Perth Voice Interactive

Drunk, loud, loitering women leading “idle lives” in early 1900s Perth is the topic of a new book by ECU lecturer Leigh Straw.

Dr Straw became interested in researching the era while investigating a 1929 murder.

Poring over newspapers of the day, she was struck by the number of mugshots of women staring back at her.

Her book Drunks, Pests and Harlots: Criminal Women in Perth and Fremantle 1900-1939 tells the stories of both victims and perpetrators: Esther Warden was known as the “terror of the West End” in Fremantle.

“A really tough character,” Dr Straw says. “She was a woman who could hold her own,” amassing more than 200 convictions. She spent an average of 10 months a year in Fremantle prison, and proves glassing is not a 21st century phenomenon.

“As she was walking down the street in Fremantle to the Orient Hotel, the second the staff would see her they’d start hiding the glasses, because she’d lob glasses at the clientele.

“It was a sad story, too, because she couldn’t get off the drink.”

Others, like Sarah Jane Mattson, were victims of circumstance. After so many of her children died at a young age, she turned to drink to cope, and notched up many arrests for fighting in public and loitering for sex.

“They were caught up in this cycle of offending, and really quite lost souls,” Dr Straw says.

While sentences doled out to women for public nuisance were comparable to what men received, the way the courts viewed them was very different.

“Women were sexualised in their crimes: No matter what they did, it came back to them being a woman.

“They talk about some fall from femininity that takes place. For a woman appearing in court, her appearance is detailed, her family life, whether she’s quite sexual.”

Dr Straw found some themes live on today: “The public gaze is always different towards women.

“If you see a young woman drunk in public, it’s not accepted in the same way as male drinking… immediately we hear terms like ‘she’s vulnerable’, ‘she’s looking for trouble’.”

The research also reveals some posh Perth areas used to be very different places: “King Street was one of the most notorious places in Perth,” Dr Straw says.

“King Street was described as this scene of drunken orgies, and prostitutes working on the corner, and youth gangs hanging around.”

Murray and Hay used to be inner-city slums filled with “all manner of criminal types”. Fremantle’s sort of remained steady: In the old days only social outcasts were game enough to live in inner city Fremantle. A wander along Queens Street still feels like an outing in the wild west.

Dr Straw’s book is out now on Amazon.

by DAVID BELL