Mary Ann McCarthy

Mary Ann McCarthy, born County Galway, Ireland in 1834, was an Irish orphan who fatally stabbed her husband Edward Young in Gulgong, New South Wales after he beat her with a horsewhip.

At the height of the Irish Famine, the Earl Grey scheme fashioned a plan to ease overcrowding in the workhouses of Ireland, while providing serving staff and a way to help settle the new Australian colony.

[4] The Irish Orphan young women were housed in the former convict barracks in Macquarie Street, Sydney.

[6] Mary Ann died in 1887 after taking a dose of Chlorodyne, a laudanum-based pain-relieving mixture containing cannabis and chloroform.

[7][8] Early on Tuesday morning of 20 February 1872 a violent argument broke out in Black Lead Lane, Gulgong between Mary Ann and her husband Edward Jacob Young.

At one point Edward Young struck his wife so hard that she fell to the ground.

She seized a butchers knife and stabbed her husband in the navel, penetrating the liver.