The Hobart Gallows and Gibbet

When the British established a penal colony at Sullivan’s Cove in 1804, they brought with them not just convicts and soldiers, but the full apparatus of British criminal justice — including its most visible instruments of punishment and deterrence.

Among the first structures erected in the new settlement were the gallows and the gibbet. Both stood on Hunter Island, at what is now the intersection of Hunter Street and Franklin Wharf, in front of Macquarie Wharf 1. The location was entirely deliberate. Every convict ship that arrived at the settlement unloaded its human cargo directly onto Hunter Island. The first thing newly arrived convicts saw as they stepped ashore in Van Diemen’s Land was a reminder of what awaited those who broke the law.

What was a gibbet?

A gibbet was a gallows-type structure from which the bodies of executed criminals were hung on public display. Sometimes it was a purpose-built iron cage, shaped roughly like a human body, in which the corpse was encased and left to decompose in public view. The intention was to extend the punishment beyond death — to make the criminal’s end visible, and to leave it visible for as long as possible as a warning to others.

Bodies were sometimes coated in tar to slow decomposition and prolong the display. Some remained on the gibbet for years. The stench and spectacle were considerable. Many people found gibbeted bodies offensive and believed the decomposing corpses spread disease. Others felt that hanging by the neck until dead was punishment enough, without the additional indignity of public display afterwards. The practice was nonetheless common in England and its colonies from the medieval period through to the early nineteenth century, and was considered an appropriate response to serious crime.

In earlier centuries, live gibbeting also occurred — the condemned was placed alive in a metal cage and left to die of thirst or exposure. By the colonial period in Australia this practice had long ceased, but the posthumous display of executed criminals remained in use.

The Murder Act 1752

Gibbeting was formally codified in British law by the Murder Act of 1752 — formally titled An Act for Better Preventing the Horrid Crime of Murder (25 Geo. 2. c. 37). The Act was passed in response to a moral panic about rising murder rates in London, fuelled largely by press coverage of several homicides in late 1751 and early 1752. Parliament moved quickly, and the Act became law on 26 March 1752.

The Act’s key provisions added what it described as further terror and peculiar mark of infamy to the punishment of death for murder. It mandated that the body of every convicted murderer be either dissected and anatomised by surgeons, or left intact and hung in chains — and that in no case whatsoever shall the body of any murderer be buried, unless it has been dissected and anatomised. The relevant sections of the Act read as follows:

“That from and after the first day of Easter term, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and fifty two, all persons who shall be found guilty of wilful murder, be executed according to law, on the day next but one after sentence passed…”

“…the body of such murderer so convicted shall…be immediately conveyed by the sheriff…and be delivered to such person as the said company shall depute or appoint…and the body so delivered to the said company of Surgeons, shall be dissected and anatomized by the said Surgeons…”

“…it shall be in the power of any such judge or justice to appoint the body of any such criminal to be hung in chains: but that in no case whatsoever the body of any murderer shall be suffered to be buried; unless after such body shall have been dissected and anatomized as aforesaid.”

The full text of the Murder Act 1752 is available at the Statutes Project: https://statutes.org.uk/site/the-statutes/eighteenth-century/1751-25-geo2-c37-murder-act/

The Act remained on the statute books until 1832, when it was largely repealed and replaced by the Anatomy Act, which created a legal supply of cadavers for medical research through other means. The dissection provision had an important side effect that was not entirely unintended — it gave surgeons and anatomists a legal source of bodies for medical training at a time when cadavers were extremely difficult to obtain. Body snatching from graveyards was widespread before the Act, and the legitimate supply of executed criminals’ bodies to the surgical profession helped — though never entirely solved — that problem.

Why dissection was feared

To a modern reader, dissection after execution might seem less terrible than the execution itself. To many people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was worse. A widespread religious belief held that physical resurrection of the body at the Last Judgement required the body to be buried intact in consecrated ground. Dissection destroyed the body and prevented Christian burial. For many convicted criminals — and their families — the prospect of being cut open on a surgeon’s table after death, with no burial and no grave, was a terror that went beyond death itself.

This was precisely the point. The Murder Act was designed to make the punishment of murder as frightening as possible, by adding to the certainty of death the additional horror of what would happen afterwards. The sentence of death and dissection was intended to be read aloud in open court immediately after conviction, including all its provisions, so that the condemned would be left in no doubt about their fate.

The Hobart gallows in practice

The gallows on Hunter Island served the colony from 1806. The location meant that executions were visible to the settlement’s population and, most significantly, to arriving convict ships. In the mid-1820s the gallows were relocated to the newly built convict barracks at the corner of Murray and Macquarie Streets, opposite St David’s cathedral.

The Murder Act applied in Van Diemen’s Land as in England, and its provisions were carried out here. The colonial surgeon was entitled to the bodies of executed murderers for dissection — a practice that served the limited medical education available in the colony. The executioner, by long-established custom, was entitled to keep and sell the clothing in which the condemned was executed.

Public executions in Tasmania ceased in January 1856, after which all executions were conducted within the walls of the gaol, out of public view. The last execution in Tasmania took place in 1946. Capital punishment was abolished in Tasmania in 1968.

The last gibbets

The last man gibbeted in England was William Jobling, on 21 August 1832 — just months after the Murder Act’s gibbeting provisions were repealed. In the British colonies, the last recorded gibbeting was that of convicted murderer John McKay in 1837. He was gibbeted on a tree beside the Midland Highway, just north of Perth, Tasmania — making Tasmania home to the last gibbet in the British colonial world.

Primary source: Murder Act 1752 (25 Geo. 2. c. 37) https://statutes.org.uk/site/the-statutes/eighteenth-century/1751-25-geo2-c37-murder-act/