In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Northern Territory of Australia stood at the outer edge of the British Empire—vast, sparsely governed, and brutally unforgiving. Here, the machinery of law operated far from oversight, and capital punishment was carried out in conditions almost unimaginable elsewhere in the imperial world.
"Hanged: Execution in the Top End" is the first comprehensive history of judicial execution in Australia’s tropical frontier. Drawing on court records, prison files, official correspondence, and contemporary newspapers, historian Derek Pugh reconstructs the cases of ten men condemned to death in a place where the authority of the state was fragile and the consequences final.
Their executions were functional and carried out in remote settlements where race, isolation, and administrative neglect shaped justice as much as statute law. Aboriginal prisoners, Chinese gold miners, and European refugees were caught in a system struggling to impose order on an environment it barely controlled.
Written with forensic clarity and grounded in primary sources, this book challenges romantic myths of the Australian frontier. Instead, it reveals a legal world where punishment was swift, appeals were rare, and mercy was uncertain.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Northern Territory of Australia stood at the outer edge of the British Empire—vast, sparsely governed, and brutally unforgiving. Here, the machinery of law operated far from oversight, and capital punishment was carried out in conditions almost unimaginable elsewhere in the imperial world.
"Hanged: Execution in the Top End" is the first comprehensive history of judicial execution in Australia’s tropical frontier. Drawing on court records, prison files, official correspondence, and contemporary newspapers, historian Derek Pugh reconstructs the cases of ten men condemned to death in a place where the authority of the state was fragile and the consequences final.
Their executions were functional and carried out in remote settlements where race, isolation, and administrative neglect shaped justice as much as statute law. Aboriginal prisoners, Chinese gold miners, and European refugees were caught in a system struggling to impose order on an environment it barely controlled.
Written with forensic clarity and grounded in primary sources, this book challenges romantic myths of the Australian frontier. Instead, it reveals a legal world where punishment was swift, appeals were rare, and mercy was uncertain.
In July 1893 the Northern Territory Times was exultant, screaming “A HANGING CARNIVAL” incapital letters[1]. What was going on? In the 23 years since white settlement, there had never been a legal hanging. Of course, there had been murders, and trials of the guilty, and death was never very far away. In fact, there were numerous retribution massacres, men shot while attempting to escape, deaths from crocodiles, disease, accident and thirst, and these were all too common, but a hanging carnival?
Justice Charles Dashwood had excelled in the court that year. In February he had heard three murder cases in three days and sentenced 10 of the guilty to death, although he did have the power to recommend commuting their sentences. He eventually did so for all but two of the condemned. And those two did indeed hang for their crime.
Early in the morning of the 14th of July, John Archibald Graham Little, the long-term telegraph and postmaster and deputy sheriff of the tiny South Australian colony of Palmerston on the north coast of Australia, shared a memo with the press. The date for the executions of the men currently lounging on death row in Fannie Bay Gaol[2] had been set.
First was Charlie Flannigan (aka McManus), who had been found guilty of murder at his six-hour trial, five months earlier. He had spent the time since then, alone in his cell, sketching his memories of working as a stockman in the cattle stations of the north. He would be hanged the very next day, he was told, and Reverend W. A. Millikan arrived to attend to him in his last hours.
The other nine on the row waited. Their crimes had been committed as a group, and it had been decided that they would be taken back to the place where they had brutally murdered six Malay fishermen. There, they would and strung up as near as possible to the crime scene and left hanging until they were dead. It was thought this was the best way to teach the men’s families that even tribal Aborigines would face the full force of the white man’s law. The deputy sheriff was to accompany them, and they would go by boat, in chains, some 250 kilometres eastwards along the shores of Arnhem Land to Malay Bay.
Wandy Wandy[3], Goolarguo, Capoondur, and Mintaedge and the others thus believed that their fate was “practically settled”, as the Times put it, and they had ten days left to live. But oh, how the South Australian Press howled.
The Adelaide Register, thought that hanging the Aborigines would “be a wicked, cruel, and useless act[4].” It would be better to flog them and send them home, where the “poor creatures… would relate how they had suffered.” This, the writer reasoned, “would have a more salutary effect than hanging any quantity of them.”
Dashwood may have agreed to a certain extent. He was to comment later, that “it is very unsatisfactory to say the least of it, that we should be here to try at ease two creatures who stand their utterly ignorant of what is going on[5].”
