Thursday Island

Charles Gleeson was cook at a shelling station on Prince of Wales Island in the Torres Strait, and Patrick McKiernan, by his own later account, was the only man there he actually liked. That did not stop him shooting McKiernan dead with a stolen shotgun one Wednesday morning that May, then wandering the bush armed until Water Police talked him into surrendering, backed by a settler on horseback who held him at gunpoint.

Gleeson was quiet and composed when brought before a magistrate, offering no reason for the killing. He was convicted and hanged in Brisbane on 24 October 1892, sharing the scaffold with William Moncado, condemned separately for the murder of a ship’s boy at Thursday Island; witnesses said Gleeson twitched convulsively for ten minutes before he died.

“Poor Paddy, the only man on the station that I liked, and now I have shot him,” he said when shown the body, the closest thing to an explanation he ever gave.

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