The Notorious Frances Thwaites by Kellinde Wrightson

Author:Kellinde Wrightson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger

A little further towards the city in the somewhat grander part of Carlton in Rathdowne-street, where the houses were bigger and had important-sounding names, lived the Goldspinks. They were a well-known family, Mr Goldspink being a Justice of the Peace in the City Court. Mrs Goldspink was a champion of destitute mothers and neglected children. She was Vice-president of a small but effective group known as the St George’s Neglected Children’s Society run through her church. She was a tireless worker in the police stations and the local courts on behalf of deserted wives and destitute children.

It was the children Maggie Goldspink cared for the most. They were innocent of the crimes of their fathers and mothers. In no time at all she could have a child placed in the St Vincent de Paul Orphan-age, with the Department for the Care of Neglected Children, or, if she was lucky, in a good private household. She was a well-connected and persuasive woman and there were more than a few single mothers in the city of Melbourne who would be eternally grateful to Maggie Goldspink.

Yet there were times when even Mrs Goldspink could not find a solution. There were babies, new-borns, abandoned on the streets, who were brought to her attention by the police or colleagues from other benevolent societies. It broke her heart to see such cases. How desperate or depraved must the mothers have been to do such a thing? Mrs Goldspink was a Catholic woman and did not that great and determined woman Sister Mary MacKillop say, ‘Never see a need without doing something about it?’ So when all else failed and Maggie Goldspink was left with a baby in need of mothering, she sought the help of Mother Walkerden in Faraday-street. For what else was there to be done if there was no foundling hospital and the orphanages were full to bursting and the Department could not take yet another?

Mother Walkerden was a baby farmer. Indeed she had chosen her cottage in Faraday-street with that very idea in mind, the Lying-in being just around the corner. She placed advertisements in the newspapers offering to mind babies and even to meet the young mothers at the Lying-in. And she was good at it. She was efficient and organised. She ran a clean and ordered house where babies were cared for properly until their mothers or their relatives took them back. But baby farming was not a regulated business. Money was paid up front to the farmer and a promise given to make weekly payments for the child’s upkeep but more often than not the mothers could not afford it for long and the babies would be abandoned for the farmer to do with as she saw fit.

Mother Walkerden was a business minded woman. She would not keep a baby without payment. She had a nose like a bloodhound and a wide network of friends. She could track down any wayward mother in this city and hand the baby back no matter if she were living on the street.

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