Animation: Jake Duczynski from Studio Gilay / Original artwork ‘Blood On His Hands, Cleansed By Salt Water’ by Aunty Loretta Ethel Parsley, commissioned by Impact Studios
The Last Outlaws
A Trilogy Podcast from Impact Studios
In a History Lab season like no other, we’re pulling on the threads of one of Australia’s greatest misunderstood histories, moving beyond the myths to learn what the Aboriginal brothers Jimmy and Joe Governor faced in both life and death.
Jimmy and Joe Governor were from Wiradjuri and Wonnarua country, and were the last proclaimed outlaws in Australia, wanted dead or alive.
Australia’s budding Federation is the background setting to this remarkable story, tying the brothers to the inauguration of a ‘new’ nation and Australia’s dark history of frontier violence, racial injustice and the global trade and defilement of Aboriginal ancestral remains.
This Impact Studios production is a collaboration with the Governor family descendants, UTS Faculty of Law and Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research.
Introducing:
The Last Outlaws
Introducing: The Last Outlaws
Emma Lancaster: This is an Impact Studios production from the University of Technology, Sydney. Before we start, please be aware if you are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, you should know that this episode contains the voices and names of deceased persons. Please listen with care.
Leroy Parsons: This is a story about two brothers.
James Wilson-Miller: She started talking to me about these blackfellas, these two bad black fellas that came through Singleton one day.
Loretta Ethel Parsley: They did a bad thing.
Leroy Parsons: And the complex realities they faced in life
Loretta Ethel Parsley: Where he was walking in the two worlds.
Leroy Parsons: As well as death…
Loretta Ethel Parsley: He had blood on his hands.
Leroy Parsons: The Last Outlaws in Australia. The story of Jimmy and Joe Governor has been told before. But never like this.
Loretta Ethel Parsley: Welcome to Country [in language] This is my story through Jimmy Governor. If it wasn’t for Jimmy, I wouldn’t be here.
Leroy Parsons: For the first time. The Governor descendants will share their story.
Loretta Ethel Parsley: Jimmy was fighting for his family
Leroy Parsons: But that family man snapped.
Professor Katherine Biber: Jimmy Governor was an outlaw, and he probably was guilty of all of these horrific, violent murders, primarily of white women and children. And yet every legal defence, every legal process, every legal opportunity was provided for him. And I’m interested in why.
Leroy Parsons: In this three part History Lab series, we’re pulling on the threads of one of Australia’s great misunderstood histories.
Loretta Ethel Parsley: He fell in love with a non-Aboriginal woman and that changed everything.
Leroy Parsons: We’ll find out what the Governor brothers reveal about Australia, about the start of our Federation, our legal system, a global body trade driven by race science and what their story tells us about black and white Australia.
Leroy Parsons: This may be the tale of a prison colony trying to become a country and the murder case that stood in its way.
Professor Katherine Biber: Local people would come and strike a match on the sole of his feet
Kaitlyn Sawrey: To find it would be a needle in a haystack.
Dr Murat Kekic: Well, we’re going to go through every bit of hay.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker: Oh God, what I really want to say… Am I allowed to swear?
Loretta Ethel Parsley: It could be a love story, it sounds like a love story.
Professor Katherine Biber: The archives are always not some pure and true source.
Kaitlyn Sawrey: So who do we trust? Nobody?
Leroy Parsons: This is the story of The Last Outlaws. Subscribe to The Last Outlaws wherever you get your podcasts and find out more at TheLastOutlaws.com.au
Emma Lancaster: The Last Outlaws, a three part History Lab series, dropping September 22.
EPISODE ONE – SEPTEMBER 22, 2021
The Last Outlaws
This is the tale of a prison colony trying to become a country and the murder case that stood in its way, but this is not a true crime podcast.
Jimmy and Joe Governor, two brothers from Wiradjuri and Wonnarua country, were the last proclaimed outlaws in Australia – wanted dead or alive.
120 years later we examine what has survived and what we can still learn from the Governor brothers’ story.
The Last Outlaws – Episode One Transcript
Emma Lancaster – Cultural Warning:
This is an Impact Studios production from the University of Technology Sydney. Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that the following episode contains the names of people who have passed. The story you’re about to hear starts in the year 1900 and draws on the colonial archive. Listeners are advised there may be words and descriptions that may be culturally sensitive, and which might not normally be used in certain public or community contexts. Terms from archival material used in this podcast reflect the attitude of the author or the period in which the item was written and may be considered inappropriate today. This story also contains information about acts of violence that may be distressing.
Leroy Parsons:
I don’t want to assume that you will know who Jimmy Governor was or why he matters to me. He was a Wiradjuri and Wonnarua man and a little bit Irish. In 1900, he was 25 years old. Jimmy has been described in many ways; a bush ranger, a serial killer, and even a freedom fighter. But none of these labels quite fit. Today, most people don’t know who he is, let alone what he did, but there was a time when everyone knew his name because for a brief moment, his crimes paralyzed Australia.
Leroy Parsons:
On an unusually freezing night in July, 1900, Jimmy Governor, his brother Joe, and their friend Jackie approached the Mawbey family home in Breelong, a small town on Gamilaraay country on the western plains of New South Wales. Inside was a group of white women and children, and outside Jimmy, Joe and Jackie were armed with the tomahawk, a heavy club called a nulla-nulla, and an unloaded rifle.
Leroy Parsons:
There are different reports about exactly what was said when Mrs. Mawbey opened the door. What we do know is what happened next. Mrs. Mawbey was strike in the head and neck five times with the tomahawk. Her 14 year old son Percy tried to stop it, but he was hit so hard his head was nearly severed from his body. Mrs. Mawbey sixteen-year-old boarder Grace escaped through the front window with her 21-year-old school teacher, Helen Kerz. They were chased and clumped to death. 11 year old Hilda was chased to a nearby creek and murdered. All told, five women and children died. The attackers slipped into the frigid night. The law wouldn’t be too far behind them, and just like that, one of Australia’s largest manhunts began.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Yeah. So this is the road that’s going to take us in the main gate of Rookwood Necropolis. The sign here says Rookwood Cemetery, but when we enter it, we’ll see that it’s called Rookwood Necropolis, and that word necropolis is a clue to the immensity of this cemetery.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So this is supposed to be the city of the dead?
Professor Katherine Biber:
It is, and it is the size of a city and it’s as heavily populated as a city.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
This is Katherine Biber, a professor of law from the University of Technology Sydney, and she’s walked through this city of the dead Rookwood Cemetery for years, all in search of Jimmy Governor, because she’s had a hunch for a long time that there’s a much bigger story to be told about his life.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So this is the area. We can walk in and have a look. There are some marked graves, but my understanding was that Jimmy Governor didn’t have a headstone. So somewhere in this scrappy bush, he’s been buried.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Jimmy’s case and everything we still don’t understand about it has gotten under Katherine’s skin. There’s something about his story that does that to you. I’m Kaitlyn Sawrey, a journalist and audio maker, and I’ve been following Katherine as she digs into the archives to trace the trail of Jimmy’s violent murder spree. In this three part History Lab series, we’re pulling on the threads of one of Australia’s great misunderstood story.
Professor Katherine Biber:
I started with the intention to undertake what I call the legal history of Jimmy Governor and I’ve realized that it’s probably a history of the making of Australia.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
But I want to be clear this isn’t a true crime podcast. We’re moving beyond the myths to learn what the Governor brothers, Jimmy and Joe, faced in both life and death and what it reveals about Australia, about the start of our federation, our legal system, what happened in our prisons, the global body trade driven by race science, and what their story tells us about black and white Australia. This may be the tale of a prison colony trying to become a country and the murder case that stood in its way. This is the story of the law outlaws.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
When did you first come across the story of the Governor brothers?
Professor Katherine Biber:
I think it was when I saw the film The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, which was released in 1978, but I didn’t see it until decades later. I was writing a PhD on Australian cinema and that was one of my texts. That film kind of stayed with me for a long time, because I knew in some way that it was based on a true story and I was kind of shocked by that.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So first seeing the film to now, how long has that been, do you reckon?
Professor Katherine Biber:
I would say 20 to 22 years. That’s a long time. It’s older than my children. But I also felt like if this was a true story, it would be much more well known than it is. I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t more well-known and that’s why I wondered, could it be true or could this be an extremely fictionalized fantastical account of what really happened? So I wanted to know what really happened because I felt like if it really happened the way it’s portrayed in the film, everyone should know this story. So I turned to the archives for answers.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So we know what happened on that fateful night, but how do we get there? To find out, we probably need to know who Jimmy Governor was. What do we know about him?
Professor Katherine Biber:
It was thought that he was descended from Aboriginal people, but he also had Irish ancestors. From an early age, he and his brother Joe and possibly also their father did various farming jobs where they would build fences and other work on farms.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So we know he was a fencer, but do we know anything about any of these other jobs? He was a police tracker at one point.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Yeah, that’s true. He was a police tracker. There were no roads, there were no communications and the landscape was something quite unfamiliar to white people. So they began to recruit Aboriginal people, but of course, quite soon afterwards, police trackers became used as a tool of policing indigenous peoples.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Jimmy had found ways to exist in the colony until he did something quite radical for frontier Australia.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So he was in his early 20s when he met and married a white woman, a white teenager really, called Ethel Page. They already had a small baby and she was already pregnant with a second child.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So the archives were able to tell us that Jimmy married Ethel and they had a growing family, but Katherine knew to better understand Jimmy’s past, she needed to find a link to Jimmy’s present.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So it was a Friday afternoon and by the time we got there, it was quite dark. When you arrive at a unfamiliar place in the dark, especially somewhere out in the bush, we didn’t even know if we were in the right place.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Katherine and I headed down to the south coast of New South Wales to one of those tiny towns that’s really just a petrol station on the side of the road.
Professor Katherine Biber:
I was really anxious or nervous because I felt like I was finally going to connect with someone who really owned this story in a personal way. It seemed very important to be respectful, to be consultative. So I wanted to hold on to that fact that this was not my story, this is not my family, and this is not my project to play with. It’s not a toy and it belongs to another family.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Now, I am the great-granddaughter of Jimmy and Ethel, and as I speak about him, I want to be able to let people know that he was a real person.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
This is Loretta Ethel Parsley, Walbunja elder and custodian of Country. She’s a direct descendant of Jimmy and Ethel Governor and the family historian. We’re at Loretta’s home, which sits on 67 acres of sprawling landscape that she calls Middle Earth.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
[Welcome in Walbunja Yuin language]. I’d like to welcome you to the traditional lands of the Walbunja people, pay our respects to elders both past and present and acknowledge that we are on country and that when we leave, all we leave is our footprints, and we’re here today to honor an ancestor.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
We settled into an outdoor table with homemade damper and lilly pilly jam.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
How’s the damper?
