Today’s Artistic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In the early eighteen hundreds the Australian penal settlements were the scene of floggings of so severe a nature as to rival, for sheer savagery, the worst that were inflicted in England in the sixteenth century, or in the Southern States of America during the days of slavery. George E. Boxali, author of The History of the Australian Bushrangers, writes in that work:
It is said that there were two floggers in Sydney who were regarded as artists in their profession. These men performed together, the one being righthanded and the other left. They prided themselves on being able to flog a man without breaking the skin, and consequently there was no blood spilled. But the back of the flogged man is described as having been puffed up like ‘blown veal’. The swelling ‘shook like jelly’, and the effects were felt for a much longer period than when the back was cut and scored as it generally was, for we are told that the ground, in the Barrack Square in Sydney, all round where the triangles stood, was saturated with human blood, and the flogging places elsewhere must have been in the same condition.
No more convincing indication of the terrible nature of these whippings, and of the mortal terror of them which with many of the convicts were imbued, can be cited than the fact of these prisoners deliberately mutilating their limbs in order to avoid punishment. All the dreary way to Australia these convicts, men, women and boys, upon the most trifling of pretexts, were beaten within an inch of their lives; arrived in the penal settlements, they were whipped, hammered and tortured repeatedly. The following account gives a graphic picture of the offences for which such cruel punishments were devised and employed.
Here are some entries from the official journal kept upon the island (Norfolk Island—one of Australia’s penal settlements), 1844.
The convict Richard Henry received 300 lashes for insubordination, and for endeavouring to trump up a charge of unfairness in dealing with prisoners on the part of Warder McCluskey. Earlier, on 5 Nov., 1842, James MacDonald sentenced to receive 100 lashes and to work for three months in irons; and James Elliott to seventy-five lashes and 3 months in irons, for having been seen to associate with each other by signals, when silence was enjoined in the gang.
Another entry says:
Thomas Downie was ordered to the dark cells for seven days, and to receive 200 lashes for insubordination and refusing to work.
Flogging in Australia
Culled from: The History of Corporal Punishment
Face Transplant Du Jour!
Have you seen this yet? If you haven’t seen this yet, go see this now! A teenager shoots her face off in an impulsive suicide attempt (aided by a conveniently close-by loaded gun), and four years later she receives the face of an opioid overdose victim. It’s like everything that’s wrong with America wrapped up in one feel-good story! With graphic photos!
