To understand Elijah Upjohn, I needed to understand his predecessors and their victims. This introduced me to a trio of brutal, boozing hangmen, along with poor, doomed characters such as John Weachurch, ‘martyr’ of Victoria’s penal system, and Charles Marks and Edward Feeney, tragic gay lovers in an age of vicious homophobia.
But the first people to go to the gallows in what became the colony of Victoria were the Aboriginal men Maulboyheenner and Tunnerminnerwait, hanged in an appalling mass ‘entertainment’ in 1842. There were two more similarly awful spectacles that year, but hangings didn’t happen again in Melbourne until January 1847, when a permanent executioner was sent down from Sydney. Jack Harris, a convict who’d been transported for life in 1818, was given a pretty sweet deal; he was to
