Margaret Heffernan, known as Maggie, was born in 1878 and raised on her parents’ farm near Gundaring in Victoria, at a time when the colony had not yet become a state. In her early twenties, she left home to work in domestic service for the Hayes family near Albury. Her employer, Mrs. Hayes, was consistently pleased with her polite and diligent work.
After a little over a year, Maggie suddenly left, telling Mrs. Hayes she had met a young gentleman and intended to marry. The man in question was known in the community as something of a flirt, but the marriage never took place. Within months, Maggie returned to live with her parents, and her mother grew concerned about her health.
A local doctor attributed her condition to physical weakness and advised rest. In reality, Maggie was in the early stages of pregnancy. At around seven months pregnant, Maggie traveled to Melbourne, believing the father of her unborn child would marry her. When she arrived, she discovered he had given her a false address and had no intention of marrying her.
Unwilling to return home and expose her family to local gossip, she remained in Melbourne despite having very little money. She found work at a hotel owned by a man named Mr. Ralph, doing her best to disguise her condition. She was aware that the city had hospitals and refuges for women in her situation, many of whom were poor, alone, and shunned by society.
On December 29, 1899, Maggie gave birth to a baby boy, whom she named George. The hotel owner sent for a doctor, and his wife accompanied Maggie to the Women’s Hospital. On the birth certificate, Maggie did not name the father and changed her own name to Joanna Margaret Heffernan. She stayed in the hospital for eleven days, which was standard at the time.
Nurses described her as a good mother who cared for her baby and fed him well. After leaving the hospital, she moved to Mrs. Cameron’s home in Armadale, a place for unmarried young women with babies, where she was permitted to stay for two weeks. She left after just six days, telling one of the other young women that the baby would be cared for by the father’s mother.
Before leaving, she wrote a letter to her parents explaining her situation and mailed it at the post office. That very day, the post office burned to the ground, and the letter was destroyed. It never reached her parents. Because they heard no response, Maggie assumed they did not support her.
When she left Mrs. Cameron’s home, she returned to Melbourne but struggled to find a place to stay. Establishments refused to take in an unmarried young lady with a baby. A kind woman eventually directed her to a restaurant, where she secured a bed for herself and baby George for the night.
She was exhausted, hungry, dehydrated, and still recovering from childbirth just three weeks earlier. On Tuesday, January 16, 1900, after being given a cup of tea, Maggie left the restaurant. It was a hot summer day in Melbourne, and she had nowhere to go. She walked the streets and sat in parks, trying to care for her three-week-old baby while contemplating her situation.
She bought a local paper hoping to find employment, but as an unmarried woman with a baby, suitable work was extremely difficult to find. The next day, January 17, she returned to the Women’s Hospital. She was very sad and told the doctor that her baby had died. She asked if there was a position as a wet nurse, a profession where a woman feeds another woman’s baby.
Such positions had become less common by 1900 due to advances in synthetic feeding practices. While Maggie was speaking to the doctor at the hospital, a laborer working at the South Melbourne Wharf saw something floating in the water. He retrieved it and realized it was the body of a recently born baby boy. He immediately contacted the police.
Bodies of women and babies had previously been found in the Yarra River, many floating into Port Phillip Bay and out to sea. It was presumed many bodies, especially those of babies, were never found. The police wrapped the baby in a blanket and went to the Women’s Hospital, the obvious place to start. The baby found in the river matched the age of Maggie’s recently deceased baby, and Maggie had just started work as a wet nurse that very day.
The doctor, realizing she was in a vulnerable state, wondered if the recovered baby might be her child. The police spoke to Maggie, but she reassured them the baby was not George. She claimed she had given her baby to the father’s mother, who lived in Sydney. She told an elaborate story about a woman she respectfully called Mrs.
Hardy, the baby’s grandmother. She said that when she left Mrs. Cameron’s home, she traveled by train to meet Mrs. Hardy, who agreed to meet her at Wangaratta, a city in northeastern Victoria.
She claimed they all stayed at a hotel there before parting the next morning, and she even gave police the name of the hotel. She also stated that Mrs. Hardy lived at 204 King Street in Sydney. Police checked her story.
The hotel existed, but neither Margaret Heffernan nor Mrs. Hardy had stayed there. No one by that name lived at 204 King Street in Sydney. When questioned a second time, Maggie began to change her story, but again the police did not believe her.
