They Killed Men to Send a Message. I Have Their Own Words for It.
I’ve been transcribing a book of government minutes from the 1840s. Executive Committee minutes. The most boring genre of writing that exists. Reports read, motions carried, adjournments noted. And buried in that boredom, in the same flat bureaucratic hand, a group of men sat in a room in Hobart every few weeks and decided who would be hanged.
Not based on what those men had done. Based on whether killing them would be useful.
They wrote it down themselves. In their own words. “For the sake of example.”
Sit with that phrase for a second, because I can’t stop thinking about it.
Four men. The same crime. Two of them die because it’s convenient.
20 March 1844. Four men: Joseph Bowers, Matthew Byrnes, Peter Byrnes, George Bristol, convicted of exactly the same offence: aiding and abetting an attempted murder. Same crime. Same trial. Same jury.
The Colonial Secretary looks at the four of them and decides two can live, because they “did not exert themselves so much as the others.” Fine. That’s at least a fig leaf of individual judgment.
Then, in the same sentence, almost as an afterthought, he writes that Matthew Byrnes and George Bristol “must be excepted for the sake of example.”
Not “because the evidence proves they did more harm.”
Not “because they’re a danger to anyone.”
For the sake of example.
Somebody had to swing, the arithmetic said two was the right number, and it landed on them. Read it again. A government official, writing calmly, decided that two human beings would be killed as a public demonstration, and he didn’t even bother to dress it up. He just wrote the quiet part down, because to him it wasn’t the quiet part. It was just how you governed.
Matthew Byrnes had a name, friends and loved ones. As did George Bristol. And a committee decided their deaths were a useful teaching tool for other people’s behaviour.
And the same phrase saves a man’s life a year later – which tells you everything about the men in power.
Here’s the part that should really make your blood boil, because it proves this wasn’t principle. It was a dial they turned depending on the mood.
Image: Trove
October 1845: Daniel Priest, convicted of armed robbery, is set to hang. Weeks pass. A petition arrives on the desk of the Governor, with 600 signatures. And suddenly the Governor and the Chief Justice reconsider and decide his execution “was not… required for the sake of example, and therefore might be dispensed with.”
Read that next to the Byrnes and Bristol entry and tell me this was ever about justice. It wasn’t. It was never about what any individual man deserved. It was a public relations calculation, made and unmade at will, about how many corpses the colony currently needed to keep the convict population frightened. Enough hangings this month? Spare him. Feeling short? String someone up.
The person on the gallows is not the subject of the sentence. He’s the object of somebody else’s crowd-control strategy.
They are not describing punishment. They are describing performance. A hanging as advertisement. A man’s death as a billboard.
No, I will not “understand the context.” I understand it perfectly.
I know what’s coming: ‘it was a penal colony, they were scared, the probation system was collapsing, try to see it from their point of view.’
No. I refuse. Understanding why a bureaucracy found it convenient to treat human lives as inventory does not make it less monstrous. It makes it more damning, because it means they weren’t out of control, they weren’t in a panic, they weren’t lashing out. They were calm. They were organised. They took meeting minutes about it. They used the passive voice: “sentence of death has been passed” as if the sentence fell from the sky rather than being signed by the men sitting at that table. They wrote “regret” and “cannot but advise” while ordering a human being strangled to death in public because it was administratively efficient.
That is not chaos. That is a system working exactly as designed. And a system that calmly designs some deaths to be useful to it is not a relic: it’s a warning.
Say their names
Matthew Byrnes. George Bristol. Two men out of thousands who were not judged on what they did, but on what killing them could accomplish for people who never had to look them in the eye. The Council’s own minutes never once had to justify itself to anyone but itself. That’s what makes it worse, not better: nobody was watching, and this is still what they chose to write down.
I am angry about this, and I am not going to apologise for being angry about it, because the alternative is reading two hundred lines of committee minutes deciding who gets to live and just… turning the page.
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The information for this article is sourced directly from the Executive Council Minutes of Van Diemen’s Land, Council Room, Hobart Town, 1843 – 1847 (folios 310 – 311 and 379 – 380). https://libraries.tas.gov.au/Record/Archives/EC4-1-8
**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 No. 32-33 (Daniel Priest’s case), 31 October 1845, Minutes of Proceedings of the Executive Council (EC4), Executive Council (TA62), Tasmanian Archives, Hobart, EC4/1/8, fol. 379 -380.