Meat pies and Strychnine: Criminal Poisoning in Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Century Australia.

This thesis examines the nature of criminal poisoning in nineteenth-century Australia, focusing on perpetrators and their punishments and their victims. The study examines five main types of crimes, those against spouses, children, and patients, poisonings committed within the workplace and finally massacres committed on the Australian frontier. The study investigates what these crimes reveal about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australian society, including the common tensions and societal issues that influenced a resort to homicide.