1841: The Scaffold Confession That Exposed a Wrongful Transportation by a Bushranger
Patrick Curran was a notorious bushranger who terrorised the colony’s roads and outstations, once storming a property with a loaded gun levelled at the overseer before he was overpowered, wounding one of his captors with the stock of his musket in the struggle. Sentenced to death, he escaped from his escort between Picton and Sydney that April, prompting a thirty pound reward before he was run down and returned to custody.
On the morning of 21 October 1841, Curran was hanged at Berrima. His final days swung between violent despair, so bad the attending clergymen were twice ordered from his cell, and sudden, sincere penitence that lasted through the night before his death.
On the scaffold, Curran confessed to the murder of a man named Fuller, a crime for which another man, Bright, had already been tried and transported for life in his place.