Professor Katherine Biber:
It’s delicious.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
A lot of what Loretta tells us about Jimmy lines right up with the archives, but has the depth we hadn’t heard before.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Well, from the aunties and obviously they’d spoken to their mother who was married to Jimmy and that he was quite athletic and he played cricket and he was really handsome. He was out there in the community because he had the status of being a black tracker, the status of being married to a white woman. He did everything that most Aboriginal people of that period of time would never even consider. So to him, he was as equal to other people, regardless of skin color. He was able to walk proudly in our community and yet something happened. He was walking in the two worlds, but he fell in love with a non-Aboriginal woman, and that changed everything.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
In 1900, an Aboriginal man providing for his family wasn’t easy. Many Aboriginal people had been pushed onto missions. Jimmy was working for the Mawbey’s building fences.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
That is a skill, putting a post into the ground, to be able to dig it. Yeah, we wouldn’t have had excavators or post hole diggers. It was all physical work, so you had to be strong.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Jimmy wasn’t doing it alone. Katherine Biber tells us his little brother Joe was living with them and helped Jimmy build fences.
Professor Katherine Biber:
I think he was probably about two years younger than Jimmy Governor. We don’t really have any records in which he speaks or in which his thoughts or even his existence is recorded in any meaningful way. He had traveled around where he could find work and he was living with Jimmy Governor and Ethel at the time that the Mawbey family members were murdered.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Loretta reminds us that there was another Aboriginal man camping on the Mawbey property with Jimmy, Ethel and Joe, Jackie Underwood, and they all went on the run following the murders.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
They were consider dogs because they murdered and natives were led to be killed and shot at any time. That was the expected thing. But then they had to be smarter. They had to think smarter on the run.
Leroy Parsons:
In the first six days of being on the run, the newspapers report that Jimmy and Governor continue to kill in three separate attacks two men, a woman, her young child, and her unborn baby. Newspapers label them revenge killings. This is a new feeling for white Australia. The tables have been turned. The white man was the one being hunted. The Singleton Argus, 2nd of August, 1900. “Several schools have closed. Everyone is armed. Above all is a feeling of impending calamity or the arrival of news of a fresh horror.” A month later, Singleton Argus, “Houses were empty. Dogs was with dying on the chains and cows were sick with milk fever.”
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
The brothers lead authorities on a 2000-strong manhunt that spans 3000 kilometers across Western New South Wales.
Professor Katherine Biber:
They have great navigation skills, they have enormous fitness and that they have great capacity to survive in the bush. Just to see that landscape and to see the scale of the distances involved between different places. Because you can look on a map and go, “From here to here, that’s 200 kilometers,” and you think, “Okay, you can drive that,” but that’s a pretty long drive on not great roads, but imagine in 1900 in winter with no shoes on walking that distance or running that distance …
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Ethel Governor is captured in the early days of the chase, and Jackie Underwood within the first week. At the inquest into the Mawbey killings, Ethel gives a statement. She says that Joe is innocent. Jimmy had forced her to go on the run, saying, “Joe, you have to come with me or I’ll take your life. We are bush rangers now.” Loretta says it’s likely that Joe would have followed Jimmy’s lead.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
He would have followed Jimmy to the end of the earth. Joe was Jimmy’s brother and Jimmy was the leader. Being the older brother, he was the leader in their family and Joe followed Jimmy.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
With the newspapers reporting a death toll totalling nine and Jimmy and Joe still on the run, the question that remained was what sparked the murders? Relying on 120 year old sources can make facts murky, but often they’re all we have, like Ethel Governor’s account of what went wrong between the Governors and the Mawbey’s.
Professor Katherine Biber:
She testifies that Mrs. Mawbey and some of the other women and girls in the household had said she’d thrown herself away by marrying a black fellow, suggesting that she could have done better.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Ethel said to him that she was being taunted by the Mawbey’s. “Why waste your time on a black fellow?” She lived nowhere other than with the Aboriginal people. So she was considered no better than them in the establishment eyes. So when you get the two cultures that come together, petrol and matches, I’ll call it. But when you got two people who don’t see you that conflict because they’re having a baby, they’re in love …
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
This is a story Aunty Loretta knows all too well.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
These two decided to challenge the establishment, the same as Trevor and I have.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Loretta met her husband Trevor when she was still a teenager. They fell in love, got married and had to face the realities of being an interracial couple in 1970s Australia.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Because we were married in 1975, Trevor and I, so we were experiencing the racial establishment of Aboriginal people not being allowed into pups, the social injustices. So I was asked to leave. So I wonder how many times Ethel and Jimmy were in a situation where people said, “This is not acceptable. You are black, she’s white.” Being taunted, of course you go and talk to your husband. I would because that’s what you do, you talk to your partner.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So was it racial abuse that made Jimmy snap? Katherine Biber says something else had happened not long before.
Professor Katherine Biber:
It’s hard to absolutely know what really sparked the first of the homicides, but there was an argument and we know that the relationship between Jimmy Governor and the Mawbey family was an employment relationship, that Jimmy and his family lived on the property. Jimmy was employed to build fences on the property and in exchange, he would receive payments and rations.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
There was a citation from The Daily Telegraph interview from the 24th of July, 1900 when Mr. Mawbey said that he rejected a hundred of the posts out of the thousand that were laid in the line of fence and offered to pay half price for them and then use them. But also in this article, Jimmy and his family owe Mr. Mawbey some money. So it’s like whatever Jimmy is doing for work is not really keeping the family afloat. What do you make of that?
Professor Katherine Biber:
Yes, it’s shocking that you can work so hard and still be in debt to your employer. I think that says a lot about frontier relationships between colonial settlers and indigenous people on the frontier.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Sitting around the table at Aunty Loretta’s, she was excited to show us something Jimmy had made with his own hands.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
To people, oh, it’s just a bit of wood, you could throw it on the fire, but it’s more than that to me.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Loretta has an original fence post made by Jimmy. It’s been sitting wrapped in newspaper for over 20 years, the same amount of time that Katherine has been researching this story. So how did Loretta come to have the post?
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
That’s my little secret women’s business. I have that because it was gifted to me. That fence post that sits in there, maybe we need to put it on the table to remind us that this was the catalyst. Do you want to open it?
Professor Katherine Biber:
Would you like me to?
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Yes, please. Yeah. I’m giving you permission to open it. Yeah. It’s wrapped up very well.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
I was waiting for one day that it would be unwrapped and this is the day. This is one part of the post that Jimmy had put into the ground. So you can imagine going out, working, putting in fence posts for a family, and when you work, you expect to be paid, but they said it wasn’t good enough and that he didn’t deserve to be paid. He’d snapped, and the brain does. If you’re deprived of food, things happen in your brain. Yeah, and he didn’t just have Ethel. He had his brother and he would have had his sister and his extended family. A lot of mouths to feed, a lot commitment and a new baby, another mouth to feed.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Can I ask you another question about this post? Because I’ve been listening to you talk about its significance, that it symbolizes his labor and injustice, but this is also a physical thing that was made by your ancestor. He touched it, he worked on it. I wonder if that’s also significant for you that he made this.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Yeah, and that’s why I kept it wrapped for so long. It’s been there and it’s sat, but it’s still is something that my great-grandfather had worked with his fingers and his hands touching that, and that’s why I asked you to open it because you need to connect with this story. I’ve connected with this story for a long time. You’re coming on this journey through me and Jimmy’s memory and Ethel’s.
Leroy Parsons:
It’s the year 1900. Weeks become months and the Governor brothers remained on the run. Newspaper reports suggest the police are out of their depth. A stockman on the hand for 81 days describes the chase. The Singleton Argus, 18th of October, 1900. “In one place, it took us five hours to get to the top of a mountain. The horses frequently got hung up in the vines. We were there for three days living on nothing but flour and water. The newspapers claim that the Governor brothers spent time writing notes taunting their pursuers. “I am a bush ranger. He who sees me first gets hell. Put this in The Sydney Mail so they can all say it. Sub inspector Cameron, Dubbo, I know you had 150 police at Wollar and 35 men at Gulgong. I was reading all that news.” Signed Jim Governor. “You dog, I shoot you. We will have your scalp.” Jimmy Governor.
Leroy Parsons:
With that, the legend of the Governor brothers took on a life of its own. One report stated they were observed walking on the top wire of the boundary fence in the early dawn. The Governors could run for miles on the still ribbons of the railway line with no sign of their passing.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So every time somebody’s hut is robbed, every time somebody’s horse is stolen, the Governor brothers are thought to be responsible for it. Every suspected sighting, every clue, every rumor is being published in local newspapers and as time passes and as the Governor brothers elude capture for longer and longer, that narrative sometimes becomes almost like a comedy of errors because we send out these soldiers in their crisp uniforms who don’t know how to camp, they don’t know how to ride horses properly, and these people are just going to outsmart us.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
With Jimmy and Joe on the loose for three months, pressures put on the New South Wales government to bring an end to the manhunt once and for all, and so this case makes it all the way to the desk of the New South Wales attorney general Bernard Wise who, as the most senior law officer in the colony, was responsible for bringing the Governor brothers to justice.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Until the Governors were brought to justice, the colony would be a lawless place. But of course also what’s looming is federation, the making of a new nation.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
This would have been a challenging situation for any lawmaker, but even with his status as attorney general, Bernard Wise still felt like he had something to prove.
Professor Katherine Biber:
His father died and left the mother with hardly any money. So he was very lavishly educated, but always as the poor boy. So he was supposedly brilliant and with all this potential, but I think he also had some self-esteem issues. That’s my own personal diagnosis. Because even though he rose very high, he also had a lot of self doubt. He thought that his life was a failure.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
I mean, was anything working for him?
Professor Katherine Biber:
Look, Alfred Deacon described … Do you want me to read the quote?
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Sure.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Alfred Deacon described him as being as handsome as the hero of a female novel, a cupid with a rich soft voice, a man of culture and of aristocratic tendencies, who was a Democrat by conviction.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
What a dreamboat.
Professor Katherine Biber:
I’ve seen a photo of him. Maybe tastes have changed.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
As a poor boy reaching for greatness, what better way for Bernard Wise to prove himself than influencing the biggest issue of the time? Federation.
Professor Katherine Biber:
He was never an official member of the federation conventions. He is sometimes described as an uninvited guest, but the historical record suggests he was an influential figure, that he was actively involved in the drafting of documents that led to the constitution that we now have.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Federation was Australia’s attempt to become a proper country and rise above its convict past. It was a chance of squabbling colonies to become a legitimate unified nation. This made people ask what kind of country do we want to live in? The stakes were high. With federation looming and the myth of the Governor brothers growing daily, Bernard Wise is pushed towards a solution, one that he resists because it hadn’t been used in Australia since the bush ranging days of Ned Kelly: declare the Governor brothers outlaws.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So broadly speaking, an outlaw is as a person who has done something that doesn’t entitle them to the protection of the law, and what that means is that if someone has done such a terrible crime and will not surrender to the law, then that person can be caught dead or alive.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So basically someone’s been so abhorrent in their behavior, it’s like you can be brought back dead or alive, we don’t care, we just need to catch you.
