Photographed 27 November, 1919 at the State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay . FP07_0215_005

Many criminals give false personal information to police in the hope that their previous convictions will not be discovered. Jean Harris used a large number of aliases that included the names Emma Rolfe, May Mulholland and Eileen Woods.  She sometimes successfully fooled police into believing she was a novice criminal. In fact she was a career criminal who specialized in theft from houses and shoplifting. Her many aliases created confusion amongst police and she made multiple appearances in the New South Wales Police Gazette under different names. She was a convincing actress and when interrogated by police would strongly protest her innocence and say she was going to consult her solicitor.

The Police Modus Operandi (MO) branch published an internal document, the New South Wales Police Criminal Register, containing details about criminals and the pattern of their criminal behaviour. A 1934 report on Harris states that she waited until householders left before forcing a window or breaking a leadlight door. In one case she was convicted because her fingerprints were found on leadlight glass. Harris chose to steal from ‘the homes of those in superior circumstances’ or worked with a gang of shoplifters in order to steal valuable silks and furs from Department stores. She would disguise herself by wearing a wig, changing her hair colour or by wearing glasses. According to the police MO report she had a ‘Sullen disposition and dresses well’. The Justice & Police Museum collection has another image of Holland in the special photographs collection in which she is identified as Emma Rolfe:
http://collection.hht.net.au/firsthhtpictures/fullRecordPicture.jsp?recnoListAttr=recnoList&recno=31177

Photographed 10 January 1924 at the State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW

During the early 20th century many unmarried or widowed women with children lived in circumstances of abject poverty. Unable to work during a time when there were no welfare payments, they were often driven to commit desperate acts. Whole columns of the Police Gazette were dedicated to tracing the parents of abandoned children. A typical example being:

A woman who can only be described as of medium height and build, and fair complexion, called on Bella Leek, residing at 182 Underwood-street, Paddington, and asked her to hold her male infant, about 2 months old, for a few minutes, but failed to return. The child has since been admitted to the Scarba Home for Infants, Bondi.
New South Wales Police Gazette, 19 December 1923, p.659

Other women, like Sarah Boyd, went further and killed their baby. In November 1923 a group of children visiting the seaside discovered a suitcase containing the remains of a baby girl, who had been strangled. Police investigations led back to 39-year-old Boyd who had been seduced and abandoned by her lover. Boyd had a young son from a previous relationship and, due to ill health, she was unable to maintain steady employment. She was struggling financially and her situation became dire in the months leading up to the birth of her daughter. In her statement to police she said “I was desperate – I strangled it…I had no money and I had not got any word from its father”. Boyd then asked a friend, Jean Olliver, to help dispose of the body. They wrapped it, placed it in a suitcase and threw it from a Harbour ferry. The court found both women guilty and sentenced Olliver to 12 months gaol and Boyd to death with a recommendation of mercy. In 1927, after many sympathetic public petitions, Boyd was released from prison and reunited with her son.

Photographed 3 June 1927 at the State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW

The care and management of young offenders has always presented difficulties for the police and courts. Authorities are reluctant to send teenagers to prison and seek to give them an opportunity to turn their lives around. During the 1920s the courts would often place juvenile offenders in the care of church and charitable institutions if the parents were deemed unfit to care for them. Attempts would be made to remove female offenders from their friends by sending them to convents and homes in rural areas. This strategy was rarely successful and police records detail numerous ‘missing friends [persons]’ who had fled charitable homes in order to return to their criminal associates in the city.

Eileen O’Connor’s story is an old yet familiar one. It would appear that she came to the authorities’ attention as an ‘uncontrollable child’, a term often used by the courts to describe runaway children or those frequenting unsavoury places such as sly grog shops. O’Connor was placed in the care of the Salvation Army but soon fled and was reported missing by the Matron. Soon after, the seventeen year old began to make appearances in the New South Wales Police Gazette as a wanted person. She stole a wallet from a man, possibly as part of a prostitution scam, and a warrant for her arrest was issued. Within a month she was apprehended and sentenced to nine months hard labour at Long Bay.

