I’ve spent the last few days transcribing the Executive Council minutes from Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, covering 1843 to 1847. Most of it is the dry procedural sediment you’d expect from any committee: minutes confirmed, despatches read, licences approved. But woven through it is a recurring ritual that I can’t stop thinking about. Roughly every few weeks, the Governor and his Executive Council* would sit down with a list of condemned men and decide, one by one, who would hang and who would be spared.
And again and again, the deciding factor wasn’t what a man had done. It was whether killing him would be useful.
The phrase they used for this, over and over, was “for the sake of example.”
Four men, the same crime, two different fates
Here’s the clearest case. On 20 March 1844, the Council reviewed the convictions of four men: Joseph Bowers, Matthew Byrnes, Peter Byrnes, and George Bristol, all convicted of the same offence: aiding and abetting an attempted murder.
The Colonial Secretary’s own assessment was that Peter Byrnes and Joseph Bowers “did not exert themselves so much as the others” and could reasonably be spared the noose. Fair enough. That’s at least an attempt at individual judgment.
But then, in the very next breath, he writes that George Bristol, while convicted of the same crime, with only a matter of degree separating his conduct from the men just pardoned, “must be excepted for the sake of example.”
Not because the evidence against him was stronger. Not because he was more dangerous. Because somebody had to die to send a message, and it might as well be him.
The same phrase, used to save a life
What makes this so chilling isn’t just that it happened once. It’s that the reasoning was explicit, procedural, and reversible. It was a lever the Council pulled in both directions depending on what they judged the moment required.
Image: Trove
In October 1845, Daniel Priest was convicted of armed robbery and slated for execution. Weeks later, after a petition signed by more than 600 local residents, the Governor changed course. His stated reason: after conferring again with the Chief Justice, they’d concluded that executing Priest “was not… required for the sake of example, and therefore might be dispensed with.”
Read those two entries side by side and the logic becomes unmistakable. A man’s guilt was almost beside the point. What mattered was a standing calculation about deterrence, how many hangings the convict population currently “required” for them to stay in line. Bristol died because the Council judged an example was needed. Priest lived because they judged it wasn’t. The men themselves are almost incidental to the decision being made about them.
This wasn’t a slip: it was the stated theory of punishment
I want to be fair to the historical context here, because this wasn’t sadism or careless cruelty. It was a coherent, openly argued theory of criminal justice, and the Executive Council minutes let you watch these men in power reason their way into it without a flicker of self-doubt. Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s was, functionally, a prison island holding tens of thousands of transported convicts under a probation system the administrators themselves worried was fraying.
Executions were understood as public theatre aimed at the other convicts: a warning to the masses, not a reckoning with the individual in the dock. You can see the Colonial Secretary say as much explicitly in a different entry, arguing that an offence “assumes in this Colony a very different character… because from the circumstances in which we are placed, it is here much more dangerous to the peace and well-being of the Community” than the identical act would be in England. The crime was being judged not on its own moral weight but on its usefulness as a cautionary tale.****
That is what should make you angry. Not that these men were cruel by the standards of their time, plenty of their contemporaries objected to exactly this kind of reasoning, but that a system of government allowed men to sit in a room, and record in writing, that they treated a human being’s life as an input to a public-order calculation. The wording in the paperwork is polite. The Council “regrets.” They “cannot but advise.” They write in the passive voice of men doing their sad duty. And underneath every one of those careful sentences is a decision to kill a specific, named person not principally for what he did, but for what his death might do for everyone watching.
Why it’s worth sitting with
It would be comforting to file this under “the past was barbaric, we’ve moved on.” But the logic of for the sake of example – punishing one person harder than their individual conduct warrants, in order to deter a wider population – hasn’t vanished from how societies think about punishment. It shows up any time someone argues a sentence should be harsher to send a message, rather than because it fits the person and the act. The 1840s version is just unusually easy to see, because the men writing it down had no reason to hide what they were doing. They obviously thought it was sound governance.