Plus, there was real concern that capital punishment was unfairly given to the guilty depending on how dark their skin was. About the same time the brown-skinned Flannigan climbed the gallows steps, Charles Page, who had slain his niece, had his sentence commuted to “penal servitude for life[6].” Page was a white man with friends in high places, including Premier John Downer. Flannigan was a brown man with no friends at all. The argument, according to the Observer, was that if both were undoubtedly guilty, they should both be treated the same. However:
… Page was a civilized and fairly educated white man; Flannigan, offspring of a degraded lubra and a probably unrefined European, [who] never had a chance to do well. He was bred in degradation and cradled and trained in lawlessness. Society must be protected against such men; but the scales of justice must weigh equally, and the sins of the less cultured must not be deemed worse than those of the more cultured. Whilst capital punishment is the legal penalty of murder, both Page and Flannigan ought to be handed over to the public executioner, but if the one is spared so should the other be.[7]
And what of the Aborigines who were facing the noose? Wandy Wandy, the English-speaking recidivist, was the only one who seemed to admit the crime and understand the punishment that they were facing. Anyway, much of the evidence was circumstantial, and if the others were less guilty than Wandy Wandy, and even if “they are only blackfellows” the Observer pointed out that:
… if they are hanged whilst Page escapes the gallows, their fate will make a still darker stain upon our judicial annals than the execution of Flannigan[8].
The arguments in Adelaide became more bitter. When the decisions of the Executive Council regarding capital punishment were discussed in Parliament, Territory Representative Walter Griffiths and some of his parliamentary colleagues declared that a grave injustice had already been made by hanging Flannigan, and they pressed the Executive Council to rethink their decisions, before it was too late.
The South Australian Chronicle pointed out that modern attempts for a community to go without capital punishment had only ended in greater crime. In Switzerland, for example, eight of the Swiss cantons had reintroduced the death penalty after five years. The long arm of the law, said the Chronicle, needed to fall equally across a civilised nation, no matter how far removed, or remote, were the crimes.
Nothing would more swiftly tend to make attempts at civilisation a complete failure than the spread of a conviction that the arm of justice was too short and feeble to reach wrongdoers and inflict upon them the penalty due to their crimes[9].
But they reminded their readers, it was a serious affair:
… human life, even though it be that of an aboriginal, is too sacred to be lightly taken away[10].
Territorians, through their only weekly paper, the Northern Territory Times and Gazette, appeared bemused by the “antagonistic criticism from the Press of South Australia proper[11].” The paper’s editor, Charles Kirkland, felt sure that most Territorians would be in favour of capital punishment. “Not that there is any strong feeling here as to the unqualified merit of the gallows as a deterrent to crime[12]” he suggested, “but it may be argued that while capital punishment remains an institution among us there are certain cases which demand its rigours[13].” Five months before, with ten men on death row, the paper could find no sympathy for Flannigan and encouraged his hanging, for if the sentence was not carried out, “the gallows [was] doomed as an instrument of justice in South Australia[14].”
In the end, as we shall see, Wandy Wandy was hanged alone because Dashwood and the Executive Council in Adelaide caved in to the pressure and commuted the sentences of the others. The Hanging Carnival thus never occurred, and the arguments for and against capital punishment continued. They were so passionately presented, on both sides, that executions became an increasingly rare event, and it was a brave judge who ordered them.
From 1884 to 1911 the "Judge of the Northern Territory" exercised the full powers of the Supreme Court under the Northern Territory Justice Act. There were four of them: Thomas Pater, Charles Dashwood, Charles Herbert and Samuel Mitchell, and they only dealt with criminal trials. After the administration of the Territory was moved to be under the Commonwealth of Australia, the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory was established, with Justice David Bevan presiding.
The judicial concern over racism came to a head in 1913. Both Chief Protector of Aboriginals William Stretton and Justice Bevan agreed that there was a problem with the jury system in the Territory because of racism and the small population that was available to draw the jury from.
In a letter to the Administrator[15] in September 1913, Stretton pointed out that two very similar cases had just been tried but had very different outcomes: a white man, Carl Lindroth was acquitted of murdering an Aboriginal man named Dick (after a three-minute retirement to discuss the case!), but the Aboriginal men accused of killing a white man named Clare Ernest Campbell were found guilty. Stretton pointed out that five of the jury were the same for both cases and he regretted to say, ‘without any hesitation,’ that:
… the verdicts in these cases are inconsistent and in one case at least ill-considered[16].
