Before Barbara Barlow saw her son Kevin for the last time she prepared him a gift – a cocktail of 75 sleeping pills dissolved in gin, whisky and brandy that she poured into a water bottle.

At the last minute, sitting with her son in Kuala Lumpur's Pudu Prison on a Saturday morning in July 1986, she held back. She kept the bottle in her handbag, terrified that if she gave it to him and he drank the concoction he might die before all avenues of appeal against his death sentence had been exhausted.

But there were to be no more chances for Perth man Kevin Barlow, condemned to death for drug trafficking. As a Herald story published on July 8, 1986, reported, within days of Mrs Barlow's visit, her son and his accomplice, Brian Geoffrey Chambers, had been dropped from the gallows in "pre-dawn gloom" with "the wailing chant of the Islamic call to prayer in their ears".

Just after dawn a prison truck left Pudu, driving through a crush of people. Through a peephole in the prison gate, Barlow's waiting Malaysian lawyer, Karpal Singh, was given the news. He turned to the crowd and translated it. "The bodies are in the back of the truck."

A photograph accompanying the article shows guards carrying Kevin Barlow's body into the Kuala Lumpur mortuary. It is barely covered by a blanket; his feet are uncovered, splayed lifelessly.

If Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan fall before a firing squad in Bali they will become the fifth and sixth Australians to be executed in a foreign country in the past 30 years, following in the dread-filled footsteps of four other convicted heroin traffickers: Barlow and Chambers in 1986 in Malaysia, Michael McAuliffe in 1993 in Malaysia, and Van Tuong Nguyen in Singapore in 2005.

"Please God, I just want all this to end soon ... I have seen too many others waiting to be hanged go crazy," a trembling Michael McAuliffe told Herald correspondent Lindsay Murdoch in 1990 during his trial. "I stayed in the same room as Kevin Barlow for two weeks before he went, and he was really freaky." It would be another two-and-a-half years before the Manly bartender who liked to party would hang.

Melbourne man Van Tuong Nguyen was 25 when he was executed by hanging in Singapore in December 2005. Days before the execution he was likely weighed – so his executioners could calculate the length of the rope. Hours before the execution, he held the hands of his distraught mother, Kim, and twin brother, Khoa.

Minutes before, according to a 2005 Herald report, he turned to the guards who had become his friends and joked – "do I have a chance?". He didn't. A priest performed the last rites, before "Nguyen, hooded and handcuffed, was positioned on the trapdoor and dropped to his death".

History has well-recorded the stories of last Australians to die by firing squad for crimes committed (as opposed to Australians who were victims of war-time atrocities). On February 27, 1902, Lieutenant Harry "Breaker" Morant and Lieutenant Peter Handcock faced "a firing party" after being found guilty of war crimes. Morant reportedly pulled his handkerchief off his eyes just before he was shot.

A month later, a "comrade" wrote to The Advertiser in Adelaide to report "the tragic affair". "I heard the volley at 6 o'clock this morning," the officers' comrade wrote, "and was afterwards taken in to see their coffins. I can tell you, I don't feel too bright."

Australians executed

Malaysia

Kevin Barlow (Perth)

For heroin trafficking

Executed by hanging, July 7, 1986

Brian Chambers (Perth)

For heroin trafficking

Executed by hanging, July 7, 1986

Michael McAuliffe (Sydney)

For heroin trafficking

Executed by hanging, June 19, 1993

Singapore

Van Tuong Nguyen (Melbourne)

For heroin trafficking

Executed by hanging, December 2, 2005