About: neridac
- Full Name
- Nerida Campbell
- Website
- http://www.hht.net.au
- Details
- My special interest is criminal women and at the moment I am focusing on women from the Female Penitentiary at Long Bay in New South Wales. These images begin around 1915 and continue through to 1930. With the help of a band of loyal volunteers I trace the stories of the women who appear in the mug shots using police records, media reports and any other sources I can find.
The images can be both captivating and frustrating. The women’s faces and costumes draw you in and set off a train of musing about how and why they came to be in prison. Often the answer is found in police documents and I return to the image with a new insight. Sometimes my feelings towards the subject have hardened as I read of the litany of misery she has caused, other times I feel a deep sympathy. It is very hard to adhere to the historian’s mantra of impartiality when faced with such intimate portraits and detail of the subject’s life. Sometimes a striking image has been orphaned; cut off from all official and non-official records the story behind the photo can no longer be found leaving my curiosity frustrated and thwarted. All this research will feed into a section of the Museum’s next exhibition Femme Fatale: the female criminal which opens in November 2008.
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