John Bevan arrived in Sydney aboard the Pitt in February 1792, after a gruelling eight-month voyage during which 29 convicts died, and many others arrived sick.
By 1794, Bevan had built a reputation for trouble in the colony and was caught in the act of breaking into the Sydney home of William Fielder. The case against him was considered overwhelming, and little time was lost: Bevan was convicted of burglary, sentenced to death and hanged on 6 October 1794.
He was buried at the old Sydney burial ground, little more than two and a half years after surviving the voyage that had brought him to New South Wales.
Painting of the East Indiaman Pitt and other sailing ships
On 27 September 1803, John Lynch and James Tracey were hanged at Castle Hill for a violent robbery at the Hawkesbury home of Samuel and Elizabeth Phelps. Five men had entered the house on the evening of 24 July, knocked Samuel down and bound both husband and wife before stealing money, watches, clothing and other property. Before leaving, they stripped two gold rings from Elizabeth’s fingers.
The following morning, Lynch gave a labourer a bundle of stolen papers to hold, warning him not to show anyone. When he delayed returning them, he was offered silver teaspoons and then a watch. He accepted the items but kept the papers, eventually informing the authorities and producing evidence that linked Lynch to the robbery.
Both men were convicted and sentenced to death. At the Castle Hill gallows in Sydney, Lynch admitted his guilt and urged the spectators to take warning from his fate. Tracey continued to deny involvement and interrupted Lynch’s final address before the two were hanged.
Vintage pocket watch, fountain pen and spoons on a table
On September 18, 1826, nine convicts went to the gallows together in Hobart under Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur’s ruthless enforcement of Britain’s Bloody Code, the doctrine that made property crime a capital offence equal to murder. Not one of the nine had killed anyone: George Farquharson, Robert Cable, Thomas Savell, John Davis and John Cruitt were hanged for sheep stealing, John Penson, Timothy Swinscow and William Wickens for burglary, and James Rowles for theft.
The hangings were part of the largest cluster of executions recorded in Van Diemen’s Land that year, twenty three people put to death over a single fortnight in mid September 1826. Earlier hangings that month, on September 13, had targeted actual killers; those on September 15 and 18 were reserved entirely for non-violent property offenders, a deliberate signal from Arthur to a colony economically dependent on settler flocks and stores.
Sheep stealing in particular was treated by the colonial administration as an existential threat to the fledgling economy of the penal settlement, and the September 18 executions were designed as a public deterrent to convicts tempted to raid the herds and homes of free settlers.
John Dunn, Thomas Welch and Ann Wilson were charged before the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction at Parramatta with the murder of Mary Rowe. After a lengthy hearing, the court convicted Dunn of the murder largely on the evidence of an accomplice, John Welch, a boy of about sixteen.
Dunn was ordered hanged the following Monday, between eight and twelve. But as the execution was about to proceed, the teenage witness suddenly retracted his sworn testimony in front of the assembled spectators, declaring that Dunn was innocent and that he and his father, Thomas Welch, were the true killers. The Acting Provost Marshal, with no precedent to guide him, respited the hanging, which did not take place until the following Wednesday, under far gloomier circumstances than before.
Despite the boy’s dramatic gallows reversal accusing himself and his father of the killing, the original verdict against Dunn stood and his execution went ahead two days later than planned.
Lady Justice Themis statue on gallows with scales and sword
