‘I do hope I get the job back in future,’ she told reporters. ‘That’s been my ambition since I was a six-year-old and corrupt police will not be spoiling that for me. I have no ill-feeling towards the police service. I don’t think I ever will have. It’s something that happened in the past and all I can do now is try and get reinstated.
‘Of course there are going to be some police officers who won’t be happy,’ she conceded.
She was right about that. And the officers unhappy with the ruling included senior people running the force, according to anonymous sources who briefed reporters.
If the commission ordered she be reinstated, it would be unlikely she would successfully complete recruit training.
‘She’d be better off taking a compensation package,’ one source told a reporter.
Meanwhile, before the media caravan moved on, there was a chance to make a little extra cash. The Nine network’s Sixty Minutes reportedly paid her $19,000 to appear, and it was well-known that a division of Penguin had offered a hefty advance for a tell-all book.
Ben Hills was approached to write the book but says he pulled out when a lawyer advising Hollingsworth demanded the lion’s share of the advance for her. Hills, famously frank, told the lawyer where to go and no book was written. The approaches from film and television producers also came to nothing for many years. It was only when the makers of the Underbelly drama series revived contact with Hollingsworth years later because of her colourful Kings Cross connection that it looked as if a version of her story would reach the small screen.
By mid-1997, Hollingsworth was locked in a Mexican stand-off with the police force. She insisted she still wanted to join it – and the force insisted she wasn’t wanted. One tactic was to refine the charge against her. According to a barrister acting for the police at a new hearing before the full bench of the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission in October that year, Hollingsworth’s time as a prostitute would have exposed her to ‘the criminal milieu’. The barrister said the police service wanted to draw a ‘very, very distinct, clear line’ in the case. The trouble was that the line was not clear because prostitution is not a crime in New South Wales. The case polarised – and titillated – public opinion as old morality collided with new political correctness. If there was no law against being a prostitute, then how could the fact of being one in the past legally be used against a job applicant for the police service or anywhere else?
The mix of sex scandal, corruption and political correctness was irresistible to the media and the public. Among the reporters who swarmed to the case when it was resumed in late 1997 was Luke Slattery of The Australian. Like Hills, he was not quite convinced by Hollingsworth’s portrayal of herself as a simple country girl-turned-fearless whistleblower confronting a corrupt and hypocritical system that denied her the chance to turn over a new leaf.
The astute Slattery wrote of ‘the rather theatrical form’ of Hollingsworth’s dual personalities as the police woman/prostitute: what he called ‘Good Kim. Bad Kim.’
‘Kim Hollingsworth’s eyes are a deep, lapis lazuli blue,’ he wrote. ‘Her skin is pale, sun shy. Her nose has been so finely shaped by a surgeon’s scalpel that it resembles more closely a piece of ornamental filigree than a breathing apparatus.
‘She is beautiful yet severe – all angles and planes. Too pointy, you’d think, to melt hearts. If she sashayed into a Sean Connery-era James Bond thriller as a wily seductress, you would wonder, as she and Connery slide between the sheets: KGB or CIA?’
But he made the point that the severity is softened by an open ‘at time naïve, country manner, a mouth that curls readily into a schoolgirlish grin, and a repertoire of broad Aussie dipthongs: “yes” is a husky “yieah” …’.
One of several contradictions about Hollingsworth was this: why she would want to return to the police service at all, given the treatment she swore she had endured during her two months there in 1995.
According to her affidavit, what began as a few sarcastic remarks at a nightclub about her past turned into sexual harassment and bullying by fellow police. One classmate said: ‘Tell me, did you get your gear off?’ and then two trainee detectives approached her and said words to the effect: ‘We remember you from the strip shows. How would you like to make some money and do another show? We could organise one on a boat.’
Soon, she said, notes were pinned on her door, such as: ‘Strip moll’, ‘Blow me, Kim’, and ‘Fill me up, Kim’. She got obscene telephone calls and male recruits banged on her door late at night demanding sex. She would later tell reporters that she was ‘treated terribly’, ostracised and ate her meals alone.
In an affidavit, she said: ‘The harassment got so bad that, at night, I would sit in my room alone with only the desk light on and put towels around the bottom and paper up the top of the door so the light did not shine through, so that no one would know I was in there.’
It was hard to keep the subject of sex out of the Industrial Commission hearing. The court tittered with laughter when the transsexual barrister Terry/Theresa Anderson tried to nail Hollingsworth on the issue of ‘trick sex’ because Hollingsworth had claimed earlier that she simulated sex with clients rather than providing the real thing.
