The settler colonies of the British Empire could be doubly colonial—first as the places in which European and non-European settlers had displaced First Peoples and second as self-governing polities that aspired to colonial overlordship in their own interest. The history of punishment in such societies expresses this two-sided history, in ways explored in this chapter. The abolition of the death penalty in the State of Queensland in 1922 was the first in Australian jurisdictions, the first in the Asia-Pacific region, and the first in the British Empire. But the legacy of the Queensland death penalty lingered in Australian colonial territories and stood in awkward relation to other political drivers in penal policy. The chapter considers a variety of practices in which the death penalty was invoked by Australian decision-makers during the first half of the twentieth century. These include the history of exemption of Australian soldiers from execution in the First World War; the use of the death penalty in colonial Papua and the Mandated Territory of New Guinea; hanging as a weapon of war in the colonial territories; and the retrieval of the death penalty for the punishment of war crimes. In these histories we see not only that the Queensland death penalty lived on in other contexts but that ideological and political preferences for abolition remained vulnerable to the sway of other historical forces of war and security.