Professor Katherine Biber:
That’s right. Because essentially the outlawry had already been a finding of guilt. It was a long time since anyone before them had been outlawed. So the question of, “Is outlawry the right response?” was tangled up with the question of, “Would we outlaw people in a federated nation? Is that the way to bring felons to justice?”
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Bernard Wise struggled with this decision.
Professor Katherine Biber:
I feel like Wise would not be someone who would feel that outlawry is an appropriate process.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Yeah. He’s too much of a legal nerd to be like, “Yep. Let’s just shoot them without a trial.”
Professor Katherine Biber:
That’s right. So every time someone said, “Let’s outlaw them, let’s outlaw them,” he kept pushing back and saying, “This is not the way they need to be brought to justice.” The idea that you bring someone to justice and don’t just shoot them in the bush, I think if you’re the attorney general, that’s a pretty important thing to have on the record. Bringing people to justice is an important part of your job.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
But with the chase having no end in sight and public pressure mounting, Bernard Wise caved. But why?
Professor Katherine Biber:
The archive doesn’t record what caused him to change his mind. I guess at some point he remembers that he’s a politician. It’s clear that he was under a lot of pressure. The longer the Governor brothers were at large, the more there was public debate. There was political debate. There were questions being asked in parliament. It was becoming a problematic political issue as well as causing a lot of unrest, particularly amongst people who lived on the frontier and who were living in fear of their own lives. There was really torrid newspaper reporting whilst the Governors were at large, and so people were afraid. The members of the public were afraid and politicians were alive to that fear and were concerned.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Sorry, just on that. I’ve actually got the proclamation of outlawry. Do you want me to write it? Oh, I can show you. By His Excellency, the right honorable William Earl Beacham, night commander of the most distinguished order of Saint Michael and Saint George.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
This could take a while.
Professor Katherine Biber:
And declared to be an outlaw by the said Honorable Matthew Henry Steven, and in the 64th year of Her Majesty’s reign by his excellencies command, B.R Wise, God save the queen.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
With that, their fate was sealed. The Governor brothers were declared outlaws wanted dead or alive.
Leroy Parsons:
Six days before being proclaimed an outlaw, Jimmy is shot in the mouth by a local hunter while sneaking into a hut. The bullet passes through his cheek, destroying four teeth. Another bullet hits his hip. Jimmy and Joe managed to escape, but the damage is done. While crossing the Forbes River, someone starts shooting at them. In the heat of the chase, they separate. This may be the last time they see each other. Alone with a hole in his mouth and food hard to find, Jimmy steals some tucker from the camp and falls asleep beside the fire. Before daybreak, a group of civilians call upon him to surrender. He attempts to flee, but on the 99th day of the manhunt, more than 450 kilometers from the Mawbey home, Jimmy Governor is captured and taken to the local police officer. Joe’s whereabouts are unknown.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Next time on the Last Outlaws, can Joe continue to elude the 2000-strong search party, and what will happen to Jimmy now that he’s been captured?
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Jimmy wanted to take the fall for what happened because it was his family.
Leroy Parsons:
I am speaking straight from my heart and I am afraid of nobody.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
And Katherine Biber makes a discovery that takes us inside Jimmy’s prison cell.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So just like we don’t know why the diary was ever kept, we also don’t know why the diary ever stopped.
Emma Lancaster – Credits:
The Last Outlaws series is made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney, an audio production house funded by the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research. The Last Outlaws was made on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, as well as the Walbunja people of the Yuin nation, Darug people of Ngurra Country and Gubbi Gubbi Country, whose land was never ceded. Impact Studios would like to pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge on this land. Thanks to everyone who made this series possible, including the Governor family descendants and the Parsley and Parsons families, especially Aunty Loretta Parsley and Leroy Parsons. Thanks also to our UTS partners, the Faculty of Law, the Australian Centre for Public History, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, as well as the Australian Research Council.
Emma Lancaster – Credits:
Our wonderful Chief Investigator is Law Professor Katherine Biber, and of course the team at Impact Studios. Kaitlyn Sawrey is the host, writer and senior producer. Frank Lopez is the writer, senior producer, composer and sound engineer. The role of narrator was voiced and co-written by Leroy Parsons. Allison Chan was our producer, researcher and fact checker. Ben Vozzo is the digital communications manager. Belinda Lopez is our editorial advisor. Thank you to our cultural consultants at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, especially Professor Daryle Rigney and Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt. As well as Dr. Lyndon Ormond-Parker, an honourary senior lecturer at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. Additional production by Ryan Pemberton and additional sound supplied by Camilla Hannan. Additional sound engineering by Martin Peralta. Jake Duczynski from Studio Hackett (Studio Gilay) created our incredible digital artworks and original artwork Blood On His Hands Cleansed By Saltwater was supplied by Aunty Loretta Parsley, and there are many minds that made The Last Outlaws possible.
Emma Lancaster – Credits:
A big thank you to everyone we spoke to and those who answered all our fact checking questions, including Jimmy Kyle, Dr. Katie Gilchrist, the New South Wales State Library, Laurie Perry, James Wilson-Miller, Sheila Johnson, the Gilgandra Local Aboriginal Land Council, Dr. Claire Britton, Deborah Beck, the National Art School, Nathan Sentance from the Australian Museum, Dr. Murat Kekic at the Ainsworth Interactive Collection of Medical Pathology and Emeritus Professor Paul Turnbull at the University of Tasmania. Thanks also to the deadly team at TEABBA in the Darwin studio, Lee Hewitt, Brendon Barlow, Bernard Namok. Voiceover artists are Andrew MacRay and Tom Allinson. The executive producer of Impact Studios is Emma Lancaster. Managing Directors of Impact Studios during production were Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch and Associate Professor Anna Clarke. Thanks for listening.
episode two – SEPTEMBER 29, 2021
Death Row Diary
How does the law deal with an outlaw?
Jimmy Governor is captured and his legal case becomes a lightning rod for justice in the new federation. But how did Australia’s most-wanted murderer get one of the best lawyers in the colony?
A prison experiment begins with a diary and we find out how the present mimics the past.
Episode Two – Deathrow Diary Transcript
Emma Lancaster – Cultural Warning:
This is an Impact Studios production from the University of technology Sydney, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that the following episode contains the names of people who have passed. The story you’re about to hear starts in a year 1900 and draws on the colonial archive. Listeners are advised. There may be words and descriptions that may be culturally sensitive, and which might not normally be used in certain public or community contexts. Terms from archival material used in this podcast reflect the attitude of the author or the period in which the item was written and may be considered inappropriate today. This story also contains information about acts of violence that may be distressing.
Leroy Parsons:
Last time on The Last Outlaws, Jimmy and Joe Governor go on the run after the murders of the Mawbey women and children.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Mrs. Mawbey and some of the other women and girls in the household had said that she’d thrown herself away by marrying a black fellow, suggesting that she could have done better.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
It’s thought that Mr. Mawbey was withholding rations that were owed to Jimmy.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
When you work, you expect to be paid, but they said it wasn’t good enough and that he didn’t deserve to be paid and he didn’t just have Ethel. A lot of mouths to feed, a lot a commitment.
Professor Katherine Biber:
That’s the kind of spark that sets off what turns into a murderous rampage.
Leroy Parsons:
After almost three months on the run, the brothers are outlawed by the New South Wales colony, which declared them guilty, wanted dead are alive. While on the run, Jimmy is shot in the mouth by a local hunter and a second shot hits him in the hip. In the heat of the chase, the Governor brothers become separated on the banks of the Forbes River. Jimmy is on foot and all alone for another 12 days. Finally, more than 450 kilometers from the Mawbey home, Jimmy is captured by vigilantes. Joe’s whereabouts are unknown.
Leroy Parsons:
Now, The Last Outlaws, episode two, death row diary.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
I’m Kaitlyn Sawrey and in this episode, we follow how colonial bigwigs grapple with Australia’s last outlaws on the cusp of federation. Jimmy finds unexpected support at the highest levels of the colonial system, and with the newspapers rabid for headlines, no one wanted to make a wrong move.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Jimmy Governor was captured by civilians in Bobin outside of Wingham, and when they first handed him over to the first police officer, a junior bush constable who was completely out of his depth, and this bush constable, his name was Thomas Stone, was taking into custody the most notorious murderer in Australia, and saw it as an opportunity to have a chat with him.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
You remember Katherine Biber. She’s the professor of law at the University of Technology Sydney, and she’s been digging into this story for over 20 years, and Katherine says this bush Constable put his foot in its straight away.
Professor Katherine Biber:
They had this conversation in which Jimmy Governor made admissions to him, and so at this time, just as today, there are rules about how police officers can take admissions from suspects. The rule is that you have to caution the person that you’re a police officer and anything they say can be taken down in evidence, and Jimmy Governor was not properly cautioned.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Jimmy spills the beans to this police officer, which is then obtained by and published in the Sydney Morning Herald. In this detailed statement, Jimmy admits to the murders and implies that Joe wasn’t present for the Mawbey massacre and that Jimmy himself had pushed him into becoming a bush ranger. The publication of this interview with Jimmy, without him being properly cautioned, gets the bush constable in massive trouble.
Professor Katherine Biber:
The question about the admissibility of his admissions went all the way up to the inspector general of police, which is the most senior police officer, who kicked off this really angry correspondence. There are all these telegraphs and memos that fly around the country. “Bring me Constable Stone’s head on a plate. What was he doing? He must be admonished. What was he thinking? Who was going to take responsibility for this?”
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Jimmy’s case had to be played by the book because everyone was watching.
Professor Katherine Biber:
We’re just coming around the fence of the Darlinghurst Criminal Court Complex.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
We’re headed to Darlinghurst Courthouse in the middle of Sydney where Jimmy stood trial 120 years ago. The courthouse hasn’t changed much since then. Sandstone walls, big Grecian columns, and when Jimmy entered Darlinghurst Court, he entered as an outlaw, which made him a convicted felon, guilty as charged. But Jimmy was the first outlaw to be brought it alive, so what do you do with him?
Professor Katherine Biber:
At the beginning of Jimmy Governor’s trial, his lawyer basically stood up and said, “You can’t try someone who’s already been found guilty. That process has already concluded.”
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
He’s an outlaw.
Professor Katherine Biber:
He’s an outlaw, so either you’ll have to execute him or you’ll have to let him go.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Surprising from a defense lawyer, right? Kill my client or let him go? It’s a bold move. But Jimmy’s lawyer was actually very good and his argument forced the judge to overturn the outlawry so the trial could proceed. But the question that kept digging at Katherine was how did Australia’s most wanted murderer get such an esteemed lawyer?
