Silence and resonance: memorialisation of infant mortality in Auckland, 1860-1910

In October 1867, a milkman named William Stonex was on his morning rounds in Auckland Central when he noticed a collection of fabric lying in a gutter. He turned it over with his foot and, deciding that the bundle was unusually heavy, called to a nearby servant girl named Rebecca Hall. When Hall fetched a knife and cut open the package, she and Stonex discovered a dead baby wrapped in calico. Mr Craig, a local plumber, and Hall’s employer, agreed to “see about it” and Stonex continued with his route. The police were summoned, and a coronial inquest was held in an attempt to discover the cause of death of the female infant, who was just days old at the time of her death. Although the doctor on the case suspected that her umbilical cord had been tied incorrectly, the jury found that, due to a lack of evidence, they could not ascertain a cause of death. Her mother was never found, and it is unclear where she was buried.  

Image: An 1863 map showing the section of Hobson Street near Wyndham Street where the baby was found. Pulman's register map of the City of Auckland, 1863.  Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections Map 4475-1

Infant mortality, defined as the death of a baby who was born alive but died before their first birthday, is a topic that most people today find challenging to discuss, which is unsurprising given that it is often considered to be the most heartbreaking event that a person can experience. Stillbirth, which this project also analysed, is now also increasingly recognised to be a devastating loss of a child, after many years of medical professionals and society failing to recognise the pain parents experienced. Sociologists have posited that modern society increasingly sequesters death away from the living through the use of institutions and bureaucratic processes. In many Western nations, death is much less common now than it was before advances in sanitation and medicine, and this has allowed us to put it out of our minds for much of the time. 

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the mortality rate was so high that it was a constant feature in day-to-day living and it would have been difficult to restrict death to the edges of one’s consciousness as is commonly done today, especially because most people died at home, or had their body returned there before the funeral. Infants were particularly at risk, and the infant mortality rate in New Zealand for 1875 was 125.78 deaths per thousand live births, meaning that one in eight babies born could be expected to die before their first birthday, and this did not take into account the number of stillbirths (those babies who died before they were born).

By the early twentieth century, the reported infant mortality rate had fallen somewhat to an average of 72.6 per thousand for the decade 1900-1910 (approximately 1 in 13 babies born were expected to die before their first birthday). The data on infant mortality during this era is misleading, however, because only European infant deaths were recorded. Māori were explicitly excluded, and it is unclear whether other ethnic groups were included in the statistics. The exclusion of Māori infant mortality masked the impacts of colonisation on Māori infants and communities. When infant mortality statistics finally began to include Māori deaths in 1930, the rates were harrowing, with Māori infant mortality recorded as 88.51 deaths per thousand, well over double the European rate of 34.48 per thousand. It is likely that rates were much higher in the nineteenth century due to the impacts of land theft and infectious disease, hinted at in the 1878 census of the Māori population stating that in Hokianga epidemics of measles and whooping cough had “carried off a large number of infants."

Scenes like the one that played out in Hobson Street that Sunday in 1867 with an unidentified, abandoned infant death are confronting, but mar the historical record with uncomfortable frequency. This baby was not alone in being found in the street and unable to be traced back to their parents, which Victorian rules of morality and gender roles undoubtedly contributed to. Of particular note are the number of deceased infants found on beaches and near other water sources. Some of these babies were found to have been stillborn, while others were determined by the coroner to have died under suspicious circumstances. In the absence of established state support systems and in the face of low domestic wages and intense social shame, women who had babies outside of marriage, or who had more children than they could support had few options, and abandonment, or infanticide, was sometimes the result. Even babies who were cared for within their families or the community were at a high risk of infant mortality during this period, due to diseases that medicine did not understand or could not treat, inaccessibility of medical care and the impacts of poor sanitation and poverty.

Situations such as multiple or premature births constituted particular risk, with a high mortality rate recorded in twins and near universal fatality condemning triplets. Some families bore a brunt of infant mortality that is scarcely imaginable now. The Rambaud family lost five babies aged under a year within a decade; François in 1894, James in 1896, Selina and her twin William in 1899 aged just 22 days and 6 months respectively, and Mabel in 1902. They also lost two older children, Margueritte, aged 3 and half, in 1893, and Pierre, aged 4 years and two months, in 1901. All but one of these children share two graves in the Roman Catholic section at Waikumete Cemetery. Another tragic example is the Holmes family, who lost all three of their triplets in 1902, and had no children who lived beyond the age of two and half years.

Image: The funeral record of Clara May Holmes, denoting that she was the last of triplets who had all passed away. Births Deaths and Marriages New Zealand [online], Auckland Libraries Research Central, Waikumete Cemetery Book 3 entry 28390; Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, NZMS 812: book 2, page 181.

Image: A photo of the Rambaud family grave. The epitaph only acknowledges the older children, Margueritte and Pierre, and their parents, but all the babies are buried here also. 

