scholarly journals Investigating death in Moreton Bay: Coronial inquests and magisterial inquiries

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (01) ◽  
pp. 53-70
Author(s):  
Lee Butterworth
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
Moreton Bay ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Justices Of The Peace ◽  
Physical Limitations ◽  
Interracial Violence ◽  
Death Investigation

AbstractEnglish common law was applied in the New South Wales penal colony when it was founded by Governor Arthur Phillip in 1788. Phillip’s second commission granted him sole authority to appoint coroners and justices of the peace within the colony. The first paid city coroner was appointed in 1810 and only five coroners served the expanding territory of New South Wales by 1821. To relieve the burden on coroners, justices of the peace were authorised to conduct magisterial inquiries as an alternative to inquests. When the Moreton Bay settlement was established, and land was opened up to free settlers, justices were relocated from New South Wales to the far northern colony. Nonetheless, the administration of justice, along with the function of the coroner, was hindered by issues of isolation, geography and poor administration by a government far removed from the evolving settlement. This article is about death investigation and the role of the coroner in Moreton Bay. By examining a number of case studies, it looks at the constraints faced by coroners, deaths due to interracial violence and deaths not investigated. It concludes that not all violent and unexplained deaths were investigated in accordance with coronial law due to a paucity of legally qualified magistrates, the physical limitations of local conditions and the denial of justice to Aborigines as subjects of the Crown.

Prison Versus Western Australia: Which Worked Best, the Australian Penal Colony or the English Convict Prison System?

2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (5) ◽  
pp. 1139-1160
Author(s):  
Barry Godfrey
Keyword(s):  
Western Australia ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Prison System ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
South Wales

Abstract Between 1850 and 1868, a natural experiment in punishment took place. Men convicted of similar crimes could serve their sentence of penal servitude either in Britain or in Australia. For historians and social scientists, this offers the prospect of addressing a key question posed over 200 years ago by the philosopher, penal theorist and reformer Jeremy Bentham when he authored a lengthy letter entitled ‘Panopticon versus New South Wales: Or, the Panopticon Penitentiary System, and the Penal Colonization System, Compared’. This article answers the underlying tenet of Bentham’s question, ‘Which was best prison or transportation?’ by applying two efficiency tests. The first tests whether UK convicts or Australian convicts had higher rates of reconviction, and the second explores the speed to reconviction.

Recovering and Reporting Australia's Early Colonial Case Law: The Macquarie Project

2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kercher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Late Eighteenth

When it was established in 1788, New South Wales became the most remote, and most peculiar, of the British empire's overseas colonies. The founding colony of what would eventually become Australia, it was established as a penal colony, a place to send the unwanted criminals of Britain and Ireland. Britain lost more than the majority of its North American possessions in the late eighteenth century. It also lost its principal repository for unwanted felons. New South Wales filled the gap.

scholarly journals The fossil human skull found at Talgai, Queensland

1918 ◽  
Vol 208 (348-359) ◽  
pp. 351-387 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Black Soil ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Human Skull ◽  
South Wales ◽  
The University ◽  
The Town ◽  
Heavy Rains ◽  
Brown Clay

Situated in the Darling Downs of Southern Queensland, in the vicinity of the town of Warwick, are a series of alluvial flats, watered by the tributary creeks of the Condamine River, which is itself a branch of the Darling. One of these creeks, the Dalrymple, winds a tortuous course through the black-soil country, a few miles north of Warwick, and traverses Talgai Station. In the year 1884, after exceptionally heavy rains, the creek came down in strong flood and overflowed the flats to a width of over half a mile. When the floods subsided, it was found that an old water course or “billabong” had been washed out, leaving a channel about ten feet in depth. A fencer who was at work at Talgai at this time, while traversing this freshly washed-out channel, had his attention arrested by what seemed to he a curiously shaped stone in the side of the cut, lying embedded by itself, not at the bottom, but about three feet up the side. It was firmly fixed in the clay, and in dislodging it he formed the opinion that it had not been recently disturbed. When he had freed it, perceiving that it was a skull, he took it to the proprietor of Talgai Station, from whose son it passed into the possession of Mr. E. A. Crawford, of Greenethorpe, New South Wales. This gentleman, in May, 1914, submitted a photograph of it to Prof. Edgeworth David, F. B. S., Professor of Geology in the University of Sydney, who showed it to Prof. J. T. Wilson, F. R. S. He, immediately perceiving the possibilities, expressed a strong desire to have the specimen itself forwarded to Sydney. This having been done, the preliminary investigations were immediately commenced by Profs. David and Wilson, and the results communicated to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Sydney, in August, 1914(1). Shortly after this, Prof. David made a journey to the site of the discovery. He was fortunate enough to find the original discoverer, who, though a very old man, retained a clear recollection of the circumstances of the find. He visited the locality, and, with a memory still clear as to the local conditions, pointed out to Prof. David, to within a few yards, the spot in the gully where the skull was unearthed. His account of the discovery was as just related, and he was able to identify the formation of red-brown clay, interspersed with nodular concretions of carbonate of lime, as identical with that from the upper portion of which the skull was originally removed.

