1848: Black-Faced and Armed: Matthew Mahide Hanged at Launceston for Robbery
Matthew Mahide held up the property of George Stancombe with his face blackened and a weapon in hand, the kind of disguised, armed bushranging that terrorised rural Tasmanian households in the 1840s. Convicted of the offence, he was sentenced to death.
He was hanged at Launceston on 7 November 1848. On the scaffold he said nothing at all, appearing, in the words of a witness, more dead than alive as the hangman did his work. Rather than being sent for dissection, his body was carried to the Crown Inn for a wake kept after the custom of his country, before burial in the Catholic burial ground.