Justice Bevan followed up the Protector’s letter to the Administrator on 25 September 1913. The three-minute consideration of Lindroth’s guilt, or otherwise, he said, was ridiculous:
To say they “considered” their verdict would be to introduce an element of the farcical into the administration of justice[17].
Bevan requested a discussion with Administrator Gilruth about the idea of dispensing with the jury altogether in capital cases because:
Juries will not convict a white man for an offence against a black, certainly if the evidence is that of blacks, whereas on black evidence, there is no difficulty in the way of securing conviction against a black for an offence against a white man…[18]“
I feel confident,” he wrote
… that the judge sitting with two assessors would be far more likely to arrive at an honest decision, than twelve men picked indiscriminately whose sole interpretation of a “White Australia” is that the “nigger” is something a good bit lower than a dog, to be exploited and used for his own particular purposes[19].
Gilruth ‘candidly’ agreed that the jury system was “not suitable for the Territory in its present stage of development[20]” and he held the opinion that the Minister, Judge Bevan and himself should have a personal discussion about the abolition of the jury system. Unfortunately, if this discussion ever took place, it is not in the records, and the jury system continued for another 8 years. It was finally abolished for all crimes except murder in 1921, although this was repealed in 1930.
There were 39 murder trials held in Palmerston Court between 1884 and 1913, and Justice Bevan provided a list of them to External Affairs Minister Glynn[21] (see Appendix 1) on his request. Some of the accused were acquitted, and of those found guilty and condemned to death, most had their sentences commuted to life in prison.
Such ‘luck’ continued through the twentieth century: Nemarluk, Minemarra, Mangulmangul, Nargoon, Marragin and Mankee, for example, were all condemned to death in 1933 after being found guilty of the murder of three Japanese fishermen, but each of the sentences was commuted to imprisonment for life. Nemarluk, now famous as an Indigenous resistance leader, died in Fannie Bay Gaol in 1940, possibly of tuberculosis.
Of those who were executed, Flannigan and Wandy Wandy were only the first. Eight others paid the final price for their crimes, and it took eighty years to finally end the practice of capital punishment in the Territory.
Ninety-one years after Flannigan died, all the states and territories in Australia had outlawed the death penalty. The Northern Territory waited until 1973, but the last was Western Australia, in 1984. There, Brenda Hodge was sentenced to death for killing her abusive policeman husband in Kalgoorlie. Luckily for her, her sentence was commuted, and she was paroled in 1995[22].
There were 114 people legally executed in the Commonwealth of Australia after federation in 1901. The last two to hang in Darwin dropped to their deaths at Fannie Bay Gaol in 1952. The last to hang in the country was Ronald Ryan in 1967, after he had killed a prison guard while escaping from Pentridge Gaol.
Back in 1893, waiting for death in Fannie Bay Gaol, Charlie Flannigan was given paper and pencils in his cell to fill in time, and he is now known for his art as much as the murder of a cattleman. In 2023, Library and Archives Curator Don Christophersen exhibited Flannigan’s drawings from his time locked in solitary confinement before his final day. Flannigan must have rolled in his grave!
Christophersen also researched and compiled a book on Charlie Flannigan’s story titled A Little Bit of Justice, and for the first time in 130 years, Flannigan’s life was revealed in all its tragic details.
Christophersen left it to his readers to decide whether the punishment was justified, or whether Flannigan deserved a commuted sentence like most others received. This book does the same with all ten felons who were legally executed in the Northern Territory – six of them condemned by Justice Charles Dashwood.
Murder was not the occupation of any one race, but it was, and is, more likely to be perpetrated by men. In his 9 years on the bench in Darwin, for example, Justice Kriewaldt presided over 39 murder trials involving men. Just over half involved Aboriginal people, but the others were from a range other groups. His first, in 1952, were the two Czech immigrants who appear in this book. They were hanged for murdering a taxi driver (see Ch 7) and Kriewaldt was so shocked by the event that none of his following 37 murder trials ended in the death penalty. In fact, Kriewaldt became a vocal opponent of it.