Professor Katherine Biber:
He did have good representation, but his good representation was pointed to him by the Crown. So this is kind of one of the hypotheses of my project. Jimmy Governor was an outlaw and he probably was guilty of all of these violent murders, primarily of white women and children. Yet every legal defense, every legal process, every legal opportunity was provided for him. I’m interested in why, and my hypothesis is that this was all occurring in the atmosphere of federation and that many of the legal and political figures who were involved in his case were at the same time involved in this nation making project that was federation, and they thought, what kind of nation are we trying to make? We want to make a nation under the rule of law with the proper administration of justice, where everyone who comes before the courts has a fair trial with good legal representation and every opportunity is given to them under the law.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Katherine also says everyone involved in the trial was very aware that the media was following their every move.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Everyone wanted to be seen to be doing a good job in case, once the new nation commences, they have the opportunity to advance themselves professionally. So it was kind of a high profile case to be seen to be doing a good job so that when there were more good jobs on offer, you might get one of them.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Strangely Jimmy isn’t made to answer for all five Mawbey murders. We don’t know why, but in the end, he’s only put on trial for the death of the 21-year-old school teacher who lived at the Mawbey home, Helen Kerz. Jimmy’s lawyer argued that her death was a result of extreme provocation. Katherine believes this was the only move the defense could would make.
Professor Katherine Biber:
The defense theory was really a provocation defense, that he was provoked by members of the Mawbey family, particularly the Mawbey women, because his wife had been taunted for marrying a black man and that she was so distressed and traumatized by the taunting that she’d received from the women in the Mawbey household, which in included Helen Kerz, that he was provoked and not able to control his own actions into committing those crimes. A provocation defense essentially reduces murder to manslaughter.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
It would mean the death penalty was off the table. His life was at stake. On the first day of Jimmy’s trial, the courtroom was packed out.
Professor Katherine Biber:
There was so much public interest in the trial that there weren’t enough seats in the courtroom for everyone who wanted one, and so the sheriff had to give tickets to members of the public.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
The prosecution calls a witness and the crowd murmurs. It’s Ethel Governor, Jimmy’s wife. She’s pregnant and is standing to give evidence for the prosecution. The judge asked her, “Do you understand that being a married woman, you are not obliged to give evidence against your husband?”
Professor Katherine Biber:
She says that she does understand that and she proceeds anyway.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So how do the newspapers describe Ethel’s appearance?
Professor Katherine Biber:
She’s described as wearing a blue printed frock with a lace trimming. She’s wearing a straw hat with a black band around it. She’s sitting resting on her elbows in the witness box, and she’s got her cheek resting on her knuckles. She has a really clear and steady tone of voice and that mostly she’s looking at the person who’s questioning her, but occasionally she glances at her husband.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So how does Jimmy react when he sees Ethel on the witness stand?
Professor Katherine Biber:
The newspaper accounts say that he watches her closely whilst she testifies. One of them says he never took his eyes from his wife’s face. He’s concentrating, he’s attentive. One of the accounts describes him as being at first slightly agitated, but then suppressing his feelings and sitting still pulling at his mustache whilst he’s watching her testify.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So what does Ethel say about Jimmy? Does she give him up? Does she kind of say, yes, he was to blame.
Professor Katherine Biber:
She testifies that Mrs. Mawbey and Ms. Kerz had said to her that, “It was a wonder that a nice looking girl like me would throw myself away on a black fellow, and they only said that once to me.” Jimmy Governor’s lawyer asks her if it made a difference to her own private happiness, and she said, “Yes, it did,” that, “Once in the camp, I went down on my knees and prayed, “Ph Lord, take me away from here. I cannot stand what these people are saying about me.”
Professor Katherine Biber:
I think that’s part of its meaning, that that racialised taunting caused her to be very unhappy and she was sharing her unhappiness with her husband and that eventually he couldn’t bear it anymore and he said, “Let’s go and talk to them right now and resolve it.” But her evidence is that she was not one of the people who went to the Mawbey house to resolve it. Her evidence is that he went with Jackie Underwood, each of them armed, and that she stayed back at the camp and so did Joe Governor, who was asleep at the time. It’s not clear why she is testifying against her husband, but there is some speculation that she’s doing that to protect herself from any legal consequences for her own potential involvement in any of these crimes.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Which is interesting because Jimmy’s statement is a little bit different.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Jimmy’s statement is quite different, partly about who was involved and partly about what the trigger was.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
On the second day of the trial, Jimmy takes the stand.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So when Jimmy Governor gives his dock statement, that is the only time we hear an unmediated or a less mediated account from him, but he does give his own account in his dock statement at his trial, and he talks about who went to the Mawbey house.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Here’s how it was reported by Sydney Morning. Harold on November 24th, 1900.
Leroy Parsons:
Me and my missus had some words about the Mawbey’s at the camp and I said, “Drop it. Don’t tell me no more of it.” So she said to me, “They rub it in. They do as they like with you.” I said to her, “You come down and I will see about it.” So we got ready and made off. The judge asked, “Who got ready?” Jimmy replies, “Me and my wife with Joe and Jackie Underwood.”
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
In his statement, Jimmy says after asking for rations, he went to the Mawbey family home to confront Mrs. Mawbey.
Leroy Parsons:
“Did you tell my missus that any white woman who married a black fella ought to be shot? I says, did you ask my wife about our private business? Did you ask her what sort of nature did I have, black or white, or what color was it?”
Leroy Parsons:
With that, Mrs. Mawbey and Ms. Kerz turned around and laughed at me with a sneering laugh. Before I got words out of my mouth, I struck Mrs. Mawbey on the mouth with this nulla-nulla and Ms. Kerz said, “Poo, you black rubbish. You want shooting for marrying a white woman?” With that, I hit her with my hand on the jaw and I knocked her down. Then I got out of temper and got hammering them. I lost control of myself. I do not remember anything after that.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Jimmy seems to be in full confession mode. He says that Ethel and Joe aren’t innocent. They were there for the murders, but they had all agreed to lie about Ethel and Joe’s whereabouts to protect them.
Leroy Parsons:
We all agreed to say Joe wasn’t there, nor my missus. We made all that up, you see.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Jimmy is asked if he has any more to say some newspapers report his reply as …
Leroy Parsons:
I am speaking straight from my heart, and I am favoring nobody.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
While others report it as …
Leroy Parsons:
I am speaking straight from my heart, and I am afraid of nobody.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
I mean, what do you think is the more likely one? He’s favoring nobody or he’s afraid of nobody?
Professor Katherine Biber:
We don’t know what he really said at this time in New South Wales history, we didn’t have professional stenographers, which are court reporters, so usually newspaper accounts are very reliable, but in this case we have two slightly different transcriptions. It’s not possible to resolve what he really said.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So it does kind of call into question the accuracy of the archives. What does it make you think about?
Professor Katherine Biber:
I think I always have a question of about the accuracy of the archives. I think that whilst it’s very seductive to go to the archives and read some old document, sometimes a handwritten document, and it makes you feel like, “Well, this was written in the hand of the person who was there at the time that it happened, it must absolutely be true,” we also know that all historical church requires interpretation and subjectivity and the drawing of inferences. So the archives are always not some pure and true source. They always require us to draw inferences, make interpretations and occasionally to speculate and put some subjectivity into interpretations.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So who do we trust? Nobody? The jury deliberates for just 12 minutes before returning with a verdict.
Professor Katherine Biber:
I have the handwritten notes that the judge made during the trial. Justice Owen kept a handwritten notebook, and in that notebook, he writes, “I sum up, jury retires 12:15 PM and returns 12:27. Verdict guilty. I pass sentence of death.”
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
That’s a very quick turnaround.
Professor Katherine Biber:
That’s 12 minutes by the judge’s watch.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
The jury finds Jimmy Governor guilty in the murder of Helen Kerz. He’s said to stand and stare at the jurors, showing no emotions. The judge passes a sentence of death. It’s reported that Jimmy laughs and declares …
Leroy Parsons:
It’s all right. I will go to heaven.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Jimmy is led away from the docks to a tunnel underneath the courtroom. It leads to the prison next door, where Jimmy enters the condemned cells for the first time.
Deborah Beck:
This tunnel led straight to the cells where they were kept underneath the court. So if they would go from here under the tunnel into the cell, so it was quite forbidding and frightening. I mean, the steps up into the actual courtroom are really steep and that’s the only entrance. When Jimmy was condemned to death, he knew that was the last time he was going to see anything outside the jail.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Historian Deborah Beck is leading us through the national art school in Darlinghurst, Sydney. The school was once the prison that held Jimmy Governor. So let’s go in.
Deborah Beck:
Yeah. There is actually an art installation here at the moment, so we can’t go all the way through.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
We’re standing right where Jimmy and junior prison guards called warders spent day after day together in a tiny cell.
Deborah Beck:
So it eight feet by 10 feet with two little windows at the top, and that was all the air that he had and the guard was there the whole time. There was nothing in there except for a bed, the pale for a toilet and a little table.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Must have been so strange for the warder to be cooped up essentially with this condemned person.
Deborah Beck:
Well, they’re confined in the same conditions as the condemned prisoners and that’s their work environment. So if you think of these condemned prisoners, being people who’ve committed the worst offenses, the people who do duty over them are confined in the exact same conditions, which is interesting to observe. Jimmy Governor was being guarded by some of the most junior warders in the system and this was probably one of the toughest jobs that you could do, would be to be confined in a condemned cell with a condemned prisoner 24 hours a day.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So these junior prisoner guards were stuck in a cell with Jimmy Governor all day long. If that wasn’t weird enough, in Katherine’s research, she found a reference to a diary on Jimmy Governor while he was on death row and she thought, “That’s interesting, what’s that about?” So she went to the New South Wales State Archives to track it down. Could this diary be the missing link to understanding Jimmy?
Professor Katherine Biber:
I requested access to the actual thing and they said, “Oh no, it’s a precious rare record. You can’t have the actual thing.” So I kind of left it for a while and then I had this research assistant, Brent, and he was this kind of young, charming, nerdy guy who used to hang out at the desk with the archivists and he is like, “oh, let’s have a go at this Jimmy Governor diary,” and they gave it to him and he called me from the archives. He goes, “I’ve got the diary,” and I’m like, “Is it in your hands?” He goes, “I’ve got latex gloves on, but it’s in my hand.” He had to leave the reading room to make this phone call. I’m like, “Oh my God, describe it, describe it.” He says, I’ve got my good camera with me today. I’m going to photograph every page of it.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So I’ve actually never physically handled the diary, but I made him tell me like, “How big is it when it’s in your hands? How much space does it occupy? How heavy is it? How bedraggled is it?” Because all of the covers have come loose from the spine, but he took these amazing high quality digital photos of it.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Katherine has spent hours and hours pouring over these pictures, trying to figure out what it all means. Like an archeologist scanning pyramid walls for clues, it was a series of markings that helped her decipher the code.
