For Sale: Only 7 Previous Murders

Some time ago, I was at a dinner party of 12 guests, several of whom I hadn't met previously. All of them were Sydneysiders born and bred, so I was on the receiving end of numerous comments about having originated from a state which is 25 years behind the rest of the country. (This topic of conversation crops up a lot in dinner parties..it's probably the Australian equivilent of coming from Wales).

Anyhoo. Several glasses of wine later, a charming upwardly-mobile couple seated across from me announced that they'd just bought a house in Burren Street, Erskineville (an old inner Sydney suburb, for those of you folk not from around here). Let's call this charming couple Sherrie and Ted.

History nerd that I am, I immediately perked up with a: "What, don't tell me you bought the Murdering Makins' house or something?" (accompanied by slightly inelegant and somewhat tipsy snorting at the very prospect of someone being dumb enough to buy a house that was once the most notorious address in the country.)

And -of course -they had. Sherrie and Ted claimed that they'd never heard anything about seven infants and small children being murdered and buried in their backyard (with bloodied clothing and assorted bits stuffed down the drainpipes) in the early 1890s by babyfarmers.*

Now babyfarmers tended to move house quite a bit, so it was eventually revealed that during the period 1890-1892 the Makins had buried at least 13 bodies in numerous backyards in the inner city area. But strangely, telling Sherrie and Ted that they weren't the only ones with a Makin Murder house didn't seem to provide much in the way of consolation.

The funny thing is, I didn't get to see that charming couple ever again. But I believe their house was put on the market soon afterwards. In fact, it's regularly up for sale.

I'm not going to tell you which house it is in this photo, just in case the current owners don't know yet. With my chronic Foot-In-Mouth disease, the odds are that the owners are on Blip or something.# But if you want to know which of these houses it is, it's not hard to find out thanks to the glory of the internet.

The moral of this story is: never dismiss history as irrelevant to your life. Because it's really important to know where the bodies are buried.

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*Unwed mothers or women in awkward circumstances would pay someone - often a husband and wife team- to house and care for their child on a permanent or semi-permanent basis, with babyfarmers often having several children in-house at any one time. It was a lucrative practice to kill the child (or let it die of an illness), deceive the mother and continue to receive money for the dead child's maintenence. Qualifying statement: many babyfarmers were decent human beings. (And no, this was not just some weird Australian custom -there were babyfarming scandals in the UK, US, etc as well.)
# If you live in one of these houses, don't worry. It isn't yours. Really.