 20th of January
1842, the men were dressed in white, paraded through the streets
of Melbourne in an open cart drawn by two grey horses. The executioner
John Davies, a convict who had been sentenced to life for sheep
stealing, was promised his freedom and ten pounds if he acted as
executioner. Eighteen convicts had competed for the post of public
executioner; some wanted the heads of the Aborigines as payment.
A carnival atmosphere surrounded the execution until the trapdoor
was opened.
The men only fell a short distance, not enough to break their necks.
“There was a dead pause and a cry of shame from the crowd.
The two…..twisted and writhed convulsively in a manner that
horrified even the most hardened”. A spectator kicked away
a piece of timber holding up the trap door and they fell to the
full length of the rope. Tunnerminnerwait died instantly. Maulboyheenner
continued to struggle wildly as his noose had dislodged. The bodies
hung for the regulation hour; they were stripped of their clothes
(a regular perk for executioners), their naked bodies were put in
wooden coffins and buried in the Aboriginal cemetery (the site of
the current Queen Victoria Market).
One hundred and sixty six years later, it is no accident that their
story plays no part in the history of Melbourne. The collective
amnesia that surrounds the brutality surrounding the early days
of the European colonisation of Victoria and the rest of Australia,
is nothing new. What is new are the repeated attempts by historical
revisionists in Australia over the past decade to re-write the history
of first contact. They have successfully alienated indigenous Australians
from the community and have weakened their attempts to achieve justice
through the courts and the political arena.
Nothing highlights the continuing hostility towards indigenous
people living in Melbourne more than the hysteria that surrounded
the occupation of a tiny portion of the Kings Domain by indigenous
activists during and immediately after the Commonwealth Games in
2006. Their demands for a small area of Kings Domain to be permanently
set aside as an indigenous Information Centre to educate both visitors
and residents alike about Melbourne’s black history, were
mocked and those who were involved in the occupation were publicly
humiliated. The Bracks led Victorian government changed the law
to disperse the
occupation and the Melbourne City Council refused to intervene on
the side of the occupiers.
The past is a pantheon of pivotal moments. For governments to recognise
some and ignore others - is a tragedy. Any resident or visitor wandering
through Melbourne would be hard pressed to find any public acknowledgement
of this city’s indigenous past. In 2006 and 2007, the Anarchist
Media Institute organised a small gathering at the site of the execution
to acknowledge Tunnerminnerwait’s and Maulboyheenner’s
role in the history of Melbourne.
In 2009, the Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner Commemoration
Committee will be organising the commemmoration. We encourage our
fellow citizens to join us at Midday on Tuesday the 20th of January
at the corner of Franklin Street and Bowen Street, Melbourne to
commemorate the judicial murder of the indigenous freedom fighters
Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner on the spot the execution occurred
167 years ago.
Considering the number of statutes and monuments that have been
erected around Melbourne to honour the Europeans who founded it,
it would be appropriate if a public monument was erected on the
spot Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner were executed to mark their
contribution to the story of the City of Melbourne. |
