Where Do the Children Play? 

I have no opinion to offer publicly on the Lindsay Clancy case. 

What caught me this morning was the children.

Sometimes the present has a strange way of sending us back to places we haven’t thought about for years.

This morning, when I was reading about Lindsay Clancy's case, I wasn’t looking for " Bad Minnie.". But she found me. 

I certainly wasn’t thinking about a business college in Invercargill more than thirty years ago.

Something about the story sent my mind wandering backwards, and suddenly I was standing in a cemetery in Winton again, surrounded by a group of my students, looking at a patch of ground where, according to local legend, nothing would grow.....

The Outing

In the 1990s I taught young adults at a business college in Invercargill.

Once a week we left the classroom for an outing. Sometimes I chose where we would go. We visited the tuatara exhibit. On another occasion we went out to Tiwai Point at Bluff and visited the aluminium smelter.

My students occasionally had more imaginative ideas.

One week they decided we should go to Winton to see " Bad Minnie’s"  grave. I don’t remember exactly who suggested it. I do remember that there was considerable enthusiasm. At the time I had no idea who " Bad Minnie " was. But for my students there were certain names that held a peculiar magic. 

"Bad Minnie " was one of them.

She had been a baby farmer. She had been hanged. She had a grave. And, most importantly for a group of young people looking for an interesting afternoon, she had a story.

The story told was that she had been buried outside the cemetery on unconsecrated ground and that nothing would grow on her grave.

I was sceptical. I suspected the grass had less supernatural reasons for its absence. Somebody, I thought, was probably keeping the legend alive with a bottle of weedkiller.

My students were not remotely interested in my botanical theory.

Bad Minnie

Williamina Dean was born in Scotland in 1844 and eventually settled in Southland.

In the late nineteenth century she took infants into her care for payment, in what was then known as baby farming.

It was a very different world from ours. An unmarried mother could find herself desperate and socially isolated. Poverty was harsh. Infant mortality was high. There were few of the protections and services we now take for granted.

In 1895 police discovered the bodies of infants and the remains of a young boy on Dean’s property.

She was convicted of murdering one infant, Dorothy Carter, and was hanged at Invercargill clink on 12 August 1895. She remains the only woman to have been executed in New Zealand.

Around it, however, grew the folklore.

" Bad Minnie."
The baby farmer.
The hanging.

The grave.

The barren patch of earth.
The story that nothing would grow there.

And I suppose that is why my students wanted to see it.

It was history, but it was also wicked. Macabre. Forbidden. Exactly the sort of thing that makes an ordinary afternoon more interesting.

The Grass

I wish I could remember more about that day. I remember the students. I remember the cemetery. And I remember looking at the supposedly barren patch of ground and wondering whether anyone had actually tested the soil. I suspect they hadn’t. The truth about grass is considerably less exciting than the truth about ghosts.

But folklore doesn’t require much help.

Give people a strange grave, a notorious name, and a story about a patch of earth that refuses to grow, and the story will do the rest.

For generations people remembered "Bad Minnie". They remembered the hanging. They remembered the grave. They remembered the grass.

And yet there was something strangely easy to lose in all of that.

The children.

The dead children are not nearly as colourful as the story. They don’t have a dramatic ending. They don’t have a legend attached to them. They don’t get to become folklore. They simply disappeared into history. And perhaps that is why the story has stayed with me.

The Children

We tend to think that the great distance between 1895 and now must mean the world itself has changed beyond recognition. In many ways it has.

We have better medicine. Better nutrition. Better policing. Better records. Better child protection. Better understanding of what children need. We have built systems specifically designed to protect them.

But there is one thing that has not changed.

A child is still a child.

A baby in 1895 could not choose who looked after him. A toddler could not leave an unsafe house. A small child could not explain what an adult had done to him. And none of that is different simply because the calendar now says 2026.

The language has changed. The institutions have changed. The technology has changed. 

The child has not.

That is an uncomfortable thought. Because we like to believe that time solves things. Sometimes it does. Sometimes we learn. Sometimes we build better systems because the old ones failed. But no system can remove the most basic responsibility of all.

Children remain dependent upon adults.

And when something goes terribly wrong, they are often the least able to do anything about it.

Why I Remembered Bad Minnie

That is what the story this morning brought back to me.

Not because I think the two cases are the same. They aren’t. Not because I know what happened in the Clancy case. I don’t. And not because I have suddenly acquired some great insight into a story being argued over in a courtroom thousands of miles away.

It was much simpler than that.

I saw another terrible story in which very young children were at the centre of something created by adults. And my mind went back to a group of students in Invercargill. To an outing I had almost forgotten.

To Winton. To a grave. To a patch of grass.

Funny what memory does.

You can go for years without thinking about something, and then a single moment in the present opens an old door. Suddenly you are there again. I can almost hear the students. I can almost see the cemetery. I can almost hear somebody asking whether the grass really refused to grow.

And I realised I was remembering the children.

What the Grave Says

I don’t know whether the grass really refused to grow on Bad Minnie’s grave. I still suspect somebody helped it along. Perhaps that is the best part of the story.

The legend doesn’t really matter.

What matters is what has survived beneath it: children who had no say in the circumstances into which they were born or the adults upon whom they depended.

More than a century separates those children from the children whose story brought "Bad Minnie" back into my mind this morning. The world between them has changed almost beyond recognition.

But the fundamental truth has not.

Children still need adults to protect them. They still need adults to notice when something is wrong. They still depend upon us to remember that, however complicated the circumstances surrounding them may become, they are still there.

And sometimes, when we think we are looking at the past, the past is quietly looking back at us.

Through the eyes of the children. Who never got to play.