Supreme Court Justice Stephen Kaye on Friday ordered the mother-in-law, Huajiao Zhuang, to pay Dan "Selina" Lin's mother, Shui Ying Cheng, the sum of $110,000 for her pain and suffering.

Ms Cheng has already been paid $15,000 under the Victims of Crime Assistance Act.

Justice Kaye said Ms Cheng, who travelled from China to Melbourne after the murder to help her son-in-law take care of her grandson, had told how "ever since her birth, she [Selina] has been my whole life".

Ms Cheng had been overcome with sadness and sorrow after being told her daughter, 21, had been killed.

"I have been thinking of her every moment just as if she was still with me," Ms Cheng said in a victim impact statement tendered to the court when applying for compensation.

"Even today I'm still unwilling to believe that she is gone with the wind forever. Just like in a dream, I always seem to hear her calling me, but all the expectations and hopes of a mother have been terribly shattered."

Justice Kaye said Ms Cheng was suffering from severe depression, feelings of emptiness, loss and hopelessness, and had had 17 counselling sessions with a psychologist.

"Her bereavement symptoms included: reliving images of her daughter walking around her; frequent nightmares of rushing to cuddle her daughter; seeing images of the deceased in places that they had visited together in the past; frequent dreams; frequent memories of the past, particularly when Selina was a child; and memories of discussions in which Selina told her of abuse by the respondent (Zhuang) and Selina's requests to her husband to support her," the judge said.

Zhuang, 51, a mother of five, was jailed in August 2014 for 18 years with a minimum of 13½ years after being found guilty by a jury of murdering her daughter-in-law by hitting her at least 33 times in the head with a hammer.

Zhuang attacked Ms Lin, 21, in front of her two-year-old grandson in the bathroom of Ms Lin's Bundoora home on May 3, 2012, after an argument over how she intended to bathe baby Alfred.

Zhuang, who had little formal education and could speak almost no English, had travelled from China to Australia in 2010 to be with her son, Peter, and the pregnant Ms Lin because she believed it was her duty to look after them.

But Ms Lin came to resent Zhuang interfering in the couple's lives and distanced herself from her mother-in-law.

After killing Ms Lin, Zhuang dragged her body out of the bath, where she had fallen, and put it in a large travel bag before placing it in a wheelie bin, which she left in the backyard.

Zhuang later retrieved the wheelie bin and rolled it about 700 metres to the Darebin Creek where she tipped Ms Lin's body into the water.

Ms Lin had emigrated to Australia from China on her own when she was 16 to complete her secondary school education before starting an economics course at university.

In contrast, Zhuang endured great hardship growing up in extreme poverty in China's Fujian province and had to go into hiding because of China's one-child policy before giving birth to her son, Peter, in a pig pen.

Mark Russell