 

Babies are vulnerable to environmental factors, and infant mortality rates have long been recognised as a way to take the pulse of a community’s health, as babies tend to be most at risk to changes in sanitation, nutrition and medical care. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, infant mortality was of great public concern for a number of reasons, though often not for ones we would think of today. During a borough council election meeting in 1871, men discussed the value of each infant lost before one year to be around 35 shillings, and that the anticipated 2,000 infant deaths for the next three years in Auckland alone represented “a very large amount of capital." Eugenics and racism also played an important role in the concern about infant mortality. In 1872, one article in Daily Southern Cross claimed that infant mortality was of particular importance because Pākehā children born in New Zealand would “grow up to look upon New Zealand as their country and home, and would therefore be more settled in their habits and ideas." This reflects the role of cultural colonisation and the importance placed on the formation of a settler identity as distinct from a British one. In 1908, at the founding of the new Infant Life Protection Society in Auckland, Dr Bedford stated that “to preserve the strength of the white race was a problem of immense importance” that could only be achieved through the competent raising of children.

Spurred on by such motivations to reduce infant mortality, blame for infant deaths was a common topic, and pointed in a variety of directions. Drainage was a common culprit, alongside milk provision, parental neglect or ignorance, bad ventilation, and various other social woes such as alcohol consumption. Because of the gender relations at the time, women were most often condemned for the deaths of their infants. Some sources were more empathetic, focusing on the improvements possible if women and girls were taught about motherhood, while others took a less charitable approach. The shaming of mothers appears repeatedly in the historical report, with Dr Roberton, present alongside Dr Bedford at the founding of the Infant Life Protection Society in 1908, reported by the New Zealand Graphic to have stated that infant mortality was “to a great extent due to the fact that modern woman [sic] was so largely a slave to pleasure-seeking and society attractions” and what he perceived to be a subsequent refusal of mothers to parent well.

All of these discussions are examples of ways in which colonial communities dealt with being in such close proximity to death. They are, in a way, examples of attempts to assert power over death and to try to gain a sense of progress in the face of overwhelming loss. It has also been argued by historians that parents living in conditions that resulted in high infant mortality invested less emotionally in their children, but the archival sources from the long nineteenth century suggest that this is not accurate. Both in New Zealand and overseas, personal accounts and the high level of motivation evident in the debate about potential solutions demonstrates the investment of the community in preventing infant mortality, not resigned acceptance. This is similarly reflected in memorial practices, with many parents going to significant expense to farewell and memorialise their lost babies. 

Now that the records surrounding the deaths of infants are in the archival space, these artefacts themselves form a tenet of memorialisation of these infants. More notorious markers of remembrance, such as graves, when they still exist, alongside death notices and funerary records all show the effort put in by Auckland families to grief rituals when they lost their babies. There are other records too, records of babies like the one from Hobson St, whose families were unable to honour them the way they may have wanted to; their stories lie in coronial papers, in reports of inquests, and in unmarked graves.  

This project aims to explore the presence and omission of memorialisation of infants who died in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland between 1860 and 1910. Due to scope limitations, it cannot hope to be a comprehensive review of the topic and in the following series of articles, I will instead take a case study approach drawing from extant archival sources and consideration of what may be missing from the historical record. In particular, I will take gravestones as a historical source, as has been done overseas in surveys of infant memorialisation. However, because there are many unmarked graves of infants in Auckland cemeteries, archival sources including burial books, funeral records, coronial records and hospital casebooks have been used to trace family stories and locate patterns of memorialisation that do not leave physical remnants.  

As a result, some sources speak louder than others, both because of practices at the time, and the impact of time and historical conventions on the records that remain. It is for this reason that silences and resonances are both considered to be meaningful in this project; the absence of an archival source does not necessarily mean an absence of memorialisation in the contemporary period. There is much that can be gained from studying infant mortality, both about historical events themselves and about the way contemporaries thought about them, as well as about how we think about historical practices today. Many people are unaware of how infant memorialisation is done today, and it surprised me how much current practices parallel and/or link to the ways that infant memorialisation was done in a time where babies dying was an everyday occurrence. The connection between past and present is what this project aims to uncover, and something that will be further explored in future articles.  

Author: Kasia O'Meara, Auckland History Initiative Summer Research Scholar

Kasia will enter her fifth and final year studying a Bachelor of Health Sciences/Bachelor of Arts conjoint degree in 2026, majoring her BA in history and sociology.  

Studying population health alongside humanities has stoked Kasia’s interest in the intersections between these disciplines, particularly with regards to health equity and social history. Her project focuses on infant mortality in Auckland in the decades up to 1910, and on the memorialisation and of babies that passed away during this period through gravestones, coroners reports, obituaries and the press. Her project explores the ways that the youngest members of our society are remembered, and the silences left behind when they are not memorialised, revealing the impact of gender discrimination, racism and poverty on the experiences of families and the resulting historical record. 

Kasia would like to thank Dr Jess Parr and Dr Linda Bryder for their supervision of this project and for sharing their expertise in the area of medical history. She would also like to thank the team at University of Auckland Cultural Collections, especially Katherine, the team at Auckland Libraries and Auckland Council Archives for their assistance accessing archival sources.  

Read the rest of Kasia's research on the Auckland History Initiative website.