Moments after the bolt was drawn at the Campbell Street Gaol in Hobart, the chaplain stepped forward and read aloud a letter the dead man had written the day before in the condemned cell. It was addressed “To all men at Port Arthur”, and Martin Lydon had begged that it be made public.
It was the story of a ruined life in a few lines. Disobedient at ten, a soldier at 16, Lydon struck an officer of his company in a moment of anger and was flogged: “this ruined me”. He came to hate the army and took to drink, and further violence saw him transported. “The vileness of Norfolk Island turned me into an animal,” he wrote. Only three weeks earlier, in H division, he had boasted that he did not care about being hanged. Now he called that his “wicked flashiness”: “Every man about to die must fear the judgment of God.”
Lydon had been capitally convicted in the Supreme Court of a felonious assault at Port Cygnet, south of Hobart, committed while drunk, a crime that then carried the death penalty. Lydon disputed part of the evidence given at his trial, but he did not dispute the sentence: what he had done in his drunkenness, he wrote, deserved death. “May the drunkenness that brought on me this misery be a warning to all of you.”
