Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233
Jan Kociumbas, ‘Azaria’s Antecedents: Stereotyping Infanticide in late Nineteenth-Century Australia’
Gender & History, Vol.13 No.1 April 2001, pp. 138–160.
Azaria’s Antecedents:
Stereotyping Infanticide in
late Nineteenth-Century
Australia
Jan Kociumbas
One woman, whom Mr. Meredith saw a day or two after the
birth of her baby, on being asked where it was, replied with
perfect nonchalance, ‘I believe Dingo patta!’ – She believed
the dog had eaten it! Numbers of the hapless little beings are
no doubt disposed of by their unnatural mothers in a similar
manner ...
(L. Meredith, 1844)1
The sea has soddened the baby clothes,
The flannel, the shirt, the band;
The rats have bitten the baby face,
And eaten the baby hand.
...
And down by the sea the sun crept up –
Did you hear a baby cry?
I know where one lies beside the quay,
But I will not tell – not I!
(Mary Gilmore, ‘Down by the Sea’, 1910)2
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
AZARIA’S ANTECEDENTS
139
Senior constables Joyce and Brown
Went down to Macdonaldtown
Fifteen infants there they found
Buried underneath the ground.
What will Mother Makin say
On the resurrection day,
When those babes rise up and say
Taa-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay!
(music-hall song, Sydney, 1890s)3
Stereotypes of women as unnatural child-killers have had a long
history in Australia. During the period of large-scale annexation of
Aboriginal land, an initial, romantic notion of Aboriginal women as
exemplary mothers was rapidly replaced by representations demonising
indigenous people as the embodiment of evil, savages who privileged
their hunting dogs over the burden of children and who were likely
to destroy or even eat their babies.4 This flagrantly dishonest and
profoundly offensive idea persisted despite the widespread practice of
conscripting Aboriginal women and girls as housemaids and nurses
for white infants, often justified as a civilising mission. At the same
time, the receding frontier or ‘Bush’ was constructed as the white
man’s territory where the male settler both defined his masculinity
and advanced his civilisation in an everlasting battle with a harsh and
shrewish land. The ongoing misogyny of this nationalist iconography
was dramatically illustrated in 1980 when Azaria Chamberlain, aged
nine weeks, disappeared from the tent of a white family camped by
Uluru (Ayers Rock) in central Australia. The mother’s explanation
that the child was taken by a dingo was not accepted. Having transgressed into white male space as well as exposing her vulnerable infant
to the wilderness, the mother was universally condemned by the media
as dangerous, evil, even a witch. Her infant Azaria was never found.5
Compared with allegations of infanticide in indigenous history, the
notion of the unnatural, careless, white mother who abandoned or
killed her infant has been but selectively applied. While mindful of
this point, this study is concerned with the application of similar
ideas to another frontier, the fin-de-siècle inner city. Here workingclass women were especially likely to be both perceived and punished
as unfit mothers, oversexed sirens who had no compunction in
destroying the infants whom they or their daughters too wantonly
conceived. Though this image was to some extent challenged by
feminists, who drew attention to the role of men in producing the
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GENDER AND HISTORY
superfluous infant, they too dwelt on the cruelty suffered by the
abandoned, innocent child, as Mary Gilmore’s poem attests.6 Moreover, in feminist iconography, the child-killer was only to be forgiven if
she was young, single and held to have been ‘seduced and abandoned’.
Any woman who assigned her child to an unqualified midwife, an
unsupervised wet-nurse, or to unlicensed ‘baby-farmers’ like John
and Sarah Makin, was not a victim but a villain. The Makins, accused
in 1892 of the murder of between fifteen and twenty babies found
disinterred from inner-Sydney backyards, were tried by the media as
well as the court. John Makin was hanged and Sarah served fourteen
years of a life-sentence.7
This turn-of-the-century determination to detect and punish alleged
child-killers can partly be explained in terms of moral panic about the
quality of mothering in general. From the 1880s, prominent journalists, doctors, statisticians, churchmen and parliamentarians expressed
concern regarding perceived threats to nation and race occasioned by
the secularisation of society and by feminism. As overseas, Married
Women’s Property Acts, divorce law reform, the temperance and
suffrage campaigns, concessions towards higher education for women
and especially the falling birthrate fuelled anxiety that women of all
classes were turning away from their allotted role as guardian of
morals within the sanctuary of the home. Statistical revelations of
declining church attendances, together with allegations of escalating
illegitimacy, insanity and venereal disease added to this sense of crisis,
as did graphic reports of urban larrikinism and juvenile delinquency,
taken as signs of the corruption of the nation’s youth.8 Most of all,
however, it was the image of the dead, diseased or abandoned baby
which prompted fears that traditional values associated with motherhood and the home were being eroded. During the 1880s, spectacular
disclosures of infant mortality revealed that as many as one in five
colonial infants died before the age of twelve months.9 Coinciding
with gloomy prognoses of declining family size, these revelations caused
colonial demographers and doctors to bemoan the loss of babies, who
were seen as both potential soldiers and an economic resource. Where
once a dead or dying child was accepted as an inevitable part of life,
now it was a national tragedy and a mother’s disgrace.