Professor Katherine Biber:
And then you can see not only the words, but also all of the little markings that are administrative markings. So it’s got initials on every page and you can also see what pen these people use. Sometimes they use a blue pencil. Sometimes it’s a red ink, sometimes black ink and you figure out who’s got what pen and there’s four pages which have these other initials. And I’m like, “Who’s that?” And those initials were the comptroller general of prisons. This was a guy called Frederick Neitenstein, who was this really important prison reformer.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Frederick Neitenstein, head of the prison system in New South Wales was ex-military and ran the prisons with precision. Every inch of this facility was under his control.
Professor Katherine Biber:
He’s said To be a person who expects absolute obedience from those who work for him.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
But Neitenstein was a hard ass for a reason. He believed that through regimen, he could reform the lives of the inmates. So he enacted strict routines and in an effort to find out what worked, he documented everything. He had this idea that the prison could be a moral hospital and turn prisoners into good citizens.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Well, I suppose today he’s not well-known, but in his day he was regarded as one of the great social reformers.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Right. So he had big ideas about prisons.
Professor Katherine Biber:
He had ideas about prisons, about discipline for young people. He had ideas about social hygiene, moral hygiene, and this was all part of his plan. He believed in discipline, in timetables, in drills, marching, grading, note-taking.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
It’s like a hard ass with a purpose.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Yeah. He thought that he was a force for good.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
But Neitenstein was not just keeping tabs on prisoners. He was keeping a close eye on the guards too.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Just as much as the prisoners are under surveillance, so is every single warder under surveillance and all of the people who were 10 minutes late for duty or neglected their sentry post or stole money all have judicial process. You’ll see the outcome of that judicial process. They might have lost their monthly day off. They might lose a rank. Sometimes they’re transferred. So you can see the surveillance of the prison staff and there’s this entire judicial system inside the jail. He’s a total micromanager.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So when a famous prisoner like Jimmy Governor was sentenced to death, Frederick Neitenstein wanted to keep track of that too. They kept a diary of Jimmy’s thoughts, feelings, dreams, anything at all the prison staff watching over him thought was relevant or interesting. It’s official title is …
Andrew MacRae – Voice Actor for Warder John Dwyer:
Diary of Officer Doing Duty Over Jimmy Governor.
Professor Katherine Biber:
This is actually an artifact of colonial prison administration at the highest level. Whilst it’s kind of crude and a little bit inept, that also tells you a story about how they’re kind of making up this idea of how to imprison and have under surveillance this unique prisoner. “What can we do? Let’s just record him. Let’s just make up a way of recording him. Let’s have a diary.” “Who’s going to keep this diary?” “Oh, these three random guys who do duty over him.” “What do they know how to do?” “Well, nothing. Let’s make some questions up for them to answer every eight hours.” They’re making up administrative processes explicitly to find new ways to manage and learn from this unique challenging person.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
The entries are short. It reads like a log book, but it paints a picture of Jimmy’s experience on death row, even if it’s filtered through the eyes of the white guards. He was fed three square meals a day, put on weight, given cigarettes and was allowed visitors. In over a hundred entries, one guard’s log stand out. His name is John Dwyer. He’s new to the job, as junior as they come, and locked in a cell with Jimmy. One man free, one on death row.
Andrew MacRae – Voice Actor for Warder John Dwyer:
Darlinghurst jail, December 10th, 1900. Officer John Dwyer, probationary warder. Conduct of prisoner, good. He gets downhearted at times. Speaks very harshly of his wife. Says she ought to be hanged as well as him as she is guilty. Calls on the Lord at times to help him. Anything important? Complains of his teeth and jaw being very painful. Is he sullen or cheerful? Cheerful at times, sullen in others. Does demeanor indicate suicide? No. Does he eat well? Yes.
Andrew MacRae – Voice Actor for Warder John Dwyer:
Darlinghurst jail, December 16th, 1900. John Dwyer. Conduct of prisoner? He’s been talking about being shut up like a pig, swears a great deal and said he would not stay in his cell much longer. Anything important to be recorded here? Said he would hang himself and the warder that went to stop him would have his brains knocked out. Does demeanor indicate suicide? Yes, it does, at times.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
During his time on death row, Jimmy had several visitors, but one stood out. His wife, Ethel, who despite testifying against Jimmy at his trial, continues to visit him several times a week.
Andrew MacRae – Voice Actor for Warder John Dwyer:
Conduct of prisoner, anything important to be recorded here? He said that waiting makes him bad tempered and that he wishes it was all over. Visited by his wife.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
He also has regular visits from the prison chaplain. Eventually Jimmy gets into a fight with the chaplain, saying he would punch him in the nose, complaining that the chaplain was trying to drive him instead of leading him. For a period he’s described as very sulky and sullen, saying the waiting was getting to him.
Andrew MacRae – Voice Actor for Warder John Dwyer:
December 25th, 1900. Conduct of prisoner, calmed down, singing native songs and reading his Bible. Said he was sorry for his words to the chaplain.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
But then something seems to change.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So as you move further and further into the diary, you see repeated references to Jimmy Governor being very quiet, and that becomes almost kind of poetic and rhythmical. This very quiet, very quiet.
Andrew MacRae – Voice Actor for Warder John Dwyer:
January 2nd, 1901. Conduct of prisoner, good, though very quiet. January 3rd, 1901. Conduct of prisoner, good. Constantly reading his Bible in hymn book. He’s very quiet and orderly. January 9th, 1901, John Dwyer. Conduct of prisoner, he has very little to say always reading and praying.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
We’ll never really know what was going through Jimmy’s head, but as we read through the diary, it felt like he was going through the stages of grief before finally accepting his fate. Without warning or purpose, the diary stops.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So just like we don’t know why the diary was ever kept, we also don’t know why the diary ever stopped. So that it’s one of the little mysteries of the archive.
Leroy Parsons:
At 9:00 AM, January the 18th, six days after the last diary entry, Jimmy is led from his cell to the hangman’s noose, just 20 feet away. There are reports that Jimmy slept well on that last night and had good breakfast an hour before Jimmy leaves his cell, all other prisoners are locked inside theirs and there is a silence throughout the jail. In the courtyard, outside the gallows, a small crowd gathers, including Mr. Mawbey’s brother. Reporters who attend the hanging say Jimmy had no final words and walked to the gallows smoking a cigarette accompanied by the chaplain. Just before the cap and rope were adjusted, Jimmy threw the cigarette from his lips. The Singleton Argus reported the bolt was drawn and death was said to be instantaneous.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So the place that used to be the gallows is now this small, strange triangular shaped toilet. It’s quite high up and it’s quite anomalous to think that this small toilet was a place where more than 50 people were executed for their crimes. It seems thoughtless, it seems inconsiderate, and it seems just inappropriate. It’s a really bad match for what really happened in this place and what is now happening in this place. I feel like some more creative and sensitive thought is needed to reimagine that space, to remember the lives and the deaths of the people who were executed there.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
There is no plaque to mark the hangman’s toilet. Jimmy would later be buried at Brookwood Cemetery in an unmarked grave. Even though the archives tell us that Ethel testified against Jimmy in the trial, there are other ways of seeing their relationship. Aunty Loretta Ethel Parsley, Jimmy and Ethel’s great-granddaughter, tells us her family story.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Jimmy wanted to take the fall for what happened because it was his family. So he wanted Joe and Ethel exonerated. He was protecting them as well, and Ethel can go back to white society with her mother and father with the children, and that’s what she’d after Jimmy was hung. She came back down to Wollongong and that’s where she gave birth in April, 1901. She gave birth to my grandmother.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Ethel would go on to remarry another Aboriginal man and have eight more children. Loretta tells us that even though Ethel remarried her love for Jimmy now ever wavered.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Don’t forget, Ethel was very, very loyal to Jimmy right up until the end. When Ethel died, she wanted to be buried up there with Jimmy. What does that say?
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So do we know where Ethel is buried?
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Yes, but no one will tell you and we don’t like to share that in information because there are still people who will want to go and look at the places so we don’t divulge it. I think that was her request to return there, to Rookwood, and that was her first love. When you fall in love really deeply with that person, that’s the person that will always be in your memory. I believe Ethel and Jimmy had that connection, a strong connection to commitment. What a beautiful love story.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
As our time with Loretta came to a close, sitting around the table with the light fading, Katherine had a realization about the history she’d been chasing for 20 years.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Come on. I’m just starting to get second wind here. Come on. Yeah, I’ll have another drink of this milk. It must be this milk.
Professor Katherine Biber:
I’ve been listening to you today and I think you said at the outset was your hope for this conversation was that at the end of it, we really humanized Jimmy Governor, that we remembered that he was a person, that he was loved, that he has family, that he cared about his family and that his legacy should be in all of that context. In the course of my research, I’ve gathered probably more than 2000 different bits and pieces of archival records and books and sources and articles, and I’m just not really sure how to interpret the colonial archive now. So whilst I feel like I’d like to tell the story properly from your perspective, I also don’t now know what to do with all of the material that’s in that archive and what that does for the story, if it enables me to tell a story that you would think was a proper telling of this story, or if you think it would just further traumatize or violate the history of Jimmy Governor as a person. I know that’s not really a question. It’s just an anxiety that I’ve now.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
An anxiety, oh my goodness me. I think I’ll come and council you. I think to look at the colonial impact in that short time that Jimmy had, okay, because he was born in 1875 and lived to 1901, that’s a small portion of one person’s life. Very short lived. And then bring it forward to a family that has survived through Ethel who maintained that family line. So to be able to put it on a timeline of history and historical context, to bring it to Jimmy being hung, there were lots of injustices occurring before that, and he became the victim of that injustice by daring to marry a white woman. So the two culture have been entwined and then from that became that short impact of their lives.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Because then Ethel went on to live her life. Her life could have been different where they hung her too. There’s still that love story of two people’s lives, that this is about two people who cultures come together. It’s like I said to you about Trevor and I. When he took me home, it was like World War III had occurred. Trevor and I walked those two cultures together for 45 years. I wish Jimmy and Ethel could have done that.
Leroy Parsons:
In his death row diary, Jimmy dreams of running away to America. In the same entry, Jimmy mentions his brother, Joe, which begs the question what’s happened to Joe?
Leroy Parsons:
Surrender or I’ll shoot.
Leroy Parsons:
Next time on the Last Outlaws, we delve into the murky waters of race science. We’ll find out what happened to Joe
Katherine Biber:
Local people would come and strike a match on the sole of his feet.
Leroy Parsons:
And you’ll find out my connection to this story.
Episode Three – October 6, 2021
What remains of Joe Governor?
After Jimmy’s trial, what happened to his brother Joe?
Joe has mostly been forgotten by history, and his presence in the archives is little more than a whisper.
From coronial records, family tales and a visit to a country pub, it becomes clear that Joe fell foul of the frontier, in life and death.
And yet, more questions remain: Was Joe Governor, an outlaw, killed lawfully?
How do his ancestral remains become another transactional asset in the murky world of race science? And why is western knowledge still entangled in its colonial past?
