“Maintaining her anonymity would perpetuate the abandonment,” Justice Robert Allan Hulme said last Wednesday, before overturning convention and granting a name to the girl who died at Hawks Nest in November 2007.

Since her parents - who still cannot legally be named - were charged with her murder more than 18 months ago, a law unique to NSW has prevented the seven-year-old being identified.

But Supreme Court Justice Hulme decided she should be known as something other than a “poor little girl”.

“In my view, having regard to this evidence, there is a considerable interest in this poor little girl having some identity assigned to her,” he said, before ruling that the girl will be known as Ebony, her middle name.

“She should not simply be some anonymous person, and should have a name.”

NSW law prevents Ebony’s identity - or any information that could even directly identify her or her sisters – being published or broadcast.

A 2004 amendment to the Children (Criminal Proceedings) Act made it an offence to publish information that could identify a child mentioned in a criminal case.

This meant that naming Ebony’s parents - before or after their murder and manslaughter convictions - would have been illegal, and that any photographs published of she or her parents would have been breaches of the law. As a way around that, media outlets have pixelated television and newspaper images throughout the trial.

But Ebony’s elder sisters expressed fears to the Supreme Court on Friday that her photograph, if published, would make her a “poster girl” for abused children.

Media organisations including Fairfax, publisher of the Advocate, and the Nine and Seven networks had requested permission to identify Ebony.

The older girls’ barrister Sue Kluss said the trial had attracted an unusual amount of publicity. Ms Kluss said the girls feared Ebony’s picture would become “the representative photo that will be used whenever there’s an issue of any criticism of the Department of Community Services”.