As modern demographic, medical and feminist studies have shown,
these concerns were nowhere more marked than in Australia, where
the nation was imagined as an evolving organism, just emerging
from its childhood. Especially during the economic crisis and worker
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militancy of the 1890s, social scientists and members of parliament
painted a bleak picture of the decline in family size of the ‘fit’ relative
to Aboriginal numbers and the more populous Asian nations north of
the country’s undefended coastlines.10 Many blamed the selfishness of
women, especially radical feminist ones, but the sexuality of all women
was perceived as a matter of national concern.11
Recent urban studies have also cast light on these issues, showing
how, as overseas, colonial reformers had followed Dickens and Mayhew
in associating the city street not only with noxious, insanitary conditions causing death and disease, but with moral and especially sexual
corruption. Again such ideas struck a special chord in Australia
where the local public health movement saw the inner-city slum as
an emblem of Old World vice and crime, sundering their sunny, open
spaces which would otherwise nourish new, taller and fitter human
specimens, superior even to the British stock.12 Turn-of-the-century,
nationalist valorisation of the Bush reinforced these ideals. Seen as
fostering a robust resourcefulness and vitality, wanted in the young
citizen-soldier, the Bush was imagined in opposition to the city, which
was associated with debilitating sexual immorality and the ‘clinging
hands’ of women.13 Only the spacious, private home in the breezy,
garden suburb escaped this condemnation. Imagined as a kind of
buffer between Bush and slum, the ideal home was located well away
from the supposed pollution and danger of the colonial city’s twisted
lanes and shady alleys, thought to harbour not only evils such as
infanticide but also prostitution, opium dens, larrikinism and other
criminal activities.14
These existing studies, while contributing valuable insights on antifeminist ideology and urban mythology, have not necessarily been
concerned to reassess the actual incidence of infanticide either by
birth-mothers or by baby-farmers. Some feminist studies, it is true,
have offered a partial critique. Thus O’Brien has drawn attention to
the poverty and disgrace suffered by the unmarried mother, noting
how domestic servants (known as ‘slaveys’) were especially at risk of
sexual exploitation from all the males in the household, including
lodgers and sons. When these girls’ pregnancy became apparent, they
were often banished in order to save the family’s respectability, and so
found their way to the inner city. O’Brien also noted the absence of
day-care facilities for working mothers.15 McCalman emphasised the
harsh realities of working-class family life, noting how this resulted
in a ‘toughness’ towards children which to modern child-centred
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viewpoints seems unacceptable. Fitzgerald pointed to the extra work
and costs a new baby entailed, especially in colonial families already well
endowed with children, suggesting that such mothers were forced to
choose between disposing of the infant or risking their own survival
and that of their families by turning to abortion.16
Similarly, important works by Allen, Lake, Grimshaw and others
have drawn attention to the radicalism of late nineteenth-century
philanthropic women and ‘first-wave’ feminists who attempted to
refocus the infanticide debate around the rights of all women to
control their fertility. They have also shown how feminists were alert
to the double sexual standard and its role in producing the superfluous child.17 Swain and Howe have noted the patriarchal limits
placed on feminist attempts to broaden and politicise the infanticide
debate, observing that despite feminist concerns about the stigma of
illegitimacy suffered by the ‘fatherless’ child, the ostracism of the single
mother continued.18
Most of these studies, however, while avoiding the stereotype of the
supposedly over-sexed, unnatural, inner-city woman, have not necessarily queried the allegation that she deliberately destroyed infant life.19
Indeed, Swain and Howe warn that sympathetic modern historians
should be cautious of excusing infanticide as merely a rational response
to uncompromising reality. Similarly, Allen writes with some exasperation of how police failed to prosecute mothers whose infants mysteriously ‘drowned themselves in kitchen sinks, set themselves alight,
scalded themselves on teapots, poisoned, shot or stabbed themselves,
threw themselves into bays some distance from their homes and died
from head injuries received while playing’. Other common excuses
were ‘accidents of sudden birth’, where infants were alleged to have
foolishly chosen to enter the world while their mother was using the
lavatory or chamber pot, thus drowning or fracturing their skulls.
Infants were also commonly said to have been ‘overlain’ while the
mother was asleep.20 Both these studies point out that infanticide by
the mother was lightly policed. Work by Michael Gilding and Kathy
Laster has also focused on women’s deliberate intent and imperfect
policing as key factors for historians to address in understanding
infant mortality.21
Thus, it could be said that, despite contributing valuable new class
and gender analysis, in some of these studies the view of working-class
child-rearing is not dissimilar to that in less critical, Whiggish works.
These commend rather than analyse the efforts of the sanitary reformers
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to improve child health and well-being in the colonial cities.22 They
have thus mirrored the Hogarthian imagery of the contemporary
media and police who, regularly enumerating the little foundlings
dumped about the city, also speculated wildly about numberless
infant corpses believed to be present but never found in metropolitan
gutters, backyards and waterways.23
The absence of analysis of this iconography of infanticide is especially obvious with respect to the baby-farmer. In contemporary
sources, baby-farmers were represented as perhaps the most sinister
and malicious inhabitants of the slum.24 Even recent works still tend
to assume that baby-farmers routinely destroyed infants, either by
starvation, violence or deliberate neglect.25 Yet baby-farmers were in
fact nothing more than working-class people who, for a weekly or
lump sum, took in unwanted infants or offered to find a foster home
for them. As recently as the 1870s, the term ‘baby-farming’ had been
used to denote the numerous formal, government-sponsored and
charitable schemes which boarded out destitute children to paid fostercare. By the 1890s, however, the term had acquired pejorative connotations and was used exclusively of unlicensed, working-class systems
of foster-care, now condemned as the means by which an ‘unscrupulous
she-devil’ earned ‘big dividends’ by taking unwanted children and then
‘disposing’ of them.26 The Makins especially attracted such remarks.
According to the Melbourne Argus, the fact that such people could
exist in that age was ‘astounding’, and proved that society was too
‘feeble’ ‘either to improve the moral tone of its members or to defend
itself against such hideous wretches’.27 Yet perhaps all that was unusual
about the Makin affair was that it was a married couple who stood
accused of murdering their infant boarders, and that it was the husband
who was hanged. The baby-farmer was more often a needy single
female, and one extremely vulnerable to medico-legal scrutiny in that
she was always unable to give a medically approved account of the
deaths of her little charges.
The inner-city midwife too had come under a cloud. Though somewhat less reviled by the media, she was ridiculed in medical literature
as, at best, sleazy, drunken and ignorant, inducing abortions and mishandling births; or, at worst, as strangling or exposing the newborn
and passing off healthy deliveries as stillbirths. She might also combine
these nefarious activities with baby-farming.28 In recent historiography,
however, and in contrast with the baby-farmer, this contemporary
image of the midwife has been substantially revised. Though some
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recent studies are critical of theories of ‘social control’ and ‘medical
dominance’,29 many feminist writers still agree that vilification of the
untrained midwife was part of the shift in medicine and social work
towards replacing the unqualified, working-class practitioner with the
formally trained professional.30 While undoubtedly some ignorant
midwives did exist, most were competent and experienced, often
widows whose children were old enough to be left alone while they
attended to patients and perhaps also assisted the mother with domestic
chores and child-care during the confinement. Some still enjoyed a
high status in rural areas, though all were now cut off from the new
life-saving aseptic surgery which was empowering the doctor and the
trained nurse.31 Known as a ‘fingersmith’ in convict parlance, and
formerly referred to affectionately as ‘Granny’, midwives were now
often called ‘gamps’ or even ‘Rabbit-Ketchers’.32
Why have historians been so reluctant to test whether a similar
analysis of nineteenth-century stereotypes might be applied to the
baby-farmer? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that, unlike the unmarried mother, the baby-farmer was perceived as peripheral to contemporary campaigns for the rights of women and positively
antithetical to that other focus of turn-of-the-century reform, the
‘rights of the child’.