Episode Three – What remains of Joe Governor? Transcript
Emma Lancaster – Cultural Warning:
This is an Impact Studios production from the University of Technology Sydney. Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that the following episode contains names of people who have passed. The story you’re about to hear starts in the year 1900 and draws on the colonial archive. Listeners are advised that there may be words and descriptions that may be culturally sensitive, and which might not normally be used in certain public or community contexts. Terms from archival material used in these podcasts reflect the attitude of the author or the period in which the item was written and may be considered inappropriate today. The story also contains information about acts of violence that may be distressing. In this episode, we’ll be talking about repatriation of ancestral remains. Please be aware that this information can cause sadness and anger and is part of living histories connected to people’s families. We want to tell this story with truth and respect. Thanks for listening to the Last Outlaws.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Last time on the Last Outlaws, Jimmy and Joe Governor go on the run after a series of murders. Jimmy is captured and his legal case becomes a lightning rod for justice in the New Federation before he meets the hangman’s noose. When we last saw Jimmy’s younger brother, Joe, he was also wanted dead or alive.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Joe would have followed Jimmy to the end of the earth.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So what happened to Joe?
Leroy Parsons:
Surrender or I’ll shoot.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
I’m Kaitlyn Sawrey, and now the final episode of the Last Outlaws, what remains of Joe Governor?
Leroy Parsons:
On October the 31st, 1900, the local paper, the Singleton Argus proclaims “Joe Governor is dead”. Joe’s body is slung over a horse and transported to town by police. The paper describes the event as having “large crowds of sightseers congregated, hoping to get a glimpse of the notorious desperado’s lifeless clay”. Joe Governor’s body is laid out on a billiards table in the Caledonian Hotel for a coronial inquest into his death. Witnesses claim that the soles of Joe’s feet are so weathered that you could strike a match of them. The Singleton Argus reports, “Sandpaper would not have lent a better surface for Lucifer’s ignition”. As your guide, I want to warn you, these shameful descriptions of Joe Governor do not stop here. As 12 white men act as jurors, a crowd packs into the Caledonian Hotel to watch. The incidents of the chase, as we’re calmly told at the inquest on Tuesday, were thrilling enough for fiction, reports the local paper.
Leroy Parsons:
The Wilkinson brothers, a pair of white farmers from rugged country outside Singleton, waited until dawn to approach. The Singleton Argus continues, “When discussing what they would do in whispers, a white cockatoo flighted to the top of a tree, standing quite close to where the black demon lay asleep, and screeched his welcome to the coming day.”
Leroy Parsons:
The Wilkinsons hold their breaths, thinking the noise would wake Joe, but he slept on. In his carefully worded sworn statement, John Wilkinson says he cried out, “Surrender or all shoot you.” Joe springs up from his slumber and makes a run for it, dropping his rifle. Joe attempts to jump a 20 foot gully but stumbles. From 100 yards away with his rifle aimed at the back of Joe Governor’s head, John Wilkinson fires, ending the chase. Joe, somersaulting over a steep bank, falls nearly 40 feet to his doom. The Singleton Argus describes Joe’s demise as, “an end that he richly deserved.”
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
One of the Wilkinson brothers would go on to state, “From his actions, I believed him to be a Governor. He was in an out of the way place. I felt perfectly justified in taking the law into my own hands.” At the conclusion of the proceedings, the paper reports that three hardy cheers were given to the Wilkinson brothers.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Look, there was no question about what caused Joe Governor’s death. He was killed by gunfire. He was shot in the back of the head. He was an outlaw, so if he didn’t surrender, they could legally shoot him.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
That’s Katherine Biber, our guide and law Professor at the University of Technology Sydney. A big part of Katherine’s investigation into this history over the last 20 years has been looking into the inquest into Joe Governor’s death and the many questions around the delivery of justice and rife misconduct that surrounded.
Professor Katherine Biber:
The inquest was to figure out did the Wilkinson brothers murder Joe Governor, or kill him legally.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
The answers aren’t straightforward. As usual with the Governor brother’s story, they seem to lead to more questions. One of those questions is how did John Wilkinson know that the person he was shooting at was actually Joe Governor. Now, remember Joe had been on the run for over three months and despite this had somehow managed to elude the capture of the 2000 odd men looking for him.
Professor Katherine Biber:
I suppose that any Aboriginal man who’s camping might run away. Not because he’s a homicidal outlaw, but because he’s afraid. So I think the Wilkinson’s probably felt pretty confident that whoever they shot, even if it was not one of the Governors, that that homicide would be excused.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Katherine says that the Wilkinson brothers who stalked and shot Joe Governor told a story that was almost too neat.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Both of them gave very identical testimony and testified in a way that made it very clear that Joe Governor was asleep and then they wake him up and then they invited him to surrender and then he ran away and then they shot him. So either that’s because that’s exactly the way it happened or it’s because they got their stories lined up before they testified, because that story makes it indisputable that their killing was not an unlawful killing and that Joe Governor’s death was not an act of homicide.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
It was just the brothers who saw this happen?
Professor Katherine Biber:
Yes.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
News of Joe Governor’s death spread quickly around the country town.
Professor Katherine Biber:
There are media accounts that said because there was so much of a local buzz that members of the public could come and view Joe’s body. I’m sure that didn’t happen at every coronial inquest, but at this one, people were permitted to see his body in groups, because there was so much interest.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Some reports had the crowds in the hundreds.
Professor Katherine Biber:
It said that local people would come and strike a match on the sole of Joe’s feet because his feet were so rough from having walked barefoot for months and months. That’s a story that many people have told me before.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
It’s such a weird detail.
Professor Katherine Biber:
It’s a very weird detail. Sometimes weird details suggest themselves to be true because they’re the kinds of things a person wouldn’t make up. I don’t really know. It seems hugely disrespectful to physically touch a dead body that is not personally connected with you. It also makes me wonder if there is a serious judicial process, a coronial inquest, that is happening. Why people members of the public are allowed to come up and touch him, strike matches on the sole of his foot, it suggests to me that this is not a conventional legal process.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
On the second day of the inquest, the coroner ordered that a photo be taken. It was meant to be official evidence to confirm that Joe was actually the deceased person, but somehow the photo made its way onto the wall of the Caledonian Hotel and stayed there for over a hundred years. When Katherine visited Singleton in 2019, it was still there.
Professor Katherine Biber:
All right. So the Caledonian Hotel is this really old hotel in the high street of Singleton on a corner, and the pub is filled with souvenirs and memorabilia and old photographs. So in the area where you go down a little corridor to order your meals from the bistro, there’s this whole set of photographs and newspapers and other old images related to Joe Governor. In amongst that is the photograph of Joe Governor dead, laid out across the pool table, and no one’s really paying any attention to it.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
But Joe’s coronial inquest photo turned memorabilia wouldn’t last much longer on the wall of the Caledonian Hotel. About a month after Katherine’s visit, an Aboriginal musician just happened to stay at the hotel and see the photo. Outraged, he wrote a Facebook post that attracted some media attention and the photo was finally taken down. But why was Joe’s coronial inquest being held at a pub anyway? Was that normal for 1900 Australia?
Professor Katherine Biber:
Look, it’s an interesting question. I think it was conventional to hold coronial inquests in pubs at this time. If you had a license, as a publican, one of the requirements was that you make your premises available for coronial inquests.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Weird.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Yeah, especially weird because in the Caledonian Hotel, the pool table, as well as being used to lay out Joe Governor, was also a place where local women would deliver their babies.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
The medical officer tasked with performing autopsies and delivering babies on the billiard table was Dr. Alistair Bowman. As the local bush doctor in Singleton, Joe Governor’s coronial inquest was likely the biggest case of his career. To begin with, Bowman did all the usual things you’d expect when performing an autopsy. He examined Joe’s body to determine the cause of death; gunshot to the head. But then Dr. Bowman does something that sparks a national debate.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Rumors start to circulate and the first rumor that’s publicized is fairly gruesome.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
What you’re about to hear could cause sadness or anger. Remember, Joe Governor was a real person and he’s still connected to a living history.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So a newspaper report from the Evening News, in fact, it was titled a special report, publishes rumors of Joe Governor’s head being removed. In that same report, it’s noted that only three hours after the conclusion of the inquest into Joe’s death, a box marked perishable is placed on the 1:28 PM train out of Singleton.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So where was this package going? What was in it?
Professor Katherine Biber:
Well, it was said to be addressed to a professor at the University of Sydney, and we can only guess at what it contained.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
These rumors go all the way to Parliament House, triggering an investigation, and telegrams start flying across the countryside.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So Dr. Alistair Bowman, who’s back in country New South Wales, was forced to address these rumors and he does it in a telegram that’s very brief. He says, “The brain was taken out in order to trace bullet and forwarded with portion of bone to Professor Wilson, University of Sydney.” So in attempting to quash the rumor that Joe Governor’s head was removed, we end up finding out that Joe’s brain and a portion of his skull were removed. From now on, I’m going to call them his ancestral remains because that’s the respectful way to refer to them.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Why did Bowman do this, and what happened to Joe’s ancestral remains?
Professor Katherine Biber:
Well, I mean, they were stolen, but we know where they were sent. Joe’s ancestral remains were sent to the University of Sydney to a professor called James Wilson. Wilson is one of the great heroes of the University of Sydney’s history, so he would have been well known and well-known amongst doctors in the bush as someone who would be interested in obtaining Aboriginal remains.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Okay. So he’s well known, but did Bowman know Wilson?
Professor Katherine Biber:
We do know that Bowman studied at Edinburgh University and he studied there at the same time as James Wilson. It was a large medical school so it’s possible that they were not close friends, but equally it’s highly likely that they knew each other.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Edinburgh was one of the premier universities for medical students at the time and created networks that spanned the globe. Katherine says that Professor Wilson and Dr. Bowman were not the only scientists that came out of Edinburgh who’s swapping human remains, and these kinds of exchanges were happening all the time and on a much larger scale.
Professor Katherine Biber:
In the days before social media, people in the handwriting age shared little bits of gossip and job offers and rumors and clues, but they also shared biological specimens and remains. So someone would have the eggs of a monotreme and in return they would get a mummified cat or human remains. So there was this very kind of casually conducted body trade in parts of humans and animals.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Katherine says Joe Governor’s remains would have had high value in this global body trade network.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Well, first of all, the history of Australian science is absolutely entangled with the defilement of Aboriginal bodies. In this context, certainly I think Joe’s remains were viewed as doubly valuable because he was an Aboriginal person and he was a criminal person. He was regarded as a murderer, an outlaw. So some scientists, including Wilson, said that we could learn things from those qualities.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
When it became public knowledge that Joe Governor’s remains had been sent to the University of Sydney to be studied, controversy followed. There are headlines in newspapers around Australia which attracted the attention of a member of parliament whose arguments are surprisingly woke for early 20th century Australia.