Reading George Bristol’s name next to Peter Byrnes and Joseph Bowers’ – men judged together, then separated by a single administrative flourish – is a useful, uncomfortable reminder of what it looks like when a government stops asking “what does this person deserve” and starts asking “what does killing this person accomplish for me.”
NB: I wrote the piece above as carefully as I could, but carefully isn’t the same as calmly, and it wasn’t how I actually felt while reading these Executive Council minutes. If you’d rather read the unfiltered version, [I let myself be angry about it here]
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Sourced from the Executive Council Minutes of Van Diemen’s Land, Council Room, Hobart Town, 1843 – 1847 (folios 310 – 311 and 379 -380).
*The men on the Executive council in this period:
1843–1847 period, cross-checked against the minutes themselves:
Lieutenant Governor His Excellency
Sir John Franklin held the post until August 1843, so the earliest entry (29 June 1843) falls under him.
Sir John Eardley-Wilmot then served 21 August 1843 – 13 October 1846.There’s a roughly three-month gap before Sir William Thomas Denison arrived on 25 January 1847. Denison is the Sir W. T. Denison who appears by name presiding from 21 July 1847.
Colonial Secretary James Ebenezer Bicheno, in office 20 April 1843 – 25 February 1851 (he died in the role). He’s the J.E. Bicheno who signs a memo in the minutes in August 1847.
Colonial Treasurer Adam Turnbull, who the record confirms worked alongside Bicheno under Denison, matching the A. Turnbull Esq. named in the July 1847 entries. He was also, per the minutes themselves, Chief Commissioner of the Land Board.
Chief Police Magistrate Captain Matthew Forster held this role from 1833 and is almost certainly the unnamed “Mr Forster” proposing the Field Police scheme in the June 1843 entry. Francis Burgess was appointed his successor and arrived in Hobart on 23 September 1843, so he’s the Chief Police Magistrate named F. Burgess from later 1843 onward. Usefully, this also explains something odd in the minutes: Burgess was sent to serve as judge of the Norfolk Island Criminal Court in June 1846 and returned to Hobart by September due to ill health — matching exactly the Mr Burgess… as Judge of the Criminal Court of Norfolk Island entry from 2 October 1846.
Chief Justice Sir John Lewes Pedder, who held the post continuously from 1824 to 1854, spanning this entire volume.
Puisne Judge His Honor, the second judge, Mr Justice Montagu by name in a few entries. Algernon Sidney Montagu, appointed 1833. He remained in the role throughout this period; he wasn’t dismissed until later in 1847, after this volume ends.
Anglican Lord Bishop Francis Russell Nixon, first Bishop of Tasmania, arrived 1843, matching his request for 18 months’ leave in the April 1846 entry.
Roman Catholic Bishop Willson Robert William Willson, consecrated 1842, arrived in Hobart 11 May 1844, matching his first appearance in the minutes and his own leave request in June 1846.
Senior Officer commanding the troops before 1847, by 21 July 1847 he’s named as Colonel Hulme, directly in the minutes, so far no name for the equivalent officer in 1843–46
Attorney General oddly, the record shows that Edward Macdowell, who’d earlier held that post, was by 1843 out of office and instead working as Martin Cash’s own defence lawyer at trial, so far no confirmation who held the Attorney-Generalship while the Council was actually deliberating Cash’s fate.
Crown Solicitor – Mr Stonor, granted leave in October 1846
**Executive Council Minute No. 2 (Matthew Byrnes and George Bristol’s case), 20 March 1844, Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council (EC4), Executive Council (TA62), Tasmanian Archives, Hobart, EC4/1/8, fol. 311.
****Executive Council Minute 42-43, 6 September 1843, Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council (EC4), Executive Council (TA62), Tasmanian Archives, Hobart, EC4/1/8, fol. 301–303.
