Emma Williams' case demonstrates the horrific action that a single mother with no support could be forced to take. The Champion newspaper claimed in October 1895 that the case of Emma Williams would 'exhibit Victoria to the world as the very lowest and most degraded of all civilised communities'. Was the newspaper condemning the society or the criminal?

Emma and her husband arrived in Melbourne in 1893 from Tasmania but things went badly for her. Work was scarce because of the Depression; she became pregnant; and her husband died of typhoid. She tried unsuccessfully to give her son to a baby farmer or orphanage, and resorted to prostitution to survive.

In August 1895 the anguished mother drowned her baby son because he was a 'nuisance' and cried when she had clients. Emma was found guilty but her execution was delayed when she claimed, falsely, to be pregnant. Various public petitions against capital punishment were sent to the Executive Council but Emma was hanged on 4 November 1895, aged twenty-seven.

During the 1890s depression jobs were scarce, there was no state welfare and it was difficult to avoid becoming involved in petty crime. When Rudolph Knorr was sent to prison in February 1892 for selling furniture being bought on hire purchase, his wife Frances was left pregnant and penniless. She managed by 'baby farming' - looking after children whose mothers could not care for them.

In September 1892 the bodies of three babies were discovered in Brunswick. Frances was arrested and sent for trial in December. The Weekly Times described the 23-year old woman as 'white and careworn'. She probably suffered from epilepsy. The public was deeply divided when she was sentenced to be executed. The hangman, Thomas Jones, committed suicide two days before the event. His wife had threatened to leave him if he hanged Mrs Knorr. Nevertheless, Frances Knorr hanged on 15 January 1894. This was the first execution of a woman in Victoria since 1863.

Frances Knorr found little support either among newspapers of the day or among government officials, for they had all come to believe in the deterrent effect of capital punishment. Her execution was intended as a warning to other wayward women. The city's health officer, Dr Neil, told a royal commission in 1893 that, of about 500 post-mortems he had performed on child bodies, more than half indicated murder.

Janet Dibden expressed her feelings and described her life through her remarkable poems.

Janet had given birth to a large number of children, of whom five died while young. She was living apart from her husband when John Dibden was born on 20 November 1887.

Janet gave the baby to Ellen Gardner, a baby farmer, to care for. However, Gardner did not give the baby proper food, starving him and allowing him to become filthy and emaciated. About mid-December the condition of the child was noticed by some outsiders and he was returned to his mother. She continued to neglect him, and John died on 24 December 1887 of starvation.

Dibden and Gardner were found guilty of manslaughter. Janet was sentenced to four years gaol and Ellen three years, served at Old Melbourne Gaol. While Janet was in gaol she penned the following poem:

THE BROKENHEARTED MOTHER'S RECITATION
My age is fifty five,
My children their mother have despised;
In this world alone.
No daughter to say,
Dear mother, do come home;
My mother, I love so dear,
I am your son, I wish you were here.

Martha Needle was hanged in 1894, after Frances Knorr. Martha was an attractive woman with an apparently kindly disposition, but she was insane by any modern standards. Her friends were shocked when it was discovered she had poisoned her husband, daughters and prospective brother-in-law. She had grown up in a violent and abusive household, and had shown signs of mental instability as an adolescent, but had grown into a beautiful young woman and married at seventeen. After her children's deaths, before she was apprehended, she spent the insurance money on an elaborate family grave which she visited regularly.

She was hanged at the age of thirty. Martha had been raised in an unstable family and wreaked havoc on her own. Her story is unusual in this catalogue of misery, because her crimes arose not out of the severe circumstances of colonial Victoria but from universal, age-old family and personal dysfunction.

Ellen Kelly photographed in 1911 with two of her grand-daughters, Lil and Alice Knight, daughters of Ellen junior. The hard years have left their mark but she is still a forceful, resilient woman at seventy-nine.

Ellen Kelly had married 'Red' Kelly in 1850. Red was an ex-convict transported from Ireland ostensibly for stealing two pigs. He had settled in country Victoria, prospecting for gold. Later he purchased a small farm but was forced to sell because of debts. The bushranger Ned Kelly was the second of Ellen's eight children. Ellen had little education and was unable to write. Life was not easy. After Red died she ran a sly grog shop as a means of earning some money.

Ellen was in the female section of the Old Melbourne Gaol when Ned was hanged on 11 November 1880.

She had been convicted of assaulting Constable Fitzpatrick when he had visited her home and harassed her daughter Kate. Ellen was sentenced in the Beechworth Court to three years in gaol for supposedly hitting the constable on the head with a shovel. Even by the standards of the day this was a harsh punishment, made even crueller by the decree that she was not allowed to take the normal course of having her four-month-old baby in prison with her. Her punishment was meant to be a warning to the Kellys and their relatives.

As it transpired, Ned was captured and sentenced to hang while his mother was still serving her sentence. Permitted to visit him before his execution, she told him: 'Die brave, die like a Kelly'.

Further details can be found at the State Library Victoria's Ergo site.

Ned was captured and sentenced to hang while his mother was still serving her sentence. Permitted to visit him before his execution, she told him: 'Die brave, die like a Kelly'. Then Ellen waited in the adjacent building for her son's execution.

Ned had a portrait taken of himself to give to his family as a remembrance of him.

Families settling in the new colony had much to contend with. For women the problems were often insurmountable, especially if they were widows with children or were unemployed. Many were forced into prostitution, while others sought solace in drink. When these women ended up in gaol, the cycle of devastation upon the families continued.

"Each prisoner has a separate cell. The cells are large, light and airy with a window... the floors... are pine wood and are beautifully clean and white. The walls of the cells are whitewashed... the iron work is dark green." John Wilks, 1863.

The building was demolished in the 1930s.