The sentimental notion of middle-class children as innocent, defenceless, malleable, had grown in tandem with the ideal of the separate male
and female ‘spheres’. Far from mere little adults, children were little
angels, entitled to a prolonged period of protective education free
of the work, worries and sexual corruption perceived to lie beyond the
sanctuary of the home.33 These ideas had been crucial to the increasing
status of middle-class women as mothers who, their sexuality apparently
detached from motherhood, were celebrated as moral guardians and
first teachers of the vulnerable young.34 Gaining momentum with
industrialisation, some of these concepts were gradually applied to the
offspring of the poor and, in the Australian colonies, to Aboriginal
children. For these children, however, protective ideology meant a
contraction rather than an extension of rights, the emphasis being on
separation from their family plus a modicum of formal schooling
designed to offset the counter-education provided by kin or street.35
In the enactment of these ideals, middle-class women had become
accepted experts in the ‘rescue’ of other people’s children, including
foundlings.36 They thus not only moved increasingly into the public
sphere, but sharpened their critique of the double sexual standard,
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blaming irresponsible husbands and fathers for the plight of the destitute
child, and defying male criticism that their children’s hospitals and
infants’ homes would encourage immoral conduct, becoming nothing but a dumping-ground for unwanted offspring. Accordingly the
founding ladies of Sydney’s infant asylum (established in 1874 and later
known as the Ashfield Infants’ Home) declared that their aim was to
cater for ‘poor little innocents , the victims of woman’s weakness and
man’s faithlessness and cowardice’.37
By the 1890s, however, middle-class women’s expertise even in
raising their own children was under challenge. Medical and psychological production of knowledge about the child body was transforming child-rearing into a national problem which only trained
experts were equipped to solve. As in childbirth so in child health,
doctors were able to widen their sphere of influence as they came to
accept the role of germs in the transmission of disease, particularly
syphilis and infantile diarrhoea.38 Even if they could not cure such
illnesses, doctors could claim some knowledge of how to prevent
them, thus eroding the confidence of women to manage child-raising
without medical advice.
Doctors were also problematising child sexuality and calling for a
more rigorous surveillance to be applied from infancy to the newly
defined stage of growth, adolescence. Far from little angels, children
were complicated, primitive little creatures whose growth should
recapitulate the forward progress of the race.39 All mothers were therefore to apply a Spartan formula of physical care and moral training
based on extreme hygiene, clockwork regularity and an iron discipline.
Infants were not to be fed on demand and undue fondling was
prohibited.40 Mothers’ attention to this regimen gradually increased
as childbirth was taken out of the hands of women. Even the unborn
child was being redefined as a patient whose life commenced at
conception, not at quickening and certainly not as late as birth.41
Middle-class women’s competence in philanthropy was also being
questioned, especially in Australia where the state had long played
a strong role in subsidising education and welfare. By the 1890s,
systems of free, compulsory and secular schooling were being put into
place; in New South Wales, philanthropic initiatives to find foster
homes for orphans and destitute children came under the control of
a government agency, the State Children’s Relief Board, in 1881.42
The authority of ladies in the public sphere was further challenged by
the widespread application of medical and eugenic theories to social
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problems, so that many moral issues were being reinterpreted as
amenable to medical and other scientific ‘cures’. Though their daughters
might be formally trained in the new social sciences, amateur lady
bountifuls must now defer to professional experts apparently able to
designate scientifically which sections of the population would respond
to reform and which ones were ‘carriers’ of undesirable physical and
mental attributes and should not be permitted to reproduce their
kind.43
This state-endorsed protection and surveillance of the population
aimed to ensure that every white family conformed to modern, scientific
ideals. Certainly, in childhood, disparities of wealth and opportunity
would remain and, in the school, mental and other tests would help
create difference, but all white families could and should be made much
more uniform, with every child scrutinised, classified and raised according to the latest scientific rules. The aim was to create a new, standardised child body – white, highly gendered, self-regulating, competitive
and individualistic, aware of its difference from and superiority to
allegedly less rational and self-controlled racial types, orderly yet
vigorous, willing to postpone present pleasures for future gains, and,
above all, able to repay this investment in its future by being suitably
productive and long-lived.
In this highly charged atmosphere, feminists could not but support
the concurrent attention being given by male reformers to the perceived
ring of inner-city women thought to be deliberately destroying infant
life, a move which later feminist historical analysis has not disputed.
Certainly feminist women sustained their concern about the role of
the male partner in producing the impoverished mother and the
illegitimate child.44 Thus feminists campaigned for the release of women
like Bella Fergusson, sentenced to death for the murder of her fourweek-old infant in 1890, and Maggie Heffernan, a rural domestic
servant who drowned her newborn infant in Melbourne in 1900 after
her fiancé withdrew his offer of marriage.45 In these efforts, feminists
found some support in the media, which tended to be more sympathetic to women who fell into the traditional feminine role of
‘seduced and abandoned’ than radicals who campaigned for birth
control. Sympathy for feminism, however, fell away when feminists
attempted to raise the age of consent, a measure which they saw as
vital to prevent the seduction and abandonment of girls and hence
the birth of the unwanted child.46 They also risked ridicule when
seeking legislation forcing putative fathers to pay maintenance to the
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unmarried mother even before the birth.47 This opposition meant
that feminists were again forced into alliance with those doctors, social
purity workers, ‘sexologists’ and the like who were prepared to place
demographic ‘fitness’ above male rights to unfettered sexual freedom
outside wedlock.48
It followed that by the 1890s, feminists were far less sympathetic
to the ‘soiled doves’ and ‘street arabs’ whom they had formerly sought
to save. Hoping to raise the status of women as citizen-mothers, most
contributed to the redefinition of good and bad mothering in terms
of the new social science. The good mother was now a medical
auxiliary, supporting medicalised child-rearing and the burgeoning
infant welfare movement which carried the ever more stringent medical
formula for baby care into inner-city homes. As well she supported
the application of principles of health and hygiene in schools, including compulsory domestic science classes for schoolgirls and, later, the
medical inspection and measurement of schoolchildren.49 Also on her
agenda were free kindergartens, supervised playgrounds, and protective
legislation to prohibit children from working in factories or engaging
in street trading, theatre or prostitution. The good mother also supported and abided by the expansion of existing welfare legislation so
as to streamline removal of ‘delinquents’ and their consignment via
the new children’s courts to approved foster care.50
Moreover, where good mothering was now firmly associated with
being a deputy of social and medical science, the bad mother was
increasingly marginalised as a ‘moral leper’, wilfully spreading impurity,
death and disease. The unlicensed baby-farmer would thus inevitably
be seen as part of the dangerous, impure environment from which the
defenceless child must be removed; indeed, she was being cast as the
‘other’ against which good mothering might be defined. Like the midwife, she subverted the perceived need to educate mothers in the new
clinical methods of family planning and infant-care, at the same time
as she assisted young women and girls to postpone full-time motherhood and return to work in factories and shops, sources of employment which were themselves suspected of being less effective than
traditional domestic service for preparing girls for ‘hygienic’ reproduction and infant-care.51
For the doctors, the prosecution of baby-farmers like the Makins
was crucial to the political process by which they supplanted the
untrained, unlicensed female practitioner in pronouncing when infant
life had commenced, and when and how it had ceased. Infant Life
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Protection Acts, passed from 1890, enforced the medical registration
of stillbirths and also of all private working-class homes in which children were boarded out. This meant it was now the doctors who would
decide which child was ‘normal’ in terms of its precise age, and which
women should be trusted with the bearing and rearing of the allimportant, desirable child. In this legislation, care was taken to exclude
approved charities, state-selected foster homes and elite boardingschools, while medical control of their own private hospitals effectively prevented detection of the doctors’ own activities in gaining
control over the illicit abortion market.52
This united attack on impoverished inner-city child-minders was
facilitated by graphic imagery which represented the baby-farmer as
embodying all that was most to be feared about the inner-city slum
as a source of filth, barbarity and racial decline. Baby-farmers were
nomadic, never settling down at any fixed address. Baby-farmers were
idle and unemployed, preferring to trade in human flesh for gold.
