Making Public Histories: Women and the criminal justice system in Australia
Women were outsiders in the criminal justice system for most of the nineteenth century. Unable to practice law, sit on juries or serve in the police force, they were subject to the operation of a masculine legal system. But this did not mean that they were without agency. Through the lives of three very different women, this seminar explores women’s interactions with an evolving criminal justice system, struggling to come to terms with new (and assertive) women as citizens.
Sarah Conquest was a working-class woman from inner Melbourne who engaged extensively with Melbourne’s Court system in the early twentieth century. Sarah navigated the Melbourne Police Courts in a wide variety of ways from the 1890s to the 1920s, as witness, as accused, in an attempted prosecution, in maintenance claims against her separated husband and for the state support of her two children. Later, she was an inevitable presence as her younger son became entrenched in the criminal justice system. Sarah’s experiences suggest that working class women were not only the subject of state intervention, but endeavoured — with varying success — to employ the Court system to their own advantage.
Mary Fortune was a pioneering crime writer in Australia, and one of the first women to write police procedurals world-wide. Because she used the pseudonyms Waif Wander and W. W. her substantial audience did not know her identity–with good reason. She had committed bigamy when she married a policeman, and her son George was a career criminal. That did not stop her earning a living with goldfields memoir, female-centric journalism and of course genre, for she survived as a freelance writer for over forty years in Melbourne. While George robbed banks and cracked safes, his mother considered questions of reform and recidivism in her crimewriting. This contradictory and vital pair raise questions of gender roles, crime and punishment, and how the unconventional can be so easily erased from history.
Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks was an unmarried, 40-year-old South Australian woman who in 1915 became the first policewoman in the British Empire employed on the same salary as men, and with the same powers of arrest. A strict Methodist and teetotaller who loved to shop, Cocks walked the streets with a five-foot cane, barking “Three feet apart!” at young couples caught canoodling in the Adelaide parklands. When she wasn’t rescuing young women from opium dens and finding jobs for wayward youths, she was single-handedly cracking cases, from drugs being smuggled aboard interstate coffin boats, to the suspicious poisoning of children in a country town. Cocks’ work was so groundbreaking that it was reportedly copied by the New York Police Department and hailed as world’s best practice by the League of Nations. But despite earning an MBE and enjoying almost unrivalled renown in early 20th century Adelaide, she has joined many once-prominent women in becoming lost to popular history.
Our speakers:
Dr Jennifer Anderson is a managing lawyer at Women’s Legal Service Victoria. Her PhD examined the creation of the Children’s Court jurisdiction in Victoria in the early twentieth century. Her research explores the experiences of children and women in the early Victorian criminal justice and social welfare systems.
Lucy Sussex is an Honorary Fellow at La Trobe University. Her award-winning fiction includes novels and five short story collections. She has examined crime fiction’s origins in: Women Writers and Detectives in the Nineteenth Century (2012); Blockbuster (2015); and with Megan Brown, Outrageous Fortunes (2025), about Mary and George Fortune.
Dr Lainie Anderson OAM is a writer whose 35-year career in journalism and public relations includes 17 years as a columnist with Adelaide’s Sunday Mail as well as stints at the Herald Sun and London’s The Times. In 2024, Lainie completed a PhD with the University of South Australia, researching the life of Kate Cocks, the inspiration behind her best-selling historical cosy crime, The Death of Dora Black. Lainie is vice-president of the History Council of South Australia, board trustee with the History Trust of South Australia and a South Australian representative on the Federation of Australian Historical Societies.
The seminar is part of an ongoing series, Making Public Histories, that is offered jointly by the Monash University History Program, the History Council of Victoria and the Old Treasury Building. Each seminar aims to explore issues and approaches in making public histories. The seminars are open, free of charge, to anyone interested in the creation and impact of history in contemporary society.
We thank the series sponsors, Monash University Publishing, the Monash University History Program and the Old Treasury Building.
