‘The European colonial expansion between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries led to frontier wars on every continent…As part of this world wide European expansion, the British invaded and settled Australia.’ Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars, Conflict in the early colony 1788-1817, New South, Sydney, 2018
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‘There would be some justification for the saying that England won Australia by six days’. Professor Edward Jenks, cited , H.E. Egerton, A Short History of British Colonial History, Methuen, London 1936
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‘In the late eighteenth century it looked like the bad old killing days were returning….I estimate that some 35,000 people were condemned to death in England and Wales between 1770 and 1830. Most were reprieved by the king’s prerogative of mercy and sent to prison hulks or transported to Australia. Professor V.A.C Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, Execution and the English People 1770-1868, 1994.
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A hanging was one of the great free spectacles of London. Audiences of up to 100,000 were occasionally claimed in London, and of 30,000 or 40,000 quite often….when famous felons hanged, polite people watched as well as vulgar’. Gatrell. Op. Cit.
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‘The death penalty was brought to Australia with the First Fleet’. Mike Richards,The Hanged Man, The Life and Death of Ronald Ryan, 2002.
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LONDON 1868 – Michael Barrett
Middlesex – 1867 December 13: Shoppers hurrying that Friday afternoon to a near-by market that served the poorest of the poor, took no notice of a wheelbarrow propped against the outer wall of London’s Clerkenwell Detention Centre.
Packed with gunpowder when ignited it produced an explosion powerful enough to demolish not only a substantial section of the gaol’s exercise yard but many ramshackle slum dwellings opposite.
In Queen Victoria’s Great Britain this was a period of increasing Irish terrorism. And intelligence had played large part in the bombing.
The breach in the wall was timed to coincide when Colonel Richard O’Sullivan-Burke, a ‘Fenien’ insurgent from America and Joseph Casey, would be in the exercise yard.
Flying stone, bricks and debris killed six (6) children playing alongside the wall.
In the crowed street market six (6) people died. As many as a hundred (100) men women and children were injured.
Some so badly they later died.
‘In St. James nearby is a tablet commemorating the victims of the 1867 bomb’. Richard Byrne, Prisons and Punishment of London. 1992