Baby-farmers were ignorant of the modern regimen of childcare and
broke all of its rules. Like the organised marketing of juvenile virginity
depicted in Stead’s notorious ‘maiden tribute of modern Babylon’,
baby-farmers were in league both with prostitutes and promiscuous
women and girls, increasingly thought to be purveyors of mental as
well as physical disease.53
Even worse, the baby-farmer provided such women with alternatives to the cordon of ‘sanitary’ services offered by the existing
charities and the developing welfare state. This was revealed in the
remarks of George Ardill, spokesman for the New South Wales Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1888). Comprising clergymen, members of legal and business communities and a ladies’ committee, this organisation employed a ‘Vigilance Officer’ and advocated
special legislation to secure convictions.54 Its frame of reference was
wide, including ‘cruel treatment, wrongful neglect, or improper employment of children; also all conduct by which life or health is wrongfully
endangered or sacrificed, or by which morals are imperilled or depraved’.
A similar organisation was formed in Melbourne in 1896.
Though concerned also with forms of abuse affecting the older
child, Ardill was particularly anxious about the alleged trade in infant
life. During the debate on the New South Wales Children’s Protection Bill, he placed a fake advertisement for adoption of an unwanted
child, then used the replies to argue how common such a practice
was. He also drew a lurid contrast between the charitable infants’
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homes (especially ‘Albermarle’ in Stanley Street, Newtown, which he
and his wife had founded), and the haphazard, working-class systems
of foster-care in Sydney. According to Ardill, whereas he employed
trained midwives and nurses, the incompetent, evil baby-farmer cared
nothing for her little charges, greedily accepting too many infants
and keeping them in boxes for beds, stowed away from prying eyes
in damp, unventilated cellars. Sometimes, he said, after being paid a
lump sum for outright adoption of a child, these women would then
pass the infant on to someone else who offered care on the basis of a
weekly payment. They would then disappear, paying no further instalments and pocketing the profit. Alternatively, if paid perhaps five
pounds for outright adoption, they would pass the child on to another
farmer asking only three pounds. Unqualified midwives were said to
be deeply involved in these transactions. According to Ardill, they would
offer to handle both the birth and disposal of the unwanted infant.
This was effected either by leaving the child near the Benevolent
Asylum or by passing it on at profit to a commercial baby-boarder.55
This outlawing of the midwife and baby-farmer ignored the fact
that, as late as the 1890s, the lives even of wanted and well-to-do children were precarious. Once a child became prey to the feared gastroenteritic diseases of childhood, there was little even a trained practitioner
could do to prevent an agonising and messy death. As Dr Litchfield
conceded in 1914, some tried chloroform, others mustard baths and
intravenous injections of salt solutions. Of the value of alcohol there
could be no doubt. It should be given freely, along with a brisk
purgative of castor oil, for ‘the old plan of continuous and gentle
purgation remains the best procedure’.56 Most doctors resorted to
opiates, yet it was impoverished parents, and particularly women,
who were suspected of overdosing with sedatives like ‘Mother’s
Friend’ or ‘Godfrey’s Cordial’.57
The denigration of working-class foster-care also ignored the fact
that even infants boarded out in approved, charitable homes died
with alarming frequency. This was in spite of attempts to contain the
deaths by limiting admissions to children over two. Alternatively a
pool of wet-nurses would be employed to whom infants were fostered
out at a cost of twelve shillings a week. Even so, in 1902, deathrates
of children at Sydney’s Waitara Foundling Home were admitted to be
almost 88 per cent. At the Ashfield Infants’ Home that year, despite
certain new strategies (further discussed below), the rate was nearly
45 per cent.58
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In the impoverished family, finding pure food and clean linen for a
distressed, dying infant was no easy task. Even after weaning, supplying nourishment remained problematic. Philanthropists had been
aware of this but doctors were less sympathetic, especially as medical
handbooks for mothers and for domestic science courses stressed that
young children should be fed sparingly on a plain diet at strictly
policed intervals, with alcohol and spicy animal foods strictly prohibited. As early as the 1860s, municipal health officers had classified
improper diet of children as one of the ‘noxious nuisances’ with
which they had to deal. These and other doctors declared that more
infants were killed by unsuitable food than by starvation or disease.
There was also little realisation that impoverished mothers and nurses
themselves were poorly nourished.59
With respect to infant bedding, the gin-case was universal among
the poor,60 but parents stood condemned whether they resorted to
these makeshift cradles or took infants into their own bed. Doctors
were adamant that infants must sleep in a bed of their own, partly to
guard against ‘overlaying’ and partly because of the fear of sexual
contamination, yet most adults and children shared beds when both
space and furniture were at a premium. What reformers construed as
neglect was often part of everyday existence. For instance, many
families themselves lived in overcrowded, unventilated cellars. Here
conformity to the fastidious regimen of hygienic care was impossible,
for the cries of an infant in need of comforting or deliberately woken
to be regularly fed would have been taxing in the extreme. Nor were
these critics correct in assuming that working people were less
attached to their own and other people’s children than the ‘good
mother’ herself. The poor consistently offered temporary or permanent care for their neighbour’s orphaned and destitute young. But
theirs was a world where childhood could not be sheltered, secluded
or highly structured, where children ran much higher risks of accidents
and illness, and where people coped with the ever-present likelihood
of suffering and death less by the sentiment and display of the reformers
than with passive acceptance of the pain and injustice they daily
witnessed or endured. The dying and the dead were common sights,
and those who attended the sick would rarely call a doctor unless to
make sure that the sufferer was really dead.61
Nor did a backyard burial rather than an official interment
necessarily imply that murder had been committed. In early Sydney
there is some evidence that the medieval notion that the stillborn
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brought ill-omen remained current, prompting the notion that these
corpses and perhaps also the unbaptised should be disposed of quickly
and at night. Even those who sought a more respectable burial could
be thwarted. Rose Lindsay recalled her mother’s grief when, following the death of her newborn child, Pa drank away the three pounds
she gave him to fetch the undertaker, and eventually buried the child
near the shack like a family pet. For a woman who took in a baby to
nurse, and who was unable to contact the parent when the child died,
finding the sum needed even for a simple burial could be a problem.
Nor did the use of a municipal cemetery imply any superior attitude
either to child health or public hygiene. Dead pauper children were
buried in mass, often shallow graves which were themselves a health
hazard.62 Even qualified practitioners disposed of placenta in the
backyard.63
Yet reformers, and especially doctors, displayed an increasing
willingness to label child mortality among the poor as child murder.
