ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses two disparate bush infanticide discourses from the same newspaper, the Hobart Mercury, in 1912. The infanticides of Harriet Lovell and Lilian Wakefield were reported within two months of each other and occurred in the same remote district in southern Tasmania. The first case 32-year-old Harriet Lovell premeditatedly killed her young daughter, Dorothy, after years of abuse and was also suspected of killing her four infant children in similar circumstances over the previous decade. The second case 22-year-old Lilian Wakefield killed her three children and then herself in one brief frenzied moment. Psychiatric discourse, as Foucault tells us, finds a way of limiting its domain, of defining what it is talking about, of giving it the status of an object and therefore of making it manifest, nameable, and describable. Bush madness provided an understandable rationale for the murderous actions of these two mothers and removed the imperative for the community.
