John Makin was hanged his wife was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Makins were convicted of the murder of baby Horace Amber Murray in 1893. He and his wife Sarah were two of the most notorious baby farmers in Sydney, and it is their story that Annie Cossins tells here. ‘Mr Ray’ was in fact one of the many aliases of John Makin.

We are on the eve of going to the suburbs on a poultry farm to a fine healthy part, so if you will come down we will explain things and make arrangements.ġ09 George-street, Redfern, up the steps. She will have every attention and the love of a kind mother. You need never trouble about your baby’s welfare. It is not just for the sake of the money, but just to give the child an outfit. I will take your little baby for life at a small sum of £3 or £3 10s, or whatever terms we may come to. The advertisement above received this reply: At a time of high infant mortality, the death of a baby was not uncommon. Their cries could be subdued with liberal amounts of the opiate-laced Godfrey’s Cordial. The babies invariably died, most commonly of neglect and starvation. Sometimes the mother would want to visit the child after the ‘adoption’, sometimes she would provide baby clothes or even an ongoing stipend for the child’s needs.īaby farmers answered these advertisements and took in far more babies than they could possibly look after. Often a ‘premium’, usually a few pounds, would be offered to whomever took the child. WANTED, Kind Lady to adopt little girl 2 months’ old, or to care for.

Newspapers regularly ran advertisements such as this: In this environment baby farming thrived. Each week the corpses of babies abandoned by desperate mothers were recovered in public places.

In New South Wales the Children’s Protection Act was only passed in 1892. There was no contraception, no safe abortion, no support for poor families (much less single mothers), and no child welfare. If you were unmarried and pregnant, or married and unable to afford another child, you had very few choices in Sydney in the late 1800s. Sydney in the 1890s: shame, syphilis and infanticide.

The Baby Farmers by Annie Cossins