At the Victorian Royal Commission on Charitable Institutions in 1890,
Dr Rowan, though an experienced obstetrician popular with outpatients at the Women’s Hospital, went so far as to declare that even
the deaths of children whose mothers had previously brought them
to a doctor for advice was infanticide, for, he alleged, the fact that the
babies died showed that neither the doctor’s advice nor his medicine
had been taken.64 Any woman who boarded infants who wasted away
from diarrhoeal complaints was liable to the charge of having deliberately starved them.65
Working-class women who eked out a living by taking in infants as
lodgers stood doubly condemned because of the belief that they were
making a brisk profit from this ‘trade’. Yet state systems to board out
infants and older children did not assume that foster-parents should
not be paid. This anomaly was underlined in New South Wales in
1896 when, in response to escalating costs during the depression, it
was decided to allow boarding-out of destitute children with their
own mothers (provided these women were classified as respectable
and deserving of such largesse). The allowance paid to birth-mothers
was half that paid to foster-parents operating in the state system.66
Stereotypes of good and bad mothering thus provided the
rationale by which special infant protection legislation was achieved
and enforced, which in turn helped usher in the modern, medicalised
family as a key unit in a commonly held, national culture. The
sensational baby-farming cases and hangings which accompanied or
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followed the passing of the protective legislation legitimated this new
order, helping to establish medical authority in maternity and childhood
and underline the responsibilities of women as full-time mothers. In
the case of John and Sarah Makin, of the infant bodies exhumed by
police, the only one which could be positively identified was known
to have died of marasmus and diarrhoea, for Makin had taken it to
a doctor for advice shortly before it died. Nevertheless, medical
testimony that the child wasted away while being fed on Nestlés milk
was taken as proof of deliberate intent to murder it. It was admitted
that the Makins had been providing foster-care for infants for many
years and that it was only recently that their dealings had become
‘irregular’, but the various aliases and subterfuges which they had
adopted, perhaps to evade inspection, were taken as certifying their
guilt. The fact that Sarah Makin had been both a midwife and a wetnurse was no help to her case.67
In Melbourne, Frances Knorr, who was tried for child murder in
December 1893 and hanged early in 1894, had been reduced to destitution when her husband was imprisoned soon after their marriage.
Following the birth of her first child at the Women’s Hospital, she
took in a baby to wet-nurse, boarding out her own baby to another
woman, and subsequently began to advertise for infants. Some of
these she passed on to foster homes but others died in her care and
were buried in the backyard. The judge admitted there was no proof
of murder, but the fact that Mrs Knorr was a ‘needy woman’ and ‘living
on a very precarious system’ was taken as a motive for infanticide.
That she knew the law relating to boarding-out of children and
notification of their deaths, yet buried the bodies in the yard, was also
seen as evidence of guilt.68 As in the Azaria Chamberlain case, somewhat dubious forensic evidence was used to assist prosecution, despite
the fact that the infant corpses were often in an advanced state of
decomposition and, buried coffinless, likely to have been damaged in
the course of being disinterred.
These anomalies in the attack on baby-farming were further rationalised by the emphasis on breast-feeding in the medical formula for
infant care and its role in developing the ‘mothering instinct’. Though
strongly at odds with the doctors’ emphasis on dispassionate, sanitised
infant care, this theory postulated that the modern woman had lost
the ‘instinct’ to offer full-time, maternal care. This was another reason
why the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ was occurring and why all mothers
needed special training for the task of caring for the newborn,
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including special instruction in breast-feeding. Though physicians had
long been convinced that mothers, selfish and vain, would shirk
breast-feeding if they possibly could, the turn-of-the century concern
to decrease infant mortality meant that unprecedented emphasis was
placed on this aspect of child-raising. Doctors began to speak of how
breast-feeding not only spared the infant from the hazards of diarrhoea
but how it forged a mysterious, subconscious bond between mother
and child, making her less likely to abandon her child.69 This was in
spite of the fact that some authorities were sexualising breast-feeding,70
a theory which might have prompted doctors to insist that the
practice should not become an excuse for cuddling the child but
should be performed at strictly timed intervals.
These theories had repercussions for the now maligned profession
of wet-nursing. As good breast-feeders, one would have thought wetnurses ran little risk of being categorised as bad mothers. Indeed, they
had been indispensable in the various colonial institutions which
housed abandoned infants, like the Female Factories of the convict
era and later the Sydney Benevolent Asylum.71 Until the development
of reliable milk substitutes, even the most medicalised institutions were
obliged to employ wet-nurses, as advertisements by Melbourne’s
Department of Neglected Children in 1890 attest. As well, most
family doctors continued to recommend wet-nursing, albeit only when
and if breast-feeding failed.72 According to Melbourne’s Dr Snowball,
in 1890 wet-nurses employed in private families might earn one
pound a week, though other evidence suggests payment was more
likely to be half this rate.73 The testimony of Caddie: The Autobiography
of a Sydney Barmaid suggests that wet-nursing remained a possible
source of income for the impoverished mother into the 1920s.74
Nevertheless, wet-nurses had long been regarded with much
suspicion by spokesmen on children’s rights and health.75 This was
partly because their use was linked to the supposed disinclination of
mothers to nurse their children. As well, the fact that the wet-nurse
was of lower social status and the belief that she had disposed of her
own infant meant physicians were by no means enamoured of her.
She was also a sexualised figure, which helped arouse fears that her
supposed moral failings might be transmitted to the infants she
nourished. This notion preceded but grew with eugenic ideals and
growing acceptance of germ theory, which suggested the wet-nurse
might be a ‘carrier’ of syphilis. Finally, the wet-nurse offended because
she was perceived as making a profit both from her body and from
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child-rearing, and thus fell somewhere between the prostitute and the
baby-farmer in the ‘she-devil’ ranks.76
These dilemmas were reflected in admissions and discharge policies
at the charitable lying-in homes and infants’ asylums and became even
more marked with the development of a new theory about the crucial
role of the ‘mothering instinct’ in the preservation of infant life. Thus
Dr Litchfield informed the Birth Rate Commission in New South
Wales that infants left in foundling hospitals dwindled away not just
because of infectious disease but for want of their mother’s nursing
and handling. This opinion was shared by A. W. Green, Chief Officer
administrating the Children’s Protection Act: ‘We consider that the
mothering of the child is the main business in the matter of mortality’. William Eury, Senior Inspector of the State Children’s Relief Board
agreed, as did Mrs Graham, Matron of the Benevolent Asylum.77
While loving attention from a single care-giver is undoubtedly
important to infant well-being, coinciding with attacks on ‘respectable’ women for limiting the size of their families, this theory was a
double-edged sword. It empowered the ‘good mother’ but pathologised
all women who failed to marry and reproduce, or, even worse, failed
to keep their children alive.
