He was sentenced to death for the murder of the manager of Auvergne Station , Sam Croker, at a card game in 1893.
Responding to a " taunt " by Croker , Flannigan got up , returned to the game and fired two shots. After burying Croker's body ,Flannigan fled to Halls Gap in Western Australia, where he gave himself up.
He pleaded not guilty at his trial, evidence given that Flannigan claimed Croker had carried a revolver for two weeks intending to kill him. Croker had previously killed an Aboriginal man .
George Page, a white man , convicted of murder , had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment . It was claimed Flannigan should be shown the same mercy .
A large deputation called on the South Australian Executive Council and urged that " justice should be evenly dispensed without regard to race or colour. "
Flannigan , born between 1860 and 1867 , at Marion Downs Station,in the Diamantina region of western Queensland , was the son of an Aboriginal woman and an Irishman.
As a young man he worked as a stockman and when pastoralist Nathaniel Buchanan brought the first herds of cattle from Queensland to the Northern Territory in 1883,Flannigan is believed to be one of the stockmen he employed .
The exhibition programme , with extensive text by Don Christopherson , says Flannigan was a skilled horseman who had won several races including the Palmerston Cup on a horse called Cygnet in 1887. His love of horses is reflected in many drawings . Some are panoramas , others depict homesteads on which he worked.
A number of scenes appear to narrate the journey of his arrest and transportation to Fannie Bay Gaol . He was taken to Wyndham where he was arrested by Mounted Constable Holdaway who accompanied him on the extradition to the Territory. The Boab Prison Tree at Wyndham , in which Flannigan was probably lodged, is one of the drawings .
The steamer Rob Roy, which took him to Darwin is also covered. In prison , Flannigan was given sheets of South Australian government stationery on which to draw .
When the tin walled prison was under the control of Deputy Sheriff John Knight, a former architect interested in art , he had encouraged Aboriginal prisoners to draw . With a special concern for Aboriginal prisoners , Knight believed they needed reform , not punishment.
He encouraged them to learn masonry and by 1888 they were drawing on paper. Some of the art was displayed in the Dawn of Art Exhibition organised by Knight as part of the NT display in the Centennial Intercolonial Exhibition ,Melbourne, l888 . "These were the first drawings by Aboriginal artists to be publicly displayed as art rather than ethnographic curios ."
By the time Flannigan arrived at Fannie Bay, Knight had died , but his drawings indicate that the provision of pencils and paper to prisoners had been maintained .
Flannigan's self portrait drawn while shackled by iron manacles on his wrists and ankles . Courtesy of South Australian Museum .
