Castle Creek, where John Edge was forced to bathe. The creek bed was dry when this photograph was taken but a stream was running in the winter.
John Edge probably wasn’t the only child forced to take cold baths in a Victorian rural household in the 1890s.
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But how many would have been thrust into a farm creek in the middle of winter without a towel or dry clothing, and told to clean themselves?
The Melbourne maximum temperature on the day John entered Castle Creek was about 11℃, so it is fair to assume it was a cold day in the Euroa district.
Eight-year-old John was abandoned by his parents and sent to work on a Molka farm property in 1894.
He disappeared after being sent to bathe in Castle Creek about 150 metres from the farmhouse on a cold July morning.
His body was found two weeks later.
Life was a series of hardships for the slightly built lad who was born in Tasmania and moved with his bootmaker father, Charles Edge, to Melbourne in the early 1890s.
John was the product of a marriage between Charles and Louisa Edge, married in Hobart in a humble ceremony of the congregational church.
A few months earlier, in 1880, a court in Hobart ordered Charles to pay child support of five shillings weekly to another woman.
Charles had evidently ended cohabitation in April as he published a notice saying he would no longer accept debts generated by the woman.
In 1881, he complained that the mother of one of his illegitimate children had abused him in a public place and she was fined.
She complained that he had not paid some of the child support owed. In 1883 he was back in court for failing to pay his child support.
In 1892 he was remanded in custody for a week on a charge of assaulting his wife.
By January 1893, Charles was in Melbourne and before a court charged with a brutal assault on Louisa which required hospital treatment for her head wounds. He received a month in jail for the attack.
So it was in early 1894 that Charles took his seven-year-old son to an orphanage, managed by philanthropic child protector Selina Sutherland, who noted he was in a neglected state, appeared to be slightly deaf and was apparently about nine years old.
“I had an idea that he was weak in intellect, on account of the way he had been neglected,” she later told an inquest.
She told the court he was of “unclean habits” a description also mentioned several times by his foster carer, Thomas Robinson.
John’s first placement was with dairy farmers William and Mary Leckie, also in the Molka district.
In the inquest into John’s death there are several references by witnesses to him being of “unclean” habits ( or “fouling himself”), resulting in Mr Robinson getting into the habit of taking the boy to the nearby Castle Creek and making him bathe.
The smell was apparently so bad that the boy was made to live in a tent in one of the sheds.
On the last day John was seen, Mr Robinson had taken him by the arm and put him into the creek as the boy “was disinclined to go into the water”.
Mr Robinson insisted the boy was well fed but was lazy and sometimes did not attend to the cows.
Mr Robinson told the inquest Castle Creek was about four or five yards wide (3.6m to 4.5m) and five or six feet (1.5m by 1.8m) deep where he entered the water.
He said he last saw the boy attempting to dress after being in the water.
Mr Robinson told police the boy had disappeared and a search of the farm and the creek did not find him. He thought the boy had run away.
But on July 18, farm labourer Alfred Auger found the body in the creek about 50 yards (45m) from the house, lying naked, face down in the water.
Selina Sutherland was planning to remove John and a girl, Harriet Cook, from the Robinsons on June 29.
Harriet told the inquest John did not like to go to the creek with Mr Robinson, and John did not like the water.
Mr Robinson must have known the circumstances of the boy’s death did not reflect well on him. He had secured representation at the inquest by a lawyer.
The Edge case was not the only one involving children farmed out to rural Victorian properties.
In 1894 a neighbouring farmer was charged with molesting a young girl at Molyullah, also placed in care by Selina Sutherland, but the prosecution could not muster sufficient evidence.
This is the second instalment in a three-part series. Next week: Lost in life but found in death.
A simple memorial marks the place near Castle Creek where John Edge drowned.
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