Island: No. 96: Feature

ROBERT COX

STEPS TO THE SCAFFOLD

The Execution of Pevay and Timmy

Pevay and Timmy were Tasmanian Aborigines whom George Augustus Robinson took with thirteen others to Port Phillip, where he had been appointed Chief Protector of Aborigines in 1839. Eventually, Pevay, Timmy, and three Tasmanian women, including Trucanini, absconded and began raiding settlers. They killed two men and wounded others before being apprehended. All five were tried for murder but only Pevay and Timmy were found guilty. They were hanged in Melbourne on 20 January 1842.
Author’s note

After breakfast Robinson came to say goodbye, bringing with him Trucanini’s stepson Peter Bruny. At 7am Rev. Thomson returned, accompanied by several magistrates and the sheriff. After Divine Service in the yard attended by all the prisoners, Pevay and Timmy were put into Robinson’s cart and trundled to the execution site on a small hill where RMIT now stands. A temporary gallows had been erected there at the back of the jail then under construction and now known as the Old Melbourne Gaol. The scaffold was a wobbly affair about three-and- a-half metres high, whose platform was barely wide enough to accommodate the executioner, a sheep thief named John Davies, victor in an eighteen-man contest for the job who, for his services, had been guaranteed £10 and his freedom. The trapdoor, notably makeshift, was propped up with bricks and sticks.

It was Melbourne’s first public execution, and an appreciative crowd attended, some with picnic hampers.

An immense crowd... between four and five thousand people [attended], the greater part of whom were women and children. From the laughing and merry faces which were assembled... the scene resembled more the appearance of a race-course than a scene of death. The walls and body of the new gaol were literally packed with spectators as anxiously awaiting the awful scene as if it were a bull-bait or a prize-ring. (Port Phillip Herald, 21 January 1842).

Open coffins lay by the gallows, ready to receive the bodies of the condemned, and some spectators stood on them to improve their view. Local Aborigines climbed trees to watch. A military guard in full fig added a touch of pageantry to the proceedings.

The cart carrying the prisoners arrived with an escort of police and civic dignitaries. When the condemned men got down there was a twenty-minute session of prayer that was frequently interrupted by shouts of ‘Cut it short!’ from the impatient crowd, which eddied around the prisoners, uttering ‘explosions of uproarious merriment’.

Pevay and Timmy knelt with the clergyman, Pevay calm, Timmy visibly terror-stricken. When the three men stood, Timmy ‘broke out in the most heart-rending groans; the terrified and piteous looks he threw around him... was terrible to witness; he trembled violently’.

Although Robinson absented himself from the proceedings, Assistant Protector James Dredge was there and described the scene in his diary:

‘The executioner tied their hands before they went up the ladder and chains hung from their ankles, making it nearly impossible for them [to ascend].

‘The poor wretches, in getting up the ladder, deprived of the use of their hands, were obliged to cling to the bars with their knees and chins and be partly dragged and partly pushed up to slaughter... Jack [Pevay] was the first to ascend the ladder which he did with tolerable firmness. Poor Bob [Timmy] had to be literally dragged to the fatal platform.’

Even as Pevay reached the platform, Timmy was still beseeching people in the crowd to save him, ‘pressing against everyone that spoke to him as if to catch at some chance of salvation’. Pevay waited calmly by the noose but asked the hangman not to cover his eyes yet, so he could see Timmy when he came up. Finally, Timmy stood at the foot of the ladder but, near collapse, was unable to climb it. Davies obligingly went down the ladder and dragged him up.

A hush fell on the crowd as Timmy was hauled into view, shivering violently. His terror was infectious; Pevay too began to tremble. The executioner became anxious, fearing personal injury if their quaking tipped him off the narrow, flimsy platform. Hastily he placed the nooses over their heads and pulled their caps down over their eyes, then scrambled down the ladder to safety. He and his assistant grasped the rope that would release the trapdoor and pulled. The Tasmanians fell, but only about thirty centimetres, not far enough to break their necks. ‘There was a dead pause, and a cry of shame from the crowd. The two twisted and writhed convulsively... in a manner that horrified even the most hardened’, The Chronicles of Early Melbourne 1835-52 recorded. Hastily the executioner kicked away the plank holding the trapdoor and this time the two unfortunates fell all the way. Pevay’s stoutness was a blessing: he appears to have died instantly, (‘He hung beautiful’, Davies said.) Timmy, slimmer and lighter, did not. He continued to writhe in agony, ‘his chest labouring and heaving violently, his fine athletic frame was dreadfully convulsed’ as the life was slowly, painfully strangled out of him. The crowd began to boo and jeer, yelling insults at the executioner, who could only smile abashedly.

After the bodies had hung for an hour they were taken down and probably stripped of their clothes, the sale of which for souvenirs was an executioner’s grisly perquisite. Then they were placed in the waiting coffins, the lids affixed, and the coffins put onto the cart and carried the short distance to the Aboriginal cemetery, where the Chief Protector of Aborigines was waiting to receive them; Peter Bruny was the only Tasmanian mourner. With due Christian piety the two mangled corpses were lowered into their graves and the foreign soil of Victoria piled sanitisingly atop them, itself over the years to be gradually submerged beneath multifarious layers of other detritus of Caucasian civilisation and commerce, for whatever substantial may remain of Pevay and Timmy now lies lost beneath the busy bustle and surge of Melbourne’s Victoria Market.

That night a still-sickened James Dredge confided his disquietude to his diary. The execution was ‘an affecting, appalling, disgusting, execrable scene’, he wrote, adding that he hoped he would never again see the like of it. He need not have worried. As far as Aboriginal Tasmanians were concerned, he never would.

Extracted from Steps to the Scaffold: the Untold Story of Tasmania’s Black Bushrangers, published by Cornhill Publishing, April 2004.

NOTE: ‘Trucanini’ is preferred to ‘Truganini’ or variations thereon, that being how she herself pronounced her name, according to her friend John Woodcock Graves.

ROBERT COX’s next book, A Settlement Built on Blood, is a history of early Sorell. It will be published later this year.

Last modified 22 June, 2004