They urged her to tell the truth. She broke down and said, “Yes, I know I did wrong. ” She handed police the little gown and flannel and confessed to drowning her baby in the Yarra River. She tearfully described walking up and down the riverside for about an hour before sitting down near the edge of the water with the baby, who was clothed in a little gown and a small piece of flannel.
She removed them, then let the baby drop gently into the river. She said the baby was alive when she dropped him, and she did not look to see if he sank. She then walked away. It was around 1 p.
m. at the time. Maggie was arrested and charged with the murder of her son George and sent to Melbourne prison, where she was placed in the hospital wing in an apparent state of exhaustion. Despite her confession, Maggie pleaded not guilty at trial.
Her defense claimed she had been suffering from postnatal depression. It was revealed that after drowning her baby, she had caught the train back to the hotel owned by Mr. and Mrs. Ralph and stayed the night, telling them George had died at the hospital shortly after his birth.
Mrs. Ralph testified that Maggie looked weak and ill at the time. No witnesses were called to support Maggie or to comment on the claim of postnatal depression. It was common during trials to have people testify to the accused’s good character, but this did not happen on this occasion.
The judge asked the doctors giving evidence for the prosecution whether a defendant could have been suffering from postnatal depression. Both doctors replied that a woman suffering from that condition would be unable to give a clear account of her actions afterward. The proceedings lasted only 40 minutes before the judge turned to the jury. He said the case was very sad but more painful because it was so extremely plain.
The issue the jury had to deal with was whether the accused woman intentionally took her child to the river to drown it. He noted that when Dr. Stalwell was asked whether she would be able to state what had occurred if she had been suffering from temporary mania, to which women were liable, the doctor answered that she would not. Yet here was her description of the whole of her movements at the time of the crime.
The judge acknowledged that the woman was hard-pressed and that this demanded sympathy, but it did not prevent her from legal responsibility. The jury returned to ask if a verdict of manslaughter could be given, but the judge told them it could not. They had to decide whether the defendant intentionally committed the crime, even if under pressure of her circumstances. The jury later returned a verdict of guilty of murder but strongly recommended mercy based on her weakness, her mental health, and her situation.
The judge had no choice in the sentence. There was only one sentence for anyone who had committed murder: death by hanging. Upon hearing the sentence, Maggie fainted and had to be carried out of court. There was an immediate public reaction.
Outrage followed the conviction, and the press was inundated with letters from readers. A petition seeking mercy for Maggie was started, and during a three-week period, over 15,000 people signed it. Friends and neighbors came forward to describe her kind and gentle nature and her previously unblemished character. The families for whom she had worked spoke of her as a hard-working, polite, and conscientious young woman.
Her case was supported by prominent social reformer Vida Goldstein, who a year earlier had become secretary of the United Council for Women’s Suffrage. Goldstein visited Maggie in prison and wrote about her plight in the publication “The Australian Women’s Sphere. ” The case became well known not just in Victoria but throughout Australia. Goldstein reminded everyone that this poor young lady had been sentenced to death, but where was the father of the child?
He had abandoned her while she carried the baby, gave birth, and was then supposed to raise her son alone. The father was completely absolved from responsibility when it was his actions that had put the young lady in such a vulnerable and helpless situation. The attention generated by the case caused authorities to question whether the trial was fair and whether her medical condition had been properly assessed. The whole case needed to be reviewed.
While in prison, Maggie again became ill and was admitted to the prison hospital. This time, doctors diagnosed tuberculosis, although it is unlikely this diagnosis was correct. It did, however, lead to another petition calling for her to be freed. With so much public opinion in her favor and the belief that she posed no risk to society, in December 1901, after serving less than two years, Maggie was released from prison.
After spending time with her parents, she managed to rebuild her life, now known as Greta rather than Maggie. In 1909, she married a man named Joseph Henderson, and together they had two children. In 1915, Joseph was killed in a railway accident. He had been working as a train driver for the Butter Factory and was hit by a train while unloading.
This was another tragic event in Maggie’s life and left her a widow. Fortunately, her parents had been living close by and were able to help her bring up her children. Margaret Heffernan died in February 1966 at the age of 88 and was buried in the Bunyip Cemetery along with her husband and her parents.