Recent historical studies have reconsidered the plight of white women accused of infanticide in Australia, casting new light especially on the motives of single women and mothers of large families. Still unredeemed and largely unanalysed, however, is the baby‐farmer. This article explores stereotypes of this bête noire of the nineteenth‐century city, addressing concurrent medicalisation of the maternal body, child‐birth, infant feeding and foster care. In so doing it also analyses representations of the midwife and the wet‐nurse, along with their essentialised opposite, the good mother, who abided by the newly defined ‘rights of the child’.