On 15 September 1826, seven convicts, George Brace, John McFarlane, James Edwards, Thomas Balfour, John Dadd, John Clark and Patrick Brown, were hanged together in Hobart, the second of three mass executions carried out that month under Chief Justice John Pedder.
Unlike the seven hanged just two days earlier for murder, not one of this group had killed anyone. Balfour, McFarlane and Edwards went to the gallows for absconding into the bush and robbing settler William Holdship; Brace was hanged for robbery, Dadd and Clark for burglary in Ross, and Brown for stealing sheep, a crime that under Britain’s Bloody Code carried the same legal weight as taking a human life.
The scale of the executions reflected both the severity of imported English law and Governor George Arthur’s determined push to impose discipline on the penal colony. Rather than hang prisoners as they were convicted, the Supreme Court held sentences over and carried them out in batches: seven men on 13 September, seven more on the 15th, and a further nine on the 18th, accounting for nearly half of the 53 executions recorded in Van Diemen’s Land that year.