Professor Katherine Biber:
There is this troublesome member of parliament who won’t let this go. He was a member of parliament called Dr. Andrew Ross. And he himself had been a government medical officer in the bush. His view was that you should never take remains without the permission of family. What kind of cowboy just takes remains from deceased bodies and what kind of science is it to study the brains of Aboriginal murderers? What can possibly be learned from this? He firstly thinks it’s bad medical practice, but secondly, he thinks it’s bad scientific speculation, and he doesn’t let it go. As well as asking numerous questions in parliament, he then publishes this long angry essay in the local press that is a huge criticism about politics, science, bush medicine, the treatment of Aboriginal people, the kind of primitive state of criminology and just everything that he’s very angry about. And he had a point. The behavior he was calling out would be absolutely unlawful.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
All this parliamentary drama catches the attention of a newspaper reporter from the Evening News. The reporter goes straight to the recipient of Joe Governor’s remains, Professor James Wilson. This wasn’t the first time Wilson had faced questions about how he obtained human remains. A few years before, Wilson was hauled before the University of Sydney Senate for stealing the skeleton of a Chinese man. So when asked about Joe Governor, Wilson appears to choose his words carefully. This is what he told the reporter, which was published in the Evening News on the 3rd of November, 1900.
Tom Allinson – Voice Actor for Professor J.T. Wilson:
We do everything in a legal way. We respect all prejudices and if there are relatives who object, we pay attention to their wishes. But in a case like this, where there were no friends to consult,… there cannot be the slightest objection to the cause taken.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
No friends to consult, no relatives seems convenient. When we dug into this story, we found someone who called Professor Wilson’s defense into question, a different Wilson with a different story.
James Wilson-Miller:
James Wilson Miller, I’m a former school teacher, university academic and a curator of the Powerhouse Museum.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
This Wilson is James Wilson-Miller. He’s from the Gringai clan of the Wonnarua Nation in the Hunter Valley. James is a historian who wrote a book called Koori: A Will to Win, and his great grandmother used to tell him stories about the Governor brothers.
James Wilson-Miller:
These two bad black fellows that came through Singleton one day. She said, “I knew them from when I was a little girl.” She remembered going to school with these two fellows.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
She told him the story of what happened to Joe Governor when he died.
James Wilson-Miller:
My great-grandmother did say that her and a couple of other ladies wanted to go and clean the body, but they were refused. Why they were refused, I don’t know. Remember, they would have been religious by then and to having a body cleaned in so many ways and anointed before you meet your maker, so to speak, would have been a reason for them wanting to go and clean the body. But of course they were refused to do it.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So we know there were friends and perhaps family who wanted to claim Joe’s body and wash him before burial. Based on the information we now have, Professor Wilson’s defense is, at best, shaky.
Leroy Parsons:
Joe Governor’s ancestral remains were stolen. Science used Joe Governor as a specimen and denied him his humanity. Professor James Wilson was one of many professors across the globe collecting and swapping stolen human remains and although he is gone, we are still dealing with his actions. The University of Sydney still has a collection named after JT Wilson containing 660 human remains.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
The controversy around the removal of Joe Governor’s remains falls out of the papers. Forgotten by the public, Joe Governor becomes another transactional asset in the world of comparative anatomy. There’s no record of what happens to Joe’s ancestral remains until 1903.
Professor Katherine Biber:
James Froude Flashman publishes a study of four brains, which belong to four different Aboriginal people, one of which identifies as Joe Governor’s. This study is the last known record of Joe Governor’s stolen remains that I can find.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
James Froude Flashman was a friend to Professor Wilson and an up and coming anatomist. He was the pathology director of the brand new lunacy department at the University of Sydney.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Look, I think that the term lunacy has not aged well. I mean, at that time it was probably a quite modern term, but he was interested in studying human psychology, anatomically and medically.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Okay. So we know that Joe’s remains were passed from the doctor who performed the autopsy to the professor in Sydney with the checkered past who ‘gifted’ Joe’s remains to a scientist who put them in a study. So the question is where are Joe’s ancestral remains now?
Professor Katherine Biber:
Well, that’s a good question, Kaitlyn. I did find out that Professor Wilson sent a lot of his records to Cambridge University, so I had thought that maybe Joe ended up there. After a few emails back and forth, Cambridge University did get back to me, but sadly, no luck. They said they didn’t have Joe’s ancestral remains. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s highly likely Joe’s remains may not even have survived, but I don’t want to give up.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
When revisiting the subject of where Joe’s ancestral remains could be, Katherine recalled an email from a colleague suggesting she tried the medical pathology collection at the University of Sydney. This one of a kind collection is the only place Katherine Biber hasn’t looked for Joe’s ancestral remains, and it may just be our best shot.
Dr Murat Kekic:
So here’s the museum. Well, it’s actually not a museum. We’re not allowed to call it a museum because under university bylaws, I think you have to be an entire building to be called a museum.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
It’s an off shoot of a museum.
Dr Murat Kekic:
Yeah, we got in trouble for that in our … What are we? Collection.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
This is Dr. Murat Kekic. He’s a curator of the medical pathology collection at the University of Sydney, which has a very particular collection.
Dr Murat Kekic:
So that’s the lung from the last pandemic.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Oh, wow.
Dr Murat Kekic:
It’s about the only one remaining in the world and I’ve been called into place like, “Oh, we’ve just found a container full of fingers or something. What should we do?” Or guys pass away and they’ve got stuff in the cupboards and things like that.
Professor Katherine Biber:
What guys have fingers in their cupboards?
Dr Murat Kekic:
Well, anatomists and things like that. Right? I won’t name names, but there was an elderly gentleman who was a hand surgeon. Right? He used to like to dissect at home.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
You’ve got literally two walls of brains. It’s kind of amazing. So some of these are bigger sections than others, some of these are like slices. How do you go about preserving them?
Dr Murat Kekic:
Well, I mean, in most cases, the way we would do it is after the autopsy, you’d get the brain and you’d put it in the bucket of formaldehyde.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So if Joe Governor’s remains somehow survived, they could have been preserved this way or by putting a slice of the remains in paraffin.
Dr Murat Kekic:
Just a square block of wax with a bit of tissue in it. So we’ve got records on everything that’s here and including the 30,000 paraffin sections.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So that’s 30,000 sections of human remains just in this museum. Sorry, collection. Murat told us there’s a huge part of the collection that hasn’t been digitized yet, so it’s possible that if Joe’s ancestor remains are still at the University of Sydney, the records could be in these paper archives.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
You’ve only gotten through what? 10% of it?
Dr Murat Kekic:
If that, yeah. They’re just like encyclopedias that have got all the autopsy reports in them, and so we’re digitizing those reports.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
If we were fingers crossed, hoping that potentially it is in the paper archive, to find it would be a needle in a haystack.
Dr Murat Kekic:
Well, I mean, we’re going to go through every bit of hay anyway, so if it’s there, we’ll find it.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
The 1903 Flashman study reads like a long-winded description of neuroanatomy, but one thing that sticks out, even to me, is that Joe’s injuries aren’t visible in any of the photographs and it definitely doesn’t look like a bullet passed through. There are no clear signs of trauma, which makes us wonder.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
But again, it’s kind of strange that doesn’t have a bullet wound.
Professor Katherine Biber:
So, Kaitlyn, you’re skeptical that that even was Joe Governor?
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Yeah. A little bit, because when you read the study, the way he’s done this piece, he describes all the folds in real detail. No mention of the bullet, which seems strange.
Professor Katherine Biber:
I thought so, but I thought I needed someone with more knowledge to tell me if that was conventional.
Dr Murat Kekic:
I mean, neuroanatomy is not really my thing, but if there was a bullet there, you’d think they’d show a photo of a point of entry or something.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
We left Murat to keep hunting through the archive.
Dr Murat Kekic:
I’ve actually often thought I should have been a detective.
Professor Katherine Biber:
Now’s your chance.
Dr Murat Kekic:
Now’s my chance. That’s right.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So how could remains with no evidence of a bullet hole belong to Joe? We needed to speak to someone with a medical background to help us decipher the Flashman study.
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
I was a neurologist in a former life.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
You’re in this very niche area, which is very useful to us because you understand the brain and you also understand the history. It’s quite a particular area.
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
Yes. Only a few of us around. Yeah, I wonder why.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
This is Dr. Catherine Storey. She’s an Associate Professor and historian at Sydney University’s medical school. She was also the former head of neurology at the Royal North Shore Hospital. Dr. Storey took a look at the Flashman study for us, but the photocopy wasn’t great, so she found the original. It’s over a hundred years old and a little bit yellow, but it was easier for her to read.
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
So yes, I went to the College of physicians and looked at the original report.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
My first response was, “well, that looks like a whole brain, not one that’s had a bullet go through it.”
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
So basically it went from the back of the skull and just straight through the bone and would have come out here in the temple, just above the jaw bone. I think that it just skimmed that lower part.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So does it look like it could be Joe Governor?
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
Bowman says that there is a cavity with fragments in it, and I think that that’s probably what he saw through there. So I think it is likely to be the brain, yes.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So the remains identified in the Flashman study probably are Joe Governor’s, but what’s still unclear is what Flashman was trying to do.
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
What surprised me was that they made an extraordinary number of recordings. I mean, they must’ve spent hours and hours and hours with tape measures and bits and pieces to measure it and write all of this down but they made very few conclusions, and certainly to them, they thought it was a valid science.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
James Flashman states his purpose clearly in his study. “It’s looked on as a slur upon Australian science that no serious attempt has yet been made to work out the morphology of the brain of the Australian Aboriginal. We have here a race of a very low order of intelligence.” He goes on to compare the cerebral structure of Aboriginal people to that of marsupial’s. Catherine says his research tells us more about the shortcomings of science from that time than anything else. To understand Flashman’s thinking, we have to look at the science that came before him, phrenology.
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
There was a thought the phrenologists were very, very sure that they could pick a criminal just by feeling the bumps on their head.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Phrenology was heavily influenced by the racial ideas of the time. You guessed it, white people at the top of the pyramid. Pretty quickly, phrenology was debunked by science, but something new popped up in its place.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So it kind of went from phrenology, looking at bumps on the head, to brain neurology, folds of the brain.
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
Yes. They tried to make a scientific study of the so-called convolutions, those little in foldings of the brain.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So that’s what they mean by convolutions. I wasn’t quite sure what that even meant, but that’s really just about all the shape of the brain.
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
Yes, in much the same way as phrenologists would have done looking at the skull 80 years before.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So why were scientists particularly interested in the brains of Aboriginal people?
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
Just as part of the spectrum, they were looking for links between primitive man and the modern man, and they felt that some of the other races might fit into that spectrum.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So there was this idea that Aboriginal people were less evolved?
Associate Professor Catherine Storey:
Absolutely. I mean, that had actually been part of the phrenologists’ thinking as well. I think the very pernicious ideology arose from phrenology and then it just carried through from there. They worked so hard at justifying their colonisation.