Photographed 3 July 1924 at the State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay NSW

When researching the criminal backgrounds of the women photographed at Long Bay Gaol it is common to find convictions for drunkenness on their criminal record. The connection between criminal behaviour and alcohol or drug addiction has long been established and many different methods of dealing with the problem have been trialed. In 1924 when Annie Matthews was gaoled it was common to detain alcoholics at the Shaftesbury Institution at South Head.

Annie Matthews was born in 1867 and lived most of her life in the working class suburb of Paddington. She had been previously imprisoned for stealing, vagrancy and drunkenness. Her convictions for drunkenness were so numerous that officials didn’t note them individually but resorted to writing on her record in red ink ‘Over 200 convictions for drunkenness’. At the time when this photograph was taken she was convicted of drunkenness and confined indefinitely under the Inebriates Act, 1900. It is probable that she was transferred from the gaol to be detained at the Shaftesbury Institution for Inebriates.

In January 1908 the Shaftesbury Reformatory for Girls was transferred to the management of the Department of Prisons and was renamed the Shaftesbury Institution. Male and female alcoholics could be detained there instead of serving time in the prison system. It was argued at the time that alcoholics should be treated, not punished, and that the institution was the ideal environment in which to ‘cure’ the detainee. The staff was to assist the women to regain ‘their womanly self-respect’ through education and work. By 1927 a government medical officer noted that 62% of the alcoholics housed in the institution suffered mental illness and were unlikely ever to be cured. In 1929 the Shaftesbury Institution was closed.

Photographed on the 14 May 1925 at the State reformatory for women, Long Bay

The process of photographing offenders upon their entry to prison is highly regimented. In the early 20th century images were taken from a specified distance and a measuring stand was included in every full-length portrait to indicate the offender’s height. From late 1923 onwards three images, detailing the face from the front, a side view of the head and a full-length portrait, were taken. Information regarding the prisoner’s weight, fingerprint classification and police reference number was inscribed on the glass negative. The most important rule was that the inmate was not to smile; their expression was to be neutral and they were not to consciously engage with the camera. Kathleen Ward broke this cardinal rule.

Ward was born in 1904 in Goulburn, a large settlement in southern New South Wales. Her criminal record sheet details prior convictions for drunkenness and indecent language that indicate she had a tendency to create mischief in public places. In 1925 she was convicted of theft and received a custodial sentence that was served at the State reformatory for women at Long Bay, 14kms south of the city of Sydney. Soon after her conviction this image was taken by the prison photographer using a now obsolete form of photographic technology that involved glass plate negatives and long exposure times, which relied on the subject remaining still or else the image appeared blurred.

Few forms of non-violent resistance were available to prisoners during the prison registration process. Ignoring the photographer’s instruction to remain still the smirking Ward is deliberately fluttering her eyes, making them appear eerily translucent in the photographic print. In the side view she appears to have closed her eyes for much of the exposure. This childish behaviour was her way of snubbing her nose at the authorities – she could be forced to have a photograph taken but she would do her best to render it useless. This type of mildly subversive behaviour can be seen in some of the informal mugshots taken by police, known as ‘special’ photographs, in which suspects refuse to open their eyes or continuously move in order to create a blurred image. Ward’s photograph is the first time I’ve detected this kind of behaviour in prison records.

Photographed 15 August 1923 at the State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay NSW.

I thought it would be easy to track down the stylishly dressed woman in this offender photograph. The name ‘Mary Harris’ has been scratched into the emulsion side of the glass plate by the photographer and is clearly visible on the right side of this image. The date the photograph was taken at Long Bay gaol is also evident which gives a rough indication of when she appeared before a court. Despite all the information I gleaned from the negative itself no record of her conviction appeared in the usual sources. A trip to the New South Wales State Records repository, located at Kingswood, was necessary before her story could be told.

