Daniel Moowattin was raised from infancy by the colony’s own flogger and hangman, grew up fluent in English manners, and became a trusted bush guide to the botanist George Caley. In 1810 Caley took him to London, where society was charmed by his polished English and the latest fashions; one newspaper called him, admiringly, “a black beau.” He even sang his own songs at a London party before confessing he longed for home, telling a companion he found more pleasure under a gum tree with his own people than anywhere in England.
He returned to the colony in 1812 and drifted between farm labour and life in the bush. That August, a teenage girl named Hannah Russell was walking alone on a road near Parramatta when, she testified, Moowattin dragged her into the scrub, beat and assaulted her, robbed her of money, then beat her again before a passing stockman frightened him off.
Under the colony’s rules, Aboriginal people could not ordinarily be tried in its courts, but the men who knew Moowattin argued he no longer counted as one of them: he dressed, worked and spoke like a settler. On that reasoning he became the first Aboriginal man ever tried before a court in New South Wales, and on this day in 1816 he was hanged in Sydney alongside two men convicted of highway robbery, the first Aboriginal person legally executed in colonial Australia.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie claimed in his records that all three “confessed their crimes… and died penitent.”
