ABSTRACT
This chapter provides two case studies on infanticide press discourse 11,000 miles from England in the British penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, where a young convict, Mary McLauchlan, was tried and executed for infanticide in 1830, and a free woman, Sarah Masters, the wife of a petty bureaucrat, killed her newborn child at a jailhouse in 1835. It analyses how politics played a role in the colonial press's coverage in both of these disparate infanticide cases. The chapter examines how race factored into the way Sarah Masters's case was extensively reported in the colonial press and how in the case of Mary McLauchlan a newspaper editor found a creative way to expose corruption amongst the elite in the penal colony while preventing himself from being the respondent in a libel action. The power in all convict/master relationships was always heavily in favour of the master, but for convict women that power relationship was grossly distorted against the woman.
