Simon Adams, The Unforgiving Rope: Murder and Hanging on Australia's Western Frontier.

Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish

Simon Adams, The Unforgiving Rope: Murder and Hanging on Australia's Western Frontier, University of Western Australia Publishing, Crawley, WA, 2009. pp. xxv + 285. $32.95 paper.

There is a lot about this tale of execution in the 'Western Third' of Australia that is reminiscent of Peter Linebaugh's, The London Hanged (Verso, London, 2003). While Linebaugh's book masqueraded as an exploration of the operation of Tyburn gallows, the subtitle, 'crime and civil society in the eighteenth century', hinted at a wider agenda. In fact Linebaugh's aim was to chart the impact of the introduction of a waged economy on working-class Londoners. While the evidence he deployed was largely drawn from transcripts of capital cases, readers were left in no doubt that the title of his book was a metaphor. In Linbaugh's view, eighteenth century London hanged many more than those who swung from the fatal tree. In similar style, Adams 'unforgiving rope' turns out to embrace much more than the necks of the 154 people legally hanged in Western Australia between 1840 and 1964.

Even when it comes to the condemned, Adams is selective. The book is organised around 11 cases, one per chapter. They include Aboriginal men like, Barrabong and Doodjeep, hanged in 1840 above the remains of the hut they were said to have burned down at York having previously murdered the two occupants, Sarah Cook and her baby daughter. Or former transported convicts like Edward Bishop who threw the body of the Chinese carpenter he had killed into the Avon River. Condemned to death, he walked to the gallows through the streets of Perth while the church bells rang.

While public execution was abolished in most Australian colonies in the 1850s, it continued to be used in Perth until December 1870. In the north, where frontier relations remained problematic into the twentieth century, it had an even longer history. There, Aboriginal offenders were brutally executed in public as late as 1892. As the Australian Advertiser described one such event, 'the three little niggers were all seated in a row', before being tipped off the edge of the dray upon which they were perched each with 'a rope hitched round his neck'. In all, 61 (or 39 per cent) of the 154 men and women legally executed in Western Australia were Aboriginal. Many of the remainder were drawn from immigrant minorities. Thus, of the 17 men hanged within the walls of Fremantle prison between 1889 and 1904, not one was what the press of the time would have described as a 'Britisher'. Two were Afghan, six Chinese, one Malay, two Indian, one Greek, one French and four were described as 'Manilamen'. As Adams emphasises, justice in the west was anything but colour blind.

It is the wider colonial fears--which tightened the noose around the necks of some, while others were pardoned or never prosecuted at all--that is the real target of this book. It skilfully uses a study of execution to explore the 'double talk' of the frontier. Major themes include fear of the polluting effects of transportation, especially unnatural crime, and the problematic issue of the Irish 'Yahoo', likened in the pages of Punch to the 'Gorilla and the Negro'. Other racial anxieties that developed as the nineteenth century progressed are explored through concerns about supposed Aboriginal cannibalism or the influx of Asian indentured labour. The last neck to be stretched by Adams' rope belonged to Martha Rendall, who went to her death in 1909 having been convicted of murdering her lover's children. Her case provides an opportunity to examine gender issues. Rendell was almost certainly judicially murdered, not for the crime for which she was tried, but because of the threat that she posed to the institution of the family. The press coverage of the role she was alleged to have played in the ejection of her lover's wife from the family home undoubtedly influenced the decision not to grant her a pardon.

As Adams reminds us at the beginning of this book, crime is a construct and thus any investigation of the operation of the law offers an opportunity to get beneath the skin of a society. However, the Unforgiving Rope contains some odd omissions: there is little attempt, for example, to explore per capita execution rates or the recent literature on crime in late colonial western Australia. But these are relatively minor criticisms of an otherwise fine study of the fears that powered the Western Australian gallows.

HAMISH MAXWELL-STEWART

University of Tasmania