Alice Clarke
Mar 28th, 2008 by Nerida Campbell
Photographed 3 April 1916 at the Female Reformatory, Long Bay, NSW
The Justice & Police Museum contains a small, dark room called the Crime Museum. In it is housed a collection of confiscated weapons, the effluvia of deviance, collected by generations of police to educate new recruits. This reference collection served as a warning about the dangers police encounter on the streets of Sydney, detailing the myriad of ways a weapon can be concealed and the unspeakable acts committed by one human against another. A past curator has created a photo collage within the room, reminiscent of police ‘wanted’ boards, containing scores of images of criminals. A few of the faces have captured my attention over the years and recently I was able to find the original negative and story of one of my ‘persons of interest’.
Alice Clarke is unusual on many levels. She greets the viewer with a sullenly belligerent stare, not in itself unusual in the criminal milieu, but she is one of only a handful of obese criminals I have encountered in my research into the women of Long Bay. Her criminal record indicates she was something of an entrepreneur, a women who saw a gap in the market and strove to fill it. She was a very early member of the sly grog fraternity (or should that be sorority given the prevalence of women in Sydney’s shady sly grog business?).
The sly grog trade began in earnest on 26 March 1916 when the New South Wales government brought in reactionary laws after a frightening incident involving binge drinking soldiers who rioted through Sydney in late 1915. The new laws required pubs to close at 6pm and the working man was not happy. Sly grog dens, residences in which alcohol could be bought at a premium after the pubs had closed, sprang up all over the state. In Sydney they were concentrated in the poorer areas of the city, Surry Hills and Darlinghurst. Clarke was obviously an early adaptor, arrested only weeks after the Act came into force. Clarke was convicted of selling liquor without a license and was sentenced to eight months hard labour.