Michael Adams, in his prologue, acknowledges that the book is not just about Ned Kelly’s criminal career, his eventual capture, trial and hanging by Elijah Upjohn, but mostly about the hangmen and the underbelly of colonial Australia.
Kelly really only features at the end of the book, but it is a clever marketing ploy to have his name in the title, as he has become an almost mythical figure in Australian history and literature. You either revere him as a folk hero, or dismiss him as a murderous scoundrel who got his just desserts at the end of a rope on 11 November, 1880.
Adams dishes up fact after gruesome fact about the task of the hangman in history, first in England, then in Sydney in the new colony of New South Wales, and finally in the settlement that became known as Melbourne. The nickname these hangmen often carried was that of Jack Ketch, London’s most notorious 17th Century executioner.
Adams’ painstaking research may be too much for some sensitive souls, detailing executions in which the condemned prisoners suffered a good deal, for at least the time it takes to sing ‘Happy Birthday’.
Many of the colonial hangmen were utter scoundrels themselves, with criminal records and a great fondness for alcohol.
Elijah Upjohn, the former nightsoil man who hanged Ned Kelly, came to a gruesome end after a relatively short career carrying out flogging and hanging sentences.
Some of his long-standing predecessors, particularly in Melbourne, were often drunk and disorderly on the streets and would carry out the sentences while in jail themselves.
Names such as Michael Gately, William Bamford, and Jack Harris resonated with the public in 1800s Melbourne. They were ostracised by the public, were monstrous in appearance and behaviour, and were attacked by violent gangs of larrikins.
It was an odd time in history, with the mobs who hated the hangman clamouring to witness an execution; buying the gory tabloid newspapers detailing that execution; devouring the pronouncements made about criminals by phrenologists, who ‘read the bumps on heads’; and crowding a Melbourne waxworks chamber of horrors featuring executed criminals.
Adams concludes that there has never been any evidence that hanging people reduced the number of serious violent offences.
For the squeamish, this is not bedtime reading, but it is an impressive historical account of how justice was administered in this nation’s past.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
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