PDF (Whole thesis) - UTas ePrints - University of Tasmania

fears ·that Sadler would die during the ride, and it was raining too,
it was put off.
dead before he arrived .
The next day Mills was sent or again but Sadler was
Hall, who during the typhus epidemic had been untiring in his
efforts to visit numerous cases, knowing there would be no recompense
for hims elf but the knowledge that he was alleviating human suffering ,
was shocked and angered that he had not been called.
In cas es of similar
seriousness of symptoms as those which Sadler had displayed , he had
visited twice or three times in twenty-four hours as required .
In a
who le month Sadler was visited only once and then only by a Dispenser .
On Apr il 18 Hall wrote a fu ll description of the case to his senior ,
Clarke, who considered it serious enough to demand investigation and sent
it on to the Colonial Secretary .
On April 22, the Chief Police
Magistrate was directed to order Barrow to hold an enquiry .
At the enqu iry held on May 6, the Synnott brothers were charged
with neglect towards Sadler ;
that he had died of dysentery without
proper medical aid, attention, necessaries or comforts ;
which he lay was an unfit place with no glass in the windows ;
that the hut 1n
that his
request to be sent to hospital had been ignored and that he had been bled
and dosed with Epsom salts by Walter Synnott .
As the witnesses were
mostly the assigned servants of the Synnotts who had been given amp le
time in which to browbeat and confuse them before the trial, Ha ll felt
that the Government had little chance of eliciting the truth , especially
as the presiding magistrate was a personal friend of the accused men and
moreover angry that Hall had bypassed him by reporting the affair to
Clarke .
Barrow, in fact , found it difficult to control his annoyance
over the affair and concluded his summary of the evidence on May 18 with
.... if for the future charges of this nature are to be made ,
the Police Magistrate should first be made acquainted with it
as it would enab le him to arrive more speedily at the truth ,
save the Government a great deal of trouble and I am confident
prevent a great deal of unnecessary excitement wh ich I fear has
resulted from this enquiry and only tended to engender bad
fee lings and renew ancient feuds and differences wh ich I had
hoped time could have allayed in this district ....
Apparent ly Hall had made another enemy in the new Assistant Police
Magistrate .
None the less , in an effort to see some justice done , Ha ll
conveyed his own impressions of the evidence to the Chief Police
Magistrate , appealing to him to consider certain aspects of the case :
that it was only Sunday when the Synnotts were prepared to consider the
sick man; that humanity demanded he be given treatment ; that the