FEATURE
The execution of Michael Magee DR AUKE ‘JJ’ STEENSMA, BARRISTER & SOLICITOR, STEENSMA LAWYERS1 I say, I shot the Sherriff, oh Lord And they say it is a capital offence, yeah I Shot the Sheriff Bob Marley 19732
O
n Wednesday 2 May, 1838, an Irish Catholic by the name of Michael Magee, would have the dubious and ignominious honour of being the first person executed in South Australia. Aged 25, Magee would die near Montefiore Hill, ‘just below the junction of Mills and Strangways Terrace’,3 at the hands of an incompetent executioner. His crime? Magee was ‘found guilty of shooting at with intent to kill, Mr Samuel Smart, the Sheriff of the province’,4 after a failed attempt to rob the hut of the Sheriff. ‘Jack Ketch’, the name was given to executioners of the time, was almost comically dressed in clothes that were packed with padding and a large protruding hump on his back. His face, it is said, was covered ‘with a horrible hand-made mask painted white around the eyes’,5 to prevent his identification. At the time, South Australia had no state-appointed executioner. On the day of the execution, despite £10 being offered to anyone who would conduct the execution, no one took up the offer. It is suspected that eventually, a cook of the South Australian Company, who was said to be a person known to Magee, was convinced into taking the appointment of ‘Jack Ketch’.6 He reluctantly did so. The South Australian Gazette and Register noted; ‘The unfortunate man was perfectly resigned to his fate, and had to all appearance made the best use of the short time allotted to him’ and ‘during the whole time, he envined the greatest firmness’.7 The reality of what happened that day on Montefiore Hill is far grimmer…
THE PROCLAMATION OF THE PROVINCE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA On the 28 December, 1836, Governor Hindmarsh would land at Holdfast Bay
and would proclaim the province of South Australia. As the colony started to grow, it did so without a Gaol. The Adelaide Gaol would not be built and operated until 1841. South Australia, after all, was a free state, of people who came as migrants, and not transported convicts. The colony did not require infrastructure to house the ‘Prisoners of Mother England’ that had been transported to the shores of Terra Australis. Any petty offenders were taken aboard HMS Buffalo. HMS Buffalo was moored in Glenelg, and the perpetrators were placed in irons and placed in the hold. Any more serious offenders were sent to the colony of Van Dieman’s Land, to serve their time or punishment at Port Arthur. However, in 1837, HMS Buffalo returned to England and therefore denying the fledgling colony a gaol. To facilitate the need for housing criminals, a series of tents with set up on the banks of the Torrens River. To prevent the prisoners from escaping, they were chained to logs. By this stage, throughout the colonies of Australia, there was an increasing number of escaped convicts, roaming the settlements, and often undertook a violent ‘robbery under arms’ and upon completing their task, would flee into the vast expanse of bush. South Australia however, did not suffer the scourge of bushrangers as the other colonies had. No gangs were roaming the Adelaide plains, stagecoaches being robbed, though there was petty crime, but not undertaken by the stereotypical bushranger. However, local settlers of the fledgling state accused the perpetrators of the pestilence of petty crime on: an ‘illegitimate’ class who threatened to destroy their utopian dream. Members of this ‘class’, which included escaped or emancipated convicts, associates or anyone tainted by convictism like runaway sailors and those living at whaling stations such as Encounter Bay on Fleurieu Peninsula.8
In May, 1837, pursuant newly legislated Supreme Court Act (1837), the colony’s first Sherriff, Samuel Smart, a solicitor,9 was appointed by Governor Hindmarsh. The act ‘provided that the Court should have ministerial and other officers as might be necessary for the administration of justice in the Court and for the execution of its judgments and other orders’.10 Samual Smart had been a solicitor in Van Dieman’s Land, and by some accounts; ‘zealously pursued escaped convicts and ticket-of-leave men for Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), who’d terrorised whole Adelaide neighbourhoods’.11 The Bunyip newspaper of Gawler later wrote of him; ‘Mr. Smart was well-known here as being a co-trustee with the late Mr Phillips for the Gawler Special Survey’.12
THE CRIME OF MICHAEL MAGEE The crime that Michael Magee committed was that he and two other felons, one identified as Morgan, broke into the hut of Sherriff Smart. Sherriff Smart would be targeted by those described as ‘three “Vandemonian” convicts in Adelaide’.13 As they committed the crime, Michael Magee discharged his musket pistol at Sherriff Smart. The South Australian Chronicle wrote that ‘he failed in his object, the ball having merely grazed Mr Smart’s ear, and done him providentially no further injury than a few gunpowder marks on his left cheek’.14 Magee and the other were subsequently captured. Morgan escaped and would May 2021 THE BULLETIN
33