Mary Harris was only 18 years old when she entered Long Bay Gaol. She was convicted of vagrancy and received a short custodial sentence. Her criminal record sheet showed that during 1923 she had accumulated two other convictions for vagrancy but it seems she may have paid a fine to avoid serving time. The obvious problem with this conviction is that she does not look like a vagrant, a term which conjures up an image of a hobo or tramp with no fixed address. Harris wears a luxurious fur and has even accessorized it with a fur hat. Her hair is shiny and her white stockings are pristine – she certainly doesn’t look homeless.

In all probability she wasn’t. Women charged with ‘vagrancy’, ‘indecent behaviour’ and ‘disorderly conduct’ where often, although not always, street prostitutes. Prostitution was an unlawful occupation and the term ‘vagrancy’ encompassed all those who had no visible or legal means of support. It was a useful charge for police to use, as they only needed to prove that a woman did not have a job or a male who supported her financially instead of the more complicated task of proving she was soliciting men for sex.

Photographed 20 September 1922, Female Reformatory, Long Bay NSW

When I first found this image I was entranced by the fur coat which dominates the frame. It is thick, soft and so lush that you can imagine touching it and having your fingers sink deep into the fur. It conjured up a couple of questions: Would you ever need such an extravagantly warm fur in the balmy climes of Sydney? And if so, why would you wear such an expensive piece of apparel in a daytime prison mugshot? I turned to the NSW Police Gazette for some answers.

Annie Gunderson was only 19 when she was convicted of stealing from Winn’s Limited, a department store located in Sydney. Shoplifting was a popular crime in the 1920s and quite a few of the women in the Long Bay photographs were convicted of this form of theft. Legend tells that the famous madam Tilly Devine would send her girls into the city for a spot of shoplifting if business in the brothel was slow. Police reports and daily newspapers detailed daring thefts from major stores such as Sidney Snow Ltd., Grace Bros., Anthony Hordern & Sons and Mark Foys Ltd., all of which have since disappeared from the mercantile landscape.

A fur coat in Sydney was a symbol of luxury. Aping the fashions of Europe, Sydney women would buy heavy fur coats and swelter in our tepid winters. The longing for this luxury item created a market for the theft and sale of fur. Upon further digging I discovered that Annie Gunderson, replete in her gorgeous fur, had actually been charged with stealing a fur coat from Winns. History does not tell us if the fur in the photograph is the stolen item but I suspect it is.

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.

Photographed 29 August 1919 at the Female Reformatory, Long Bay

Holding the glass plate negative up to the light, my attention was immediately caught by the grotesque fox fur dangling around the woman’s neck. My gaze then drifted to her greasy hair and despondent look. She was obviously dressed in her ‘Sunday best’, a rich velvet skirt, full pelt fur and freshly buffed shoes. I was left to wonder why a woman who took obvious pride in her appearance would have such dirty disheveled hair. The answer lay in the northern New South Wales town of Tamworth.

Alma Smith was known around town as the daughter of ‘Jack the Bellman’. It seems she was also known to police as a backyard abortionist. In October 1928 Mrs Frazier of Tamworth visited Smith as she was ‘in a certain condition’, a modest phrase indicating she was pregnant. She had given birth to twins in April that year and wasn’t ready to further expand her family. She decided to visit Smith in order to have an abortion. As a result she fell ill with septicemia, an infection of the blood, and died at the Tamworth Hospital.

The police took a statement from Mrs Frazier and she identified Smith as the abortionist. Smith denied knowing Mrs Frazier but witnesses swore they had seen the two women together. Smith was taken into custody and tried in the Armidale Courthouse. She was convicted and sent to Sydney to serve her sentence. Her unkempt hair is the result of her time spent in custody where she could not complete her usual beauty routine. I presume her best clothes were worn to impress the court during her trial. When she was found guilty she was shipped off to Long Bay in the clothes in which she stood.