This growing insistence on personal care by the natural mother
might have suggested a case for payments to single mothers. With
growing concern over baby-farming, however, policy in the lying-in
homes moved towards forcing inmates to stay on for prolonged
periods to feed their infants, it being feared that early discharge would
encourage the mother either to dispose of the child to a baby-farmer
or become a wet-nurse, either of which, it was thought, ensured the
death of her own child. Reflecting growing medical influence, in
1893, Professor Anderson Stuart mentioned that it was now the
Ashfield Home’s policy to prevent the separation of mothers and
children, that is to try to intern the mothers until the child was weaned.
The following year, new rules declared that only in emergencies
would the child of an unmarried mother be admitted alone.78
By now, it was breast-feeding, rather than the old, charitable
formula of labour and prayer, which was coming to be seen as vital to
the mother’s reform, as well, of course, as the child’s health. In 1892,
Edward Maxted suggested that the solution to increasing illegitimacy
was to ensure that lying-in homes function as incarceration, with
classification, ‘detention and employment of inmates’ and special
penalties for ‘old offenders’.79 At Ashfield, by 1909, no mother could
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leave without the child, despite the fact that this made it much harder
for her to secure employment without leaving her child in foster care,
as the charitable lady founders had been well aware. By 1914 the
Australasian Medical Gazette came out strongly against philanthropic
amateurs who failed to enforce the principle of keeping mother and
child together.80
The emphasis now placed on personal care by the biological mother
of course conflicted with concurrent policies enabling the removal of
Aboriginal children and, by the 1920s, placement of selected illegitimate children into adoption. It was however of ongoing relevance for
disciplining married mothers in ‘fit’ families, operating as a ‘scientific’
impediment to women seeking paid work or perhaps careers outside
the home. Even if such mothers were unable to breast-feed, there was
no way they could escape their responsibility to meet the psychic
needs of their baby. Mothering theory thus stigmatised not only the
wet-nurse or baby-farmer but any woman who declined or was unable
to devote herself to reproduction, as deviant, dangerous and unnatural,
and therefore not to be trusted with the vulnerable young.
As with the infant welfare movement, so in the case of the regulation of motherhood, definite change towards compliance with
modern, medical regimes can be charted by the interwar period. The
transition from anarchic, high rates of fertility and high infant mortality to low, controlled birthrates had made possible increased life
expectancy and, with this, enormous public investment in the individual child.81 Accordingly, the unruly, Rabelaisian world of uncontrolled
fertility and unregulated disposal of offspring had been replaced not
only by state intervention in child-raising and medical surveillance of
childbirth but by a more sanitised attitude to sexuality, reproduction,
death, and to decisions about which children should be permitted to
survive and who should undertake their training and care. Impregnation,
the maternal body, birth and breast-feeding were now universally to
be discreetly managed and hidden from the public gaze. Yet behind
closed, clinical doors, the bodies of all women and children were now
to come under the scrutiny of ‘public health’. Illegitimate babies
would be produced as if immaculately conceived from licensed lyingin homes controlled by doctors, ready-made for adoption into model
homes. Better understanding of nutrition would help prevent the
rickety and deformed, while the untreatable would disappear into a
network of medically supervised institutions and doctors would
dispose of the unwanted and the dead. As child-saving feminists had
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predicted, this was indeed the ‘century of the child’, dedicated to
baby shows, the ‘body beautiful’ and the cultivation of youth. What
had not changed, of course, was either the maternal deathrate or the
vulnerability of women to stand accused of lacking maternal instinct
and hence being likely to murder the unwanted child. Indeed, if the
literary sources are to be trusted, the grotesque image of infant
corpses of the turn-of-the century campaign against infanticide had
simply been replaced by more covert, less dramatic references to the
botched abortion and the dead mother.82
This was perhaps the point of the music-hall song. Though perhaps
a popular attack on Sarah Makin for having apparently committed
(like Lindy Chamberlain) an abominable act, the image of the robust
resurrection of the babies, seen as so abused by reformers, could also
be read as a mockery of the sanitary child-saving agenda itself.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
L. Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales (1844; repr. Ure Smith, Sydney,
1973), p. 95.
M. Gilmore, Marri’d and Other Verses (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1910), pp. 35–6;
Selected Verse (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1948), p. 293.
I owe this reference to the late Phillip Geeves who unfortunately could not recall the
name of his informant. See also his column, Sydney Morning Herald (SMH ), 29 March
1982.
P. O’Brien, ‘The Gaze of the “Ghosts”: Images of Aboriginal Women in NSW and Port
Phillip 1800–1850’ (History IV Thesis, Sydney University, 1992), repr. in Maps, Dreams,
History, ed. J. Kociumbas (Dept of History, Sydney University, 1998).
J. Marcus, ‘Prisoner of Discourse: The Dingo, the Dog and the Baby’, Anthropology
Today, 5 (1989), pp. 15–19; ‘From Fairy to Witch: Imagery and Myth in the Azaria
Case’, Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2 (1984), pp. 90–107.
See, for instance, ‘Judged’, in Poems, n.d. (Collected by A. E. Currie) (typescript, Mitchell
Library, Sydney).
For the Makin case, see also J. Allen, Sex and Secrets (Oxford University Press,
Melbourne, 1990), p. 35; P. N. Grabosky, Sydney in Ferment (Australian National
University Press, Canberra, 1977), pp. 20, 86, 95.
N. Hicks, ‘This Sin and Scandal’: Australia’s Population Debate, 1891–1911 (Australian
National University Press, Canberra, 1978); C. Bacchi, ‘The Nature–Nurture Debate in
Australia, 1900–1914’, Historical Studies, 19 (1980), pp. 199–212; F. Kelly, ‘Feminism
and the Family: Brettina Smyth’, in Rebels and Radicals, ed. E. Fry (George Allen &
Unwin, Sydney, 1983), pp. 134–47; J. Matthews, Good and Mad Women (George Allen
& Unwin, Sydney, 1984), pp. 74–89.
P. Morton, ‘Dead Babies: Constructing an Image of Urban Normality in late Victorian
Adelaide’, in Images of the Urban, ed. L. Finch and C. McConville (Sunshine Coast
University College, Maroochydore, 1997), p. 106; P. Mein Smith, Mothers and King
Baby (Macmillan, London, 1997), pp. 12–24, 37–61.
M. Roe, Nine Australian Progressives (University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1984);
S. Garton, Medicine and Madness (University of New South Wales Press, Kensington, 1988),
pp. 54–5; J. Kociumbas, Australian Childhood (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997), pp. 148–9.
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AZARIA’S ANTECEDENTS
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
157
NSW Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth-Rate and on the Mortality of
Infants, 1 (1904), pp. 17, 52.
R. White, Inventing Australia (George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982), pp. 63–79,
116–19.
S. Magarey et al. (eds), Debutante Nation (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993); K. Schaffer,
Women and the Bush (Cambridge University Press, Sydney, 1988).
G. Davison, ‘The City-Bred Child and Urban Reform in Melbourne 1900–1940’, in
Social Process and the City, ed. P. Williams (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983), pp. 143–74.
