AUSTRALIA: Life with Father

Farmer George Thome Bennet’s eldest daughter is a pale, 19-year-old girl named Iris. The last three of his twelve children never lived long enough to get names. Farmer George, said his wife in a complaint charging her husband with murder, drowned each of them at birth in a bucket of water.

Last week, from a rural hospital bed to which she had retired with a nervous breakdown, daughter Iris corroborated her mother’s charge. She remembered the incidents well because she herself, at the age of 13, had helped to deliver one of the babies on the family’s windswept farm in Corangie. Next day she had asked her mother whether she should bathe the child. “You needn’t bother,” Audley Bennet told her daughter wearily. “Dad drowned it.”