“Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.” – Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus (1913-60)
The penalty is death : capital punishment in the twentieth century, retentionist and abolitionist arguments with special reference to Australia / edited by Barry Jones.
A Troublemaker’s history of South Brisbane cemetery
One hundred years ago, Queensland became the first place in both Australia and the British Commonwealth to abolish the death penalty on 31 July 1922 – but not before 94 people perished at the end of a hangman’s noose. So the state of Queensland banned the death penalty long before abolitionist Barry Jones appeared on the TV quix show Pick-a-Box. On Sunday 14 August 2022, Neil Frost from Brisbane’s Labour History association gave an excellent tour called ‘a troublemakers history of South Brisbane cemetery’.
‘The South Brisbane cemetery at Dutton Park is predominantly a working class cemetery’, so reads the pamphlet handed out to 100 or so onlookers who were given an insight into the lives of notable rebels buried in Dutton Park cemetery on Annerley Road.
There were some chilling subjects including the death of a young mother of three children whose body was found dumped near the Brisbane Girls Grammar school on Gregory Terrace. Mary Emmett was the victim of an unscrupulous Wickham Terrace medico after she fell pregnant and had been treated for haemorrhaging. The doctor who performed the procedure was let off scott-free during the long period of misogynist anti-abortion laws in Queensland. It was significant that the investigation into Ms Emmett’s death was led by Frank Bishoff, the notoriously corrupt former Queensland Police Commissioner.
My mother, Bettina Curr, used to always tell me that if ‘you keep up the way you’re going. you’ll end up like cousin Frank. In Boggo Road jail.’ Her prediction was accurate. Both cousin Frank and I ended up in Boggo Road jail for different reasons. I was put in there as a result of the government’s ban on street marches in 1977. Half the cabinet of the Bjelke-Peterson government were sentenced to jail for corruption. The premier, Bjelke-Petersen, avoided that ignominy by rigging the jury.
Neil Frost described the racist basis for hanging in Queensland at the Dutton Park cemetery. Perhaps most chilling and reprehensible of the deaths recorded in the cemetery were the capital punishment burials of 41 men and one woman who were hung at the nearby Boggo Road gaol. Those killed included thirteen (13) South Sea Islanders and six (6) first nations men. This disproportionate number of South Sea Islander and First Nations people indicate a criminalization of groups whose offences could be seen as acts of resistance. These were often public events where South Sea Islanders and Aboriginal people where brought in to witness the cruel hangings to act as a deterrent for often violent resistance for their land being stolen or being the victims of ‘blackbirding’.
The most infamous of all was the public hanging of a resistance leader, Dundalli, that still remains unremarked (no grave, no official acknowledgement of his struggle for land rights) save for a small plaque in Post Office Square in Brisbane’s CBD.
There were some dry humorous moments during the tour as well when our tour guide mentioned the hitherto unknown fallings-out amongst members of minuscule far left groups.
Our tour leader celebrated the life of master painter and socialist activist, Ernest Hugo Kunze, who illuminated an internationalist tradition of left wing members of the Australian labour movement. Kunze was a Marxist and former member of the German Social Democratic Party and was one of the inner group of activists in Brisbane who formed the Social Democratic vanguard, a propagandist organisation that opposed the wage labour system.
The graves of John and Karl Vaselinkov, who died four months apart in 1936, had very distinctive but similar funerals. John was a farmer from Coopers Plains and like his son was a passionate communist. Carl who died in a cycling accident at Nudgee was a member of the young communist league and his burial service was free of religious kant. Several speeches were made at the graveside by prominent members of the Communist Party, and as the coffin, which was draped in a red silken flag fringed with gold lace, was lowered, the assembled mourners sang the Red Flag. Carl’s grave was adorned with a hammer and sickle.
But the one that most caught my attention was Eduardo Manassero, an Italian antifascist, who lived in north Queensland during the period of the Weil’s disease dispute that led to widespread support for the Communist Party. This dispute ended up with the election of Australia’s first and only Communist Party member of parliament, Fred Patterson. Patterson won his election because of support by Italian cane cutters and coal miners in the nearby Collinsville area. The only way the parliament could get rid of Fred Patterson why was by dividing his seat into two, thus gerrymandering him out of the parliament.
Manassero was among a large number of Italians, both fascist an antifascist, who were interned during World War II because of their race. It was sad that shortly after his release in 1944 Eduardo passed away. The Italian community hid anti-fascists from the authorities to prevent them being interned during the war.
Thanks are due to Neil Frost, Jeff Rickertt, Greg Mallory and Craig Buckley from the Brisbane Labour History Association (BLHA) for putting on this thought provoking event.
Ian Curr
15 August 2022
NB: This article was later published in the Brisbane Labour History Associations (BLHA) journal in the last quarter of 2022
