Police sources have confirmed that cannibalism will form part of an investigation into the death of a four-year-old boy in NSW Australia.

Police forensic experts are taking samples from a mother’s fingernails and mouth for evidence of cannibalism after she allegedly claimed to have consumed part of her son, who was found dead in their home on the NSW Central Coast in eastern Australia.

A 32-year-old woman entered the Wyong Police Station about 4:40pm on Saturday July 4 and, as a result of the conversation, police ordered a welfare check. Officers searched a unit on Byron Street at Wyong where they found the body of a four-year-old child.

The woman allegedly told police she had eaten part of her son.

Police found the body of her son with significant arm injuries. The woman was charged with domestic violence murder and refused bail. Police are investigating whether the boy had been dead since the Wednesday before the alarm was raised.

Police were granted approval to carry out a forensic procedure on the woman over the weekend that will allow them to carry out a buccal swab, a sample of her blood, nail clippings and matter under her fingernails,

“to examine the internal mouth contents and forensic material of the suspect”

Curiously, the order notes it was not to obtain the woman’s DNA, which is the usual purpose of such procedures.

The NSW Department of Communities and Justice said it had previously been in contact with the family. A department spokesperson said,

“Given the matter remains the subject of an active NSW Police investigation, it would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage”

The Minister responsible for child welfare has admitted that the department is chronically understaffed.

Sources with knowledge of the investigation say it’s suspected that the mother had a combination of mental health and drug addiction problems. The mother and child had moved into the rental house earlier this year, a neighbour said, allegedly following domestic violence between the woman and an ex-partner.

At a press conference on Sunday, Superintendent Chad Gillies from the Tuggerah Lakes District said police were calling for information about the woman and child.

“It was an extremely confronting scene. It’s been confirmed the child had injuries. I am not going to speculate further on what those injuries are”

The woman has not been identified, but police confirmed she was known to them.

Superintendent Gillies said,

“There is a domestic relationship to the child … the 32-year-old female and the four-year-old child lived at the unit together, and as I understand it, nobody else lived at that unit”

The matter will return to court at Wyong on September 1.

Wyong is a small town (population around 4,500) on the holiday coast of NSW, about 90km north of Sydney.

Australia has a history of cannibalism, not to the level of the USA or Russia, but still a part of its mythology. Australian Indigenous people, who comprise the oldest surviving civilisation on the planet, were labelled cannibals as a prelude to the expropriation of their land and the attempted annihilation of their culture and genocide of their people. Such reports are heavily contested by historians and anthropologists and, where they did perhaps occur, are usually put down to mortuary rites, survival in drought or sometimes revenge killings. Reports were largely based on hearsay.

Earliest reports from the British colonies were mostly of convicts escaping and resorting to cannibalism or bushranging, or sometimes both. The most famous was Alexander Pearce, who escaped twice in Tasmania in 1822 and 1823 and each time sampled some flesh from his accomplices while trekking to imagined freedom. His story was adapted in the famous 1874 novel “For the Term of His Natural Life” which was made into a film in 1927 and was incorporated into Australian mythology, which sometimes assumes he bred a family of cannibals in the wilderness of western Tasmania.

Others included Thomas Jeffrey in 1826 and Edward Broughton in 1830, and probably a lot more whose cases were hushed up by colonial administrators. What’s the point of accusing First Nations people of savagery if your own fellow countrymen are chowing down on each other?

In more recent times, there was the case of Tracey Wigginton (called the “Lesbian Vampire Killer“) who, with some friends, picked up a drunk man in Brisbane in 1989 and drove him to a park, where Wigginton stabbed him 27 times and drank his blood. The friends said that she was a vampire and had previously drunk the blood of other animals.

The Snowtown bodies in the barrels case was revealed to have an element of cannibalism in the final murder, but this was very much an afterthought to the killings and not even mentioned in the film of the events. Several people thought to be somehow socially undesirable (or witnesses to earlier murders) were killed and stuffed into barrels, which were later stored in a building in the small town of Snowtown in South Australia. In the final case, according to reports which surfaced years later, the killers sliced off a sliver of flesh from the right thigh of a man who wouldn’t quite fit in the barrel, then heated a frying pan, cooked the flesh, and handed it around.

Katherine Knight was a slaughterhouse worker who in 2000 had passionate sex with her partner, John Price, then stabbed him 37 times, professionally skinned him, hung his hide on a meat hook over the lounge room door, decapitated him, butchered his corpse and cooked some of his flesh. She served up his meat with baked potato, carrot, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, squash and gravy in neat settings at the dinner table, putting beside each plate placenames for Price’s children. Another meal was tossed into the backyard; it appears she intended to eat it but decided against it. However, police arrived before the kids, so no one got eaten.

David Kevin Loader, 43, murdered 64-year-old George Martin at Mandorah, near Darwin, on July 5, 2001 after a heavy drinking session. He later told a cellmate that he had cooked and eaten the man’s leg and penis. He said it tasted like chicken.

In 2019, Jessica Camilleri killed her mother and decapitated her. The judge sentencing her said she had “engaged in “acts of decapitation and cannibalism”.

In 2021, Cecil Mabb abducted a five-year-old girl from a campground in Tasmania, not because he was planning any sexual molestation but, as he told prison staff, because he wanted to eat her, and that he had wanted to eat people since he was a child.

In the Australian state of NSW, cannibalism is not mentioned in any legislation, but section 81C of the Crimes Act 1900 proscribes “Misconduct With Regard to Corpses” which involves “indecently” or “improperly” interfering with a human body or offering any “indignity” to it, and provides for maximum imprisonment of two years.

In fact, in most countries around the world, cannibalism is not listed as an offence. Killing people is certainly against the law, and there are a range of motivations that may elevate it from manslaughter to murder, but what happens if the killer uses the flesh thereafter is a bit of an afterthought. Our assumptions about human inviolability are based on Biblical claims about being made in “the image of God” (whatever that may mean), but the subsequent insistence on that sacred being having an immortal soul creates a contradiction – if the soul has left the body, are the remains “just meat”? If so, why have rumours of cannibalism elevated this story from a tragic murder to sensationalist clickbait? And why are we not equally repelled by the idea of eating a baby of other species?