Leroy Parsons:
This kind of rice science, putting Aboriginal people at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, justified the way governments treated our people. It’s not a stretch to make a connection between these studies and the Stolen Generations. You can’t untangle Western knowledge from its colonial past. Today, the remains of Aboriginal ancestors who died in the colonies are still held in scientific collections, here in Australia and all over the world.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
We can say that at least 4,000 individuals that we know of, some in Europe and North America, we often find collections in all sorts of obscure places all over the world.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Dr. Lyndon Ormond-Parker. He’s an honorary senior lecturer at the Center for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University, and he’s of Alyawarra descent from the Barkly Tablelands region of the Northern Territory. Lyndon’s been on the front lines of the repatriation fight since the ’90s.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
Repatriation is the physical return of Aboriginal ancestral remains. It’s important for our ancestors to go back to country because many Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders believe that the soul or spirit cannot be laid to rest until they have a proper reburial ceremony and are put back on country.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Why was this even happening? Why would people stealing remains?
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
So I’ve heard the Joe Governor story, which is not dissimilar to many other Aboriginal people’s experiences on the colonial frontier, with having their remains removed very soon after death. We’re looking at a time when also there was a quench for knowledge in Europe at the same time around new peoples and lands that were discovered. So of course, with that curiosity came an excitement around gaining as much physical material and sending them back to Europe and the United States.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Lyndon tells us though scientific ambitions are part of the picture, as usual, money played a role.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
Then of course they were sold on and then sold on and found their way into collections all over the world. So this dollar value was also pushing the trade in ancestors, not just this scientific curiosity, but also a dollar value for collectors. We know that many Aboriginal people came into conflict with the ever expanding colony. We know that there were many massacres that happened in particular in New South Wales, and then fanning out as the rest of the continent was so-called explored and mapped.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Aboriginal remains weren’t just being collected from massacre and burial sites.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
As the colonies grew, many Aboriginal people often died in hospitals. Their bodies ended up in morgues and their remains were often sent directly to collecting institutions all over the globe. It was often there would be a local doctor that had trained in an overseas institution, such as Edinburgh University, Oxford, Cambridge, and other places all over Europe and the Western world at the time.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
A local doctor trained overseas. Sound familiar? Lyndon tells us the archives reveal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been objecting to the desecration of their ancestors for too long.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
So we had a congregational missionary called Lancelot Threlkeld and he records in his diary that on seeing a Aboriginal burial that an Aboriginal lady came up to him and said in broken English that, I would not like to disclose where they had buried their relation, and on asking why, she replied that the woman’s relatives were afraid that a white fellow should come and take her head away. This is in 1824. It’s the very first recorded journal entry that we’ve been able to find. It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s through the Land Rights movement that Aboriginal people started gaining rights and were calling for rights to self-determination. Aboriginal people were requesting the repatriation and return of their ancestral remains and material culture.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
But research institutions and museums haven’t always made the return of ancestors easy.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
The repatriation movement is a story of success, but it’s almost a story of success for the lowest common denominator of rights that you can give people. Now, we are still fighting with recalcitrant institutions overseas, but it should be a fundamental basic human right of everybody, including Aboriginal people to bury their loved ones in the way that they see fit. But I do know that some of the individuals still abstain from any decisions around returning ancestors, which is … Oh God, what do I really want to say?
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Obvious reasons, Lyndon feels passionate about this. Heads up, there’s some swearing.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
They want to abstain because they don’t want to be seen as pro-repatriation because they’re seen as a traitor to their discipline. For fuck’s sake, you either agree with it or you don’t. Why would you abstain? And why would you be a slave to your discipline rather than actually doing something which is for the good of the Aboriginal people? It’s basic human dignity and if you can’t get that right, we’re all fucked. You can quote me on that.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Lyndon’s frustration doesn’t just come from dealing with institutions stalwarting the repatriation movement.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
So at this particular point in time, quite a few ancestral remains come back from overseas and they’re just labeled Australia or Aboriginal or just Torres Strait Islander. So we have very little information associated with those ancestors that come back, and at the moment they’re stored in a tin shed in Mitchell as part of the national museum storage facility. Aboriginal people have lobbied since the late 1970s, early ’80s for what’s called a national resting place. We should have a national resting place in Canberra, and it should be there as a public space to tell the story of repatriation and ancestors. It should be a place where people can come and conduct ceremony when remains are sent from overseas and also a place where we can lay to rest in a facility that’s purpose-built for the ancestors who we don’t know where they’re from.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Lyndon tells us that a national resting place and repatriation of ancestors is about much more than battling bureaucracy.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
These conflicts are often in the living memory of their descendants today, and so this is all part of the healing process for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in this country, trying to heal the damage that’s being done. We’re talking about individuals potentially murdered by the state, or ended up having their remains desecrated, and so repatriation of ancestral remains is probably a real base level starting point in the reconciliation process. I think if we can get this right, then we can get some other things right. We still have a healing process that goes on with things like the Stolen Generations and I’ve heard Aboriginal people describe our ancestors in museums as the first Stolen Generation.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Lyndon’s years long search for stolen ancestors has meant delving into horrifying stories in the colonial archives, but Lyndon believes these stories need to be told.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
The archive is a violent space. This process of truth-telling in terms of our colonial past and the frontier conflicts, which I think haven’t been fully told yet and I think that part of the archive is part truth-telling. Even if that story is very sad and upsetting for many Aboriginal people, it’s something that we actually want the rest of Australia to be told and educated about. I don’t think there is anything wrong with educating people about traumatic, racist, violent pasts.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Like many ancestors, Joe Governor’s remains were lost somewhere in the institutional web, and that’s the problem. We can’t send ancestors home until we find them. When we told Lyndon about our search for Joe Governor’s remains, he did some research of his own, and with this kind of search, the best place to start is at the end, the last known record of Joe Governor’s remains, the 1903 Flashman study.
Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:
I’ve asked around about Flashman. Look, I have a hunch that it’s probably still at Sydney Uni and that someone will have to interrogate their archives a little bit more. If so, it’s possible that it’s not necessarily listed as Joe Governor. Who knows?
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Lyndon believes Joe Governor’s remains may still be at the University of Sydney. So I checked back in with Dr. Murat Kekic, who, along with his research assistant, has been scouring the medical pathology collection for us.
Dr Murat Kekic:
We did find some really old handwritten notes, like from the late 1800s going into the early 1900s. We just went through them comprehensively, and absolutely nothing. So I just can’t imagine there’s anything there that relates to it.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
Well, thank you for looking.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
While Joe’s ancestral remains don’t look like they are here, they may exist in some other collection. We just haven’t been able to find them. What we do know is that Joe’s body was buried outside the fence at the cemetery in Singleton, on unconsecrated ground. His grave is marked with a meter high headstone that reads …
Leroy Parsons:
“Joe Governor Bushranger Shot 31st October 1900”.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
As we sit with Loretta Ethel Parsley, the great granddaughter of Jimmy and Ethel Governor on country, she reminds us that there’s a different way of thinking about Jimmy and Joe coming home.
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Our spirits return in different ways through our totem. So every time we see a goanna, of course, it’s Jimmy. When I see a kookaburra, that’s my father. When I see a magpie, that’s my mother. And they frequent visitors here on country, yeah, and that gives me peace too.
Kaitlyn Sawrey:
So would he still have returned to his totem, even though he’s not on country?
Aunty Loretta Parsley:
Yes, they can still return her matter where you are. So that spiritual connection is very strong to who we are as a people. It’s hard to explain to some people. They think, “Oh, they’re just making it up.” They’re not Aboriginal. They not connected to country. They’re not part of a system that was robbed from them. People like myself would like to renew the culture and our strong beliefs. If it wasn’t for Jimmy, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be sitting around talking about him. This is my ancestry. I’ll pass my knowledge on to my kids and my grandkids to keep our history alive. This is my story through Jimmy Governor, because of that responsibility. Jimmy had that responsibility and commitment to family. That was his role. So I don’t feel any animosity. I don’t feel any anger. I own my story. I tell my story of this is how it is.
Leroy Parsons:
Well, I should share my connection to this story too. This is my connection, my family tree. Jimmy and Ethel Governor had Sydney and Violet. Violet married George Parsons. They had Cyril, Robert known as Bobby, Ethel known as Etty and Ruth. Cyril married Doreen and had twelve children – one of which was Greg, known as Megsy. Megsy is my father. I am Leroy Parsons and I’m one of the many proud great-great grandchildren of Jimmy Governor.
Emma Lancaster – Credits:
The Last Outlaws series is made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney, an audio production house funded by the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research. The Last Outlaws was made on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, as well as the Walbunja people of the Yuin nation, Dharug people of Ngurra Country and Gubbi Gubbi Country, whose land was never ceded. Impact Studios would like to pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge on this land. Thanks to everyone who made this series possible, including the Governor family descendants and the Parsley and Parsons families, especially Aunty Loretta Parsley and Leroy Parsons. Thanks also to our UTS partners, the Faculty of Law, the Australian Centre for Public History, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, as well as the Australian Research Council.
Emma Lancaster – Credits:
Our wonderful Chief Investigator is Law Professor Katherine Biber, and of course the team at Impact Studios. Kaitlyn Sawrey is the host, writer and senior producer. Frank Lopez is the writer, senior producer, composer and sound engineer. The role of narrator was voiced and co-written by Leroy Parsons. Allison Chan was our producer, researcher and fact checker. Ben Vozzo is the digital communications manager. Belinda Lopez is our editorial advisor. Thank you to our cultural consultants at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, especially Professor Daryle Rigney and Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt. As well as Dr. Lyndon Ormond-Parker, an honourary senior lecturer at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. Additional production by Ryan Pemberton and additional sound supplied by Camilla Hannan. Additional sound engineering by Martin Peralta. Jake Duczynski from Studio Hackett (Studio Gilay) created our incredible digital artworks and original artwork Blood On His Hands Cleansed By Saltwater was supplied by Aunty Loretta Parsley.
And there are many minds that made The Last Outlaws possible.
Emma Lancaster – Credits:
A big thank you to everyone we spoke to and those who answered all our fact checking questions, including Jimmy Kyle, Dr. Katie Gilchrist, the New South Wales State Library, Laurie Perry, James Wilson-Miller, Sheila Johnson, the Gilgandra Local Aboriginal Land Council, Dr. Claire Britton, Deborah Beck, the National Art School, Nathan Sentance from the Australian Museum, Dr. Murat Kekic at the Ainsworth Interactive Collection of Medical Pathology and Emeritus Professor Paul Turnbull at the University of Tasmania. Thanks also to the deadly team at TEABBA in the Darwin studio, Lee Hewitt, Brendon Barlow, Bernard Namok. Voiceover artists are Andrew MacRae and Tom Allinson. The Executive Producer of Impact Studios is Emma Lancaster. Managing Directors of Impact Studios during production were Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch and Associate Professor Anna Clarke. Thanks for listening.