Of Men and Mining Education: The School of Mines at the University of Sydney

2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy MacLeod
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Mining Engineering ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Australian Science ◽  
The University

Colonial Australian science grew by a process of transplantation, adaptation, and innovation in response to local conditions. The discovery of gold in 1851, and the location of vast resources of other minerals, transformed the colonies, as it did the imperial economy. In this process, the role of mining engineering and mining education played a significant part. Its history, long neglected by historians, illuminates the ways in which the colonial universities sought to guide and direct this engine of change, conscious both of overseas precedent and local necessity. This paper considers the particular circumstances of New South Wales, and the role of the University of Sydney, in seizing the day—and producing a degree—that lasted nearly a century.

“The Man on the Spot”: Independence of the Australian Governor, 1788-1850

1971 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 177-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Clyde McCulloch
Keyword(s):  
Western Australia ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
South Australia ◽  
British Government ◽  
Complete Control ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Prison Farms

Australians recognize distance and isolation as a mold which shaped their history. Geoffrey Blainey observes this in his brilliantly provocative book, The Tyranny of Distance, and points out the consequences of Australia's geographic situation. Australia is at least 12,000 miles from England, and her continental perimeter is another 12,000 miles. Because of slow and uncertain communications between Australia and Whitehall from 1788 to 1850, the governor was really “the man on the spot”; he had often to act more independently than his instructions intended, and at times he defied both Whitehall and the colonists, sometimes at the same time. Although his link with the Colonial Office was direct, the secretaries of state to whom he was responsible changed frequently; yet much of our information comes from the dispatches between these officials.The colony of New South Wales comprised nearly all of eastern continental Australia until 1850. It was founded as a penal colony in 1788. The commission of the first governor, Arthur Phillip, gave him almost complete autocratic powers over the colony, prompting a military attaché to observe: “I never heard of any one single person having so great power vested in him as the Governor.” This commission stood, with some slight exceptions, for more than thirty years.Because of these extraordinary powers, the early governors were called autocrats. Although the British government decided how many convicts were to be sent and the colonial secretaries in London issued frequent instructions, the distance and slow mails — three to six-month voyages en route each way — placed the governor in complete control of the colony's expansion. Thus, the disposal of land, labor, and capital depended on each governor's individual discretion. After 1824, when George Arthur became lieutenant governor, Tasmania became independent from New South Wales. Eventually, these two autocratically ruled prison farms became prosperous self-governing colonies after 1850. Meanwhile, Western Australia and South Australia were founded sans convicts in 1829 and 1836, respectively. This paper will deal first with New South Wales, and more briefly with Tasmania, Western Australia, and South Australia.

VICTORIANS LIVE: AUSTRALIA'S VICTORIAN VESTIGES

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 342-346
Author(s):  
Margaret Harris
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Moreton Bay ◽  
South Wales ◽  
British Colonies

ON 1 JANUARY 1901, at the beginning of a new century, the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed a political entity by the federation of six separate British colonies. Queen Victoria's formal assent to the necessary legislation of the Westminster Parliament was one of her last official acts; she died on 22 January. For all the tyranny of 20,000 kilometres distance, the impress of the monarch on her far-flung colony was evident. Two of the states of the Commonwealth, Victoria and Queensland, had been named for her. When the Port Phillip settlement separated from New South Wales in 1851, it became Victoria; in 1859, when the Moreton Bay settlement also hived off, its first governor announced “a fact which I know you will all hear with delight–Queensland, the name selected for this new Colony, was entirely the happy thought and inspiration of Her Majesty herself!” (Cilento and Lack 161)

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