A. O’Brien, Poverty’s Prison (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1988), pp. 112–19.
J. McCalman, Struggletown (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1985), pp. 62–3;
S. Fitzgerald, Rising Damp (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987), pp. 191–4.
J. Allen, Rose Scott (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994), pp. 115–17, 182,
185–8; P. Grimshaw, ‘Bessie Harrison Lee and the Fight for Voluntary Motherhood’, in
Double Time, ed. M. Lake and F. Kelly (Penguin, Ringwood, 1985), pp. 139–47.
R. Howe and S. Swain, Single Mothers and their Children (Cambridge University Press,
Melbourne, 1995), pp. 3–6, 10; S. Swain, ‘The Concealment of Birth in NineteenthCentury Victoria’, Lilith, 5 (1988), pp. 139–47.
G. Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (Melbourne University Press,
Carlton, 1978), pp. 224–5; A. Mayne, Fever, Squalor and Vice (University of Queensland
Press, St Lucia, 1982), pp. 102–23; L. Finch, The Classing Gaze (Allen & Unwin, Sydney,
1993), pp. 115–20; R. Holden, Orphans of History (Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1999),
pp. 48–52; Morton, ‘Dead Babies’, p. 107.
Howe and Swain, pp. 91–6; J. Allen, ‘Octavius Beale Reconsidered: Infanticide,
Babyfarming and Abortion in NSW 1880–1939’, in Sydney Labour History Group,
What Rough Beast? (George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982), pp. 111–29; Allen, Sex and
Secrets, pp. 26–34.
Allen, ‘Octavius Beale’, p. 125; M. Gilding, The Making and the Breaking of the
Australian Family (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991), pp. 85–6; K. Laster, ‘Frances Knorr:
“She Killed Babies, Didn’t She?”’, in Double Time, pp. 148–56.
B. Dickey, ‘The Evolution of Care for Destitute Children in New South Wales,
1875–1901’, Journal of Australian Studies, 4 (1979), pp. 39–57; B. Gandevia, Tears
Often Shed (Charter Books, Gordon NSW, 1978), pp. 122–3; P. Curson, Times of Crisis
(Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1985), pp. 20, 40.
R. Teale, Colonial Eve (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1978), pp. 135–44; NSW
Select Committee on Children’s Protection Bill, 1891–2 (E. W. Fosbery).
C. K. Mackellar, The Child, the Law and the State (W. A. Gullick, Sydney, 1907), pp. 8–9.
Gandevia, Tears Often Shed, pp. 103–5; Dickey, ‘Evolution of Care for Destitute
Children’, pp. 54–6.
Spectator (Sydney), 22 May 1892, p. 13.
Echo, 15 November 1892, cited in K. Bagnall, ‘“Done to Death”: Narratives of BabyFarming and Infanticide in Australia 1890–1914’ (History IV Thesis, Sydney University,
1996), p. 1.
Dr A. Roberts, NSW Select Committee on the Working Classes, 1859–60, p. 155; Dr C.
McCarthy, On the Excessive Mortality of Infants and its Causes (George Robertson,
Melbourne, 1865), pp. 3, 4, 10; Dr W. Jenkins, The Family Medical Index (F. F. Bailliere,
Melbourne, 1874), p. 4; Dr Creed, New South Wales Parliamentary Debates (NSW PD),
58, 1892, pp. 6575–6 (Debate on the Infants’ and Children’s Protection Bill);
E. Maxted, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 February 1891.
This re-evaluation of medical expertise is often implied rather than explicitly argued, but
see Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby, pp. 176–91, 242–3, 246–7; J. McCalman, Sex
and Suffering (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1999), pp. 17–30, 77, 147, 169;
L. Finch, ‘Caring for Colonial Infants: Parenting on the Frontiers’, Australian Historical
Studies, 29 (1998), pp. 109–26.
E. J. Yeo, The Contest for Social Science (Rivers Oram Press, London, 1996), pp. 216–23.
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158
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
GENDER AND HISTORY
N. Williamson, ‘“She Walked ... with Great Purpose”: Mary Kirkpatrick and the History
of Midwifery in New South Wales’, in Worth her Salt, ed. M. Bevege et al. (Hale &
Iremonger, Sydney, 1982), pp. 3–15; NSW Midwives’ Association, With Courage and
Devotion (Anvil Press, Wamberal NSW, 1984), pp. 25, 34.
C. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4); B. Baynton, Bush Studies (1902; repr. Angus
& Robertson, Sydney, 1980), p. 118.
P. Aries, Centuries of Childhood (Cape, London, 1973), pp. 395–9; cf. L. Pollock,
A Lasting Relationship (New England University Press, London, 1987), pp. 11–15;
J. Kincaid, Child-Loving (Routledge, New York, 1994), pp. 62–70.
L. Davidoff and C. Hall Family Fortunes (Hutchinson, London, 1988), pp. 319–56.
Kociumbas, Childhood, pp. 112–29; R. Van Krieken, Children and the State (Allen &
Unwin, Sydney, 1995), pp. 45–60; H. Goodall, ‘Saving the Children: Gender and the
Colonization of Aboriginal Children in NSW, 1788–1990’, Aboriginal Law Bulletin, 2,
no. 44 (1990), pp. 6–9.
Colonial women’s philanthropy has a large literature. For recent summary, P. Grimshaw
et al. (eds), Creating a Nation (Penguin, Ringwood, 1994), pp. 160–76, 182–6.
L. Gardiner, Royal Children’s Hospital (Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, 1970), p. 11;
First Annual Report of the Sydney Foundling Hospital, 1875, p. 6; Fourth Annual
Report, 1878, p. 6.
Recent assessments of germ theory include M. J. Lewis, ‘Maternity Care and Puerperal
Fever in Sydney’, in Women and Children First, ed. V. Fildes et al. (Routledge, London,
1992), p. 33; McCalman, Sex and Suffering, pp. 53–72.
J. Kociumbas, ‘Children and Society in New South Wales and Victoria, 1860–1914’,
(PhD Thesis, Sydney University, 1983), pp. 106–13, 118–23, 126–7; K. Reiger, The
Disenchantment of the Home (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985), p. 180; Finch,
Classing Gaze, p. 78–9.
Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby, pp. 95–100; Kociumbas, ‘Children and Society’,
pp.106–13. Cf. Reiger, Disenchantment of the Home, pp. 140–48, who identifies this
regimen as introduced primarily after c.1918.
NSW Dept of Public Health, Before Baby is Born (Sydney, 1914), pp. 3, 8, 10–11;
Australasian Medical Gazette (AMG), 20 June 1914, pp. 548–9. See also Reiger,
Disenchantment of the Home, p. 85; A. Oakley, The Captive Womb (Blackwell, Oxford,
1984), p. 53; L. Finch and J. Stratton, ‘The Australian Working Class and the Practice of
Abortion 1880–1939’, Journal of Australian Studies, 23 (1988), pp. 45–64.
Some ladies did for a time retain powerful roles, see S. Swain, ‘Selina Sutherland: Child
Rescuer’, in Double Time, pp. 109–16.
