Don’t look now: Gordon Johnston with some of the wool museum exhibition on violent Australian female criminals.
ERIN PEARSON
The female underbelly of Australia’s violent crime features in a new exhibition at Geelong’s National Wool Museum.
Exhibition curator Nerida Campbell said Femme Fatale: the Female Criminal recounted the stories of Australia’s most dangerous women.
Campbell noted that female crime was particularly intriguing.
“There’s something about the way the other side lives that fascinates us. Most of us are law abiding citizens but we do wonder,” Campbell told the Independent.
“Certainly here in Australia, Underbelly has really fired up an interest in criminals.”
Campbell said the exhibition featured many of Australia’s most shocking female killers including Kate Leigh, Iris Webber, Eugenia Falleni and other criminals locked away in Long Bay jail between 1915 and 1930.
“Some of the stories of the Razor Gang, for example, are just remarkable. The lives of the actual criminals were punctuated by violence and drug addiction.
“Tilly Devine was a brothel madam in Sydney. She had a husband who was an ex-soldier and she’d go out and punish people.
“She was quite handy with a razor, guns and her fists.”
Campbell said the exhibition also compared the portrayal of seductive and dangerous women on the silver screen to the reality of prison life.
“The seductress we see in films is attractive, independent and intelligent and uses her sexuality against men who are unable to resist her but the reality for most female criminals turns out to be a hard, dysfunctional and violent life brutalised and degraded further by stints in prison,” she said.
“Surrounded by male gangsters, the women of Sydney’s Razor Gang era were as tough as any of the men they mixed with.”
Campbell said the exhibition included forensic evidence, glass plate negatives of female criminals, record sheets, images and medals belonging to Australia’s first policewoman.
Campbell discovered and researched the exhibition’s mug shots component at Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum, which stored more than 130,000 police forensic negatives created from 1912 to 1964.
The wool museum will host the exhibition until June 13.