Of the ten who were hanged in the Northern Territory, six were Aboriginal men, two were Chinese, and (after a gap of 39 years) two were Czech ‘New Australians.’ Seven were hanged at Fannie Bay Gaol, and three on the same ground that had witnessed the murders (see Map 1).
The stories of these ten men survive in the archives and newspapers of the times, but I also travelled throughout the Top End to visit as many of the tragic locations of their crimes as possible. That was an adventure. In some parts of the Territory, little has changed since South Australian settlers arrived in 1870.
[1] NTTG, 14 July 1893, page 2: A Hanging Carnival.
[2] Fannie Bay Gaol (aka Fanny Bay Gaol), was more formally known as ‘Her Majesty's Gaol and Labour Prison.’
[3] Aka Wandy Wandy.
[4] South Australian Register, 18 July 1893, page 6: Matthew Goode: Capital Punishment.
[5] Peter Elder, Northern territory Dictionary of Biography. Comment made by Dashwood in 1894.
[6] The Express and Telegraph, 5 July 1893: The Condemned Man.
[7] Adelaide Observer, 15 July 1893, page 24: White and Black Murderers.
[8] Adelaide Observer, 15 July 1893, page 24: White and Black Murderers.
[9] South Australian Chronicle, 8 July 1893, page 4: The Death Penalty.
[10] South Australian Chronicle, 8 July 1893, page 4: The Death Penalty
[11] NTTG, 14 July 1893, page 2: A Hanging Carnival.
[12] In an exhaustive evaluation of the executions in Australia between 1910 and 1973, Vincent O’Sullivan concluded that there was no deterrent effect on crimes following executions (O’Sullivan, 2018).
[13] NTTG, 14 July 1893, page 2: A Hanging Carnival.
[14] NTTG, 3 March 1893, page 2: Editorial.
[15] Stretton to Gilruth, 20 September 1913, NAA: A3, NT1914/426 p 33.
[16] Stretton to Gilruth, 20 September 1913, NAA: A3, NT1914/426 p 32.
[17] Bevan to Gilruth, 25 September 1913, NAA: A3 NT1914/426 p 25.
[18] Bevan to Gilruth, 25 September 1913, NAA: A3 NT1914/426 p 25.
[19] Bevan to Gilruth, 25 September 1913, NAA: A3 NT1914/426 p 26.
[20] Gilruth to Minister for External Affairs, 27 September 1913, NAA: A3, NT1914/426 p 21.
[21] Gilruth to Secretary, Department of External Affairs, 7 January 1914, NAA: A3, NT1914/426 pp 3-5.
[22] Hodge, 2005.
In Hanged: Execution in the Top End, Derek Pugh explores the history of judicial hangings in Australia’s Northern Territory with clear and direct storytelling. The book focuses on the ten men who were legally executed between 1893 and 1952. These men came from different backgrounds: six were Aboriginal, two were Chinese miners, and two were Czech immigrants. By examining their stories, Pugh reveals not only the crimes that led to their deaths, but also the legal system that judged them.
Pugh carefully walks readers through each case. He explains the crimes, the investigations, the trials, and the final executions. To make the stories feel more real, he often visits the locations where these events took place. This helps readers picture the remote towns, harsh environments, and tense courtrooms where these historic moments unfolded. The result is a narrative that feels grounded and vivid without being overly dramatic.
One of the book’s strongest themes is the question of fairness in the justice system. As highlighted in the foreword by Chief Justice Michael Grant, the death penalty can reveal how a society thinks about justice and equality. In many of the cases described, Pugh points out troubling patterns. White defendants were often spared execution through commuted sentences, while non-white defendants were more likely to be hanged.
A powerful example is the so-called “Hanging Carnival” of 1893. Public debate erupted when people noticed that a white man had his sentence reduced while a “brown man” was executed for a similar crime. Moments like this show how race and politics could shape the outcomes of serious criminal cases.
The book also traces how attitudes toward capital punishment slowly changed over time. Justice Kriewaldt, who oversaw the final executions in 1952, was deeply affected by the experience. After witnessing these hangings, he strongly opposed the death penalty and ensured that none of the murder trials he later presided over ended with an execution. This shift in thinking eventually helped lead to the abolition of capital punishment in the Northern Territory in 1973.
Overall, Hanged: Execution in the Top End is a sobering look at a difficult chapter of Australian history. Pugh’s research and storytelling make the book especially valuable for readers interested in true crime, legal history, and the darker side of colonial justice.