Eugenics has a large literature, but see A. Curthoys, ‘Eugenics, Feminism and Birth
Control: The Case of Marion Piddington’, Hecate, 15 (1989), pp. 73–89; R. Watts,
‘Beyond Nature and Nurture: Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Australian History’,
Australian Journal of Politics and History (AJPH), 40 (1994), pp. 318–34.
See, for instance, M. Gilmore, ‘The Sins of the Fathers’, in The Passionate Heart (Angus
& Robertson, Sydney, 1918), pp. 104–5.
Kelly, ‘Feminism and the Family’, p. 142; Teale, Colonial Eve, p. 141; Allen, Rose Scott,
p. 192.
Dr R. Arthur, The Needed Change in the Age of Consent (Christian World Press, Sydney,
1896), pp. 5, 10; NSW PD, 11, Second Series (1903), p. 1150 (Dr Mackellar),
pp. 1248–50 (Dr Nash); Allen, Rose Scott, pp. 185–8.
Mackellar, The Child, the Law and the State, pp. 9–10; Allen, Rose Scott, p. 191.
For opposition to such legislation, see for instance N. Lindsay, My Mask (Angus &
Robertson, Sydney, 1970), p. 63.
Grimshaw et al. (eds), Creating a Nation, pp. 227–8, Kociumbas, ‘Children and Society’,
pp. 224–8.
Davison, ‘City-Bred Child’, pp. 153–63; Kociumbas, ‘Children and Society’,
pp. 194–201, 249–51.
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51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
159
NSW Select Committee on the Employment of Children, 6 (1875–6), pp. 916–18 (Dr
Renwick); Vic. Royal Commission on Employees in Shops, 2 (1884), p. viii (Dr Beaney).
Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 72, 97, 158.
Yeo, Contest for Social Science, pp. 185–6; M. Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease
(Macmillan, London, 1997), pp. 107–14, 138–40, 166–73.
NSW Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Second Annual Report, 1890,
pp. 2–5.
NSW Select Committee on the Children’s and Infants’ Life Protection Bills 1891–2,
pp. 11–14; Mackellar, The Child, the Law and the State, p. 68.
W. F. Litchfield, ‘The Prevention and Treatment of Summer Diarrhoea’, AMG, 28 March
1914, pp. 269–72.
Cf. L. Finch, ‘Caring for Colonial Infants’, pp. 113–15.
NSW PD, Second Series, 9 (1902), pp. 5083–4; NSW Statistical Register, 1911, p. 520.
McCarthy, On the Excessive Mortality of Infants, p. 10.
M. Gilmore, Old Days, Old Ways (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1934), p. 10; Dr G.
Fullerton, The Family Medical Guide (Joseph Cook, Sydney, 1875), p. 470. For bedsharing, NSW Select Committee on the Working Classes, 1859–60, p. 92.
G. Karskins, The Rocks (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1997), pp. 49, 119;
Kociumbas, Childhood, pp. xi–xv, 113–17; O’Brien, pp. 99–100, 112–13, 135–40.
Karskins, The Rocks, p. 115; R. Lindsay, Ma and Pa (Ure Smith, Sydney, 1963), p. 67;
Deputation of NSW Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children to Mr Carruthers,
13 August 1891, AONSW, Dept of Education, Subject Files, 20/12605; Dr J. Creed,
Modern Cremation (Cremation Society of NSW, Sydney, 1909), p. 4.
McCalman, Sex and Suffering, pp. 173, 186.
Vic. Royal Commission on Charitable Institutions 1892–3, p. 243.
Deputation of NSW Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children to Mr Carruthers
(13 August 1891).
Kociumbas, ‘Children and Society’, pp. 90–95; 174–8; O’Brien, ‘Gaze of the “Ghosts”’,
p. 118.
SMH, 9–29 November 1892 (Coroner’s Inquest).
Argus, 2 December 1890, p. 10.
NSW PD, Second Series, 9 (1902), p. 5355 (Dr Nash); p.5364 (Dr Mackellar); C. K.
Mackellar, ‘Infancy and Health’, Report of Proceedings of Imperial Health Conference,
(Victoria League, London, 1914), p. 180.
S. Kern, ‘Explosive Intimacy: Psychodynamics of the Victorian Family’, Journal of
Psychohistory, 1 (1973–4), p. 448.
NSW Second Report of the Commission on Public Charities, 1873–4, p. 12 (S. W.
Mansefield), p. 111 (Mrs Blundell); Ashfield Infants’ Home, Annual Report, 1875, p. 10;
Inspector of Industrial and Reformatory Schools, Report, 1882, Appendix, p. 51.
J. Jamieson, How to Feed Infants (Stillwell & Knight, Melbourne, 1871), p. 45; Australian
Health Society, Sanitary Tracts (Australian Health Society, Melbourne, 1882), p. 3;
Fullerton, Family Medical Guide, pp. 472–3; P. Muskett, The Feeding and Management
of Australian Infants in Health and Disease (Empson, Sydney, 1903), pp. 43–6;
P. Muskett, The Illustrated Australian Medical Guide, 1 (Brooks, Sydney, 1909), p. 480;
E. Aitken, The Australian Mother’s Own Book (George B. Philip, Sydney, 1912), pp. 34–5;
‘The Australian Baby’, by a Medical Practitioner, in The Australian Household Guide,
ed. Lady Hackett (E. S. Wigg, Perth, 1916).
Vic. Royal Commission on Charitable Institutions, 1892–3, p. 277; Howe and Swain,
Single Mothers and their Children, p. 130.
Caddie: A Sydney Barmaid (Sun Books, Melbourne, 1966), pp. 36–9.
J. J. Rousseau, Emile (1762; repr. Dent, London, 1976), pp. 13, 24; W. Cadogan,
An Essay Upon Nursing and the Management of Children (London, 1772), pp. 36–8;
W. Buchan, Advice to Mothers (Cadell & Davies, London, 1803), pp. 233–5.
L. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body (Beacon Press, Boston, 1993), pp. 66–74.
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77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
GENDER AND HISTORY
NSW Royal Commission on Decline of Birth Rate, 2, pp. 55, 59, 68, 150.
Ashfield Infants’ Home, Annual Reports, 1886, p. 13; 1889, p. 11; 1893, p. 4; 1894,
p. 24; 1899, p. 4; 1902, p. 5.
SMH, 22 July 1982, p. 6.
AMG, 35 (1914), p. 145; see also Dr H. Mayo, ‘Some Observations on the Methods of
the Preservation of Infant Life in Use in Australia’, AMG, 32 (1912), pp. 503–5; Liberal
Woman, 1 March 1914, pp. 85–6.
A. Larson, Growing Up in Melbourne (Australian National University, Canberra, 1994),
pp. 27–56; Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby, pp. 8–35.
J. Matthews, ‘Building the Body Beautiful’, Australian Feminist Studies, 5 (1987),
pp. 17–34; E. Key, The Century of the Child (G. P. Putnam & Sons, New York, 1909);
Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 165.
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001.