Larrikins and Vampires

LARRIKINS AND VAMPIRES: THE AUSTRALIAN PSYCHE ON TRIAL

By John Davies

Australian Cultural History No. 12

Crimes and Trials

Deakin University $13 ISSN 0728-8433

Ellen Davitt

Force and Fraud: A Tale of the Bush

Mulini Press ISBN 0949910 36 8

On 7 July 1960 Graeme Thorne was kidnapped near his family home in Bondi. On 16 August his body was found. His parents had won the Opera House Lottery. Their address had been published. Their terrible experience led to the Not For Publication option being introduced in all lotteries. This small sad fact alone is enough to demonstrate how crimes can affect the smallest details of our lives. Justice H.V. Evatt's observation that "an injustice is none the less because it happened a long time ago" would be a fitting introduction to the twelve essays in Crimes and Trials which examine varied cases from 1886 to the present.

Two essays on the Thorne case, by Stephen Garton and Noel Sanders, deal in different ways with why one crime becomes a collective nightmare for us all, while others go unnoticed. The case embraced gambling, the Opera House, a nice average Australian family visited by horror in the form of a Hungarian i.e. a New Australian, when they were very New. The dogs of panic and prejudice were loose. Also, this happened at a time when newspapers were developing an unexpected symbiosis with the new medium of television. You could read about it on your way home from work and then turn on the telly for more, and more.

As in most sensational cases, the situation evolved with new information. In custody, Stephen Bradley (Istvan Baranyay) was not as wicked as we hoped. He was an ordinary bumbling man, twice married, who had failed in a number of optimistic business ventures. Police and warders found him likeable. As people realised this the heat went out of the "Dago did it" excuse for outrage. He was too like us. He was just a larrikin out of his depth.

Garton refers to the carnival atmosphere of such cases, and adds that in this one it was increasingly women who maintained and escalated their outrage. Was this a sublimated demonstration against larrikinism itself, against male power and violence? The facts are there, and the reaction. Male journalists found new stories in the unruly behaviour of the women in and out of court, noting that few of them wore hats.

Susanne Davies and Andrea Rhodes-Little examine the Brisbane Lesbian Vampires, again paying close attention to media coverage. They trace its progress from the first bland reports, to the ultimate portrayal of vampire-killer-lesbians on the front page of the Courier-Mail beside a cartoon of Saddam Hussein. In photographs and in other references three of the four women were shown as hairy, butch, abnormal, unfeminine. One was not. She was portrayed as a good girl gone wrong. She was pretty, but not too pretty.

Two women were sentenced to life, one, on appeal, to twelve years. Guess which one was acquitted? The pretty one.

Davies and Rhodes-Little do not question the verdict. They do question the persistent and undue sexualisation of women in court proceedings, in the way they are questioned, the way their demeanour, femininity, and attractiveness become issues of perception if not of law. Justice is about more than simple guilt or innocence. Essays on late nineteenth and early twentieth century abortion trials (Judith Allen) and the 1886 Mt. Rennie Rape trial (Juliet Peers) show clearly that women in court have always been subject to good girl?/bad girl? innuendo.

On the lighter side, there is an amusing article (by Richard Waterhouse) on the Fine Cotton scandal, the long larrikin history of substituted horses in Australian racing, and the industrialisation of racing. It is delightful to learn, from another essay by John Perry with Peter Mewett, that the Stawell Gift, an honourable athletic event, was once rife with corruption and race-fixing (athletes were described as "thinking horses") and also raised a great deal of money to assist miners whose lungs and lives had been ruined in the local pits.

Among the remaining essays in this book Hilary Maddocks examines the commercial and other exploitation of aboriginal art and artefacts, Ann McGrath aboriginal custodial history and deaths in custody.

An injustice to one is an injustice to all...

Force and Fraud is a welcome reprint, long overdue considering that it was the first murder mystery published here, in 1865, and one of the first published anywhere. Where did the author get her idea? Perhaps Davitt, a retired (not willingly) teacher, widowed and broke before the Pension, just felt like killing someone.

The style is melodramatic, the author rather too insistent on telling us which characters are "of good family", which dilutes some of the mystery. Otherwise her story is still an enjoyable genre piece with a heroine "pure as dawn", a reckless but gallant lover mistakenly arrested, an admirer scheming to win her hand and inheritance, a missing snuff-box for a vital clue, an engaging cast of Celts who inhabit the Southern Cross Hotel, and a Desperate Man who will scare your socks off. True love triumphs. I hope I haven't spoiled the ending for you.

Australian Book Review No. 154 September 1993