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Multi-award winning author Anna Haebich will visit UWA next week to deliver the Institute of Advanced Studies' annual New Critic Lecture. Her lecture will explore the controversial case of Perth stepmother Martha Rendell, 100 years after her execution for the murder of her three small step children.

Murders by women of children both repel and fascinate and the case of stepmother Martha Rendell continues to draw public controversy and raises questions relating to conviction, evidence, legal processes and right to re-trial that remain relevant today.

In this lecture, based on her book of the same title Murdering Stepmothers (UWA Publishing, 2010) Anna Haebich will explore these questions against the backdrop of issues of de facto living, step mothering, child neglect and abuse in Perth of a by-gone era.

Based on a true story and meticulously researched, Murdering Stepmothers is driven by passion, imagination and an eerie conjuring up of the past.

Anna is part of a large Nyungar family through marriage and commutes between her home in Perth and her job as a research professor at Griffith University in Brisbane.

The New Critic is the online journal of the Institute of Advanced Studies at The University of Western Australia. This annual lecture features distinguished scholars, authors, writers, thinkers, entrepreneurs, activists and others who have helped to shape new ideas.

TITLE: Murdering Stepmothers. The Execution of Martha Rendell

WHEN:            6pm, Tuesday 21 September

WHERE:          Webb Lecture Theatre, Ground Floor, Geography Building, UWA

The lecture is free and open to the public, no RSVP required. Hosted by the Institute of Advanced Studies (+61 8) 6488 1340

Media references

Audrey Barton (UWA Institute of Advanced Studies)  (+61 8)  6488 4797