The transcript reads:
Q: Ms Hollingsworth, the men who you performed trick sex on or simulated oral sex on …
A: Yes, yes …
Q: – were men who had in fact sought from you that you participate in true sexual intercourse?
A: That’s correct.
Q: And that you participate in true oral intercourse?
A: Yes.
Q: And to the extent that they did that, they paid you upon that basis?
A: That’s correct.
Q: And to that extent, you deceived them?
After objections from Hollingsworth’s lawyer on the grounds of relevance and some legal quibbling, a bemused Commissioner Peter Connor shot down the barrister’s line of attack that Hollingsworth was nothing but a crooked hooker: a mattress actress who short-changed honest johns by simulating sex.
Connor said testily: ‘Are we going to prosecute every prostitute for –’ before interrupting himself to answer his own rhetorical question. ‘No, we won’t. You can’t answer that question.’
Apart from such diversions, the case would drag on, turning into a saga. In the end, Hollingsworth landed a punch on the police service because Commissioner Connor found she had been unfairly dismissed and ordered her reinstatement with the next intake of recruits in November 1997. This result prompted one tabloid to run the inevitable headline ‘Happy Hooker’ but she wasn’t happy for long, because the police appealed for a stay against her reinstatement.
Hollingsworth turned up in a dark blue suit over a light blue silk shirt, a businesslike outfit that did not hide her striking figure. A reporter watching her walk into court noted a passing businessman swivel around to stare at her.
Hollingsworth was represented before the full bench of the Industrial Commission by Ian Barker QC, famous for his notoriously successful prosecution of Lindy Chamberlain – who was, of course, subsequently cleared of murdering her baby daughter Azaria.
Barker, who had played the Chamberlain jury like a violin, this time took the softly, softly approach – arguing that his client be allowed to start again as a trainee police officer rather than be fully reinstated as a police officer. That way, he said soothingly, the police service would have time to assess if she were suitable for the job. If this were meant to appease the police, it didn’t work – at least, not judging by the language used by the police barrister, Paul Menzies QC. He gave a caustic critique of Hollingsworth’s character, talking of her ‘absence of credibility, absence of credit’, accusing her of avoiding tax and stating: ‘The Police Commissioner does not wish to have such a person in his police service … The Commissioner does not want her there.’
It worked. After a few minutes the commission president delivered judgment: the stay wa
s granted. Meanwhile, however, Hollingsworth was to be paid the equivalent of a trainee salary: around $200 a week. In other words, about what she could make at the Touch of Class brothel in half an hour. But it wasn’t about the money for Kim Hollingsworth. She had a point to prove, maybe to herself.
All the scurrilous stuff about her had already been aired and couldn’t hurt her any more, so she was free to cause as much grief for the police service as she liked. Which is exactly what she did. She posed for photographs with her pet rat Caspar on her shoulder and became an evangelist for animal rights as well as for herself, a poster girl for positive thinking.
From Kings Cross to animal liberation. It was all a long way from her hometown.
TEACHERS don’t need crystal balls to predict the futures of most of the kids that pass through their hands. There are plenty of signposts pointing out the likely course of adult lives.
Here’s a placid girl, friendly and mature, the part of wife and mother already written for her. There’s the cocky, overgrown boy strutting around near the top of a pecking order that will make him a small town hero on the sports field until he ends up a bar room bore, unless he is the one in a hundred who can make the big league.
There’s always a few troublemakers – often from troubled homes – smoking in the toilets, drinking at the dance, doing drugs, fighting and fornicating. Some are only temporarily wild, hostages to hormones or easily led, but among them are the ones doomed to end up on the wrong side of the law.
Then there are the studious few, bent over their books and ignoring the temptations of the present because they dream of the future, an escape to the outside world.
At Wodonga West High in 1984, Kim Hollingsworth was one of the studious ones. She was never loud or vulgar, one of the so-called class ‘tarts’ with short skirts and long fingernails and cigarettes in her handbag. In fact, in all her time at Wodonga, no one would later recall her doing anything that made her stand out from the middle ground. She was quiet, like her brother Jason and sisters Melissa and Melanie. Quiet, in fact, like their mother Glenys, who lives in the same mission brown double-storey house and is so reserved she rarely speaks unless spoken to first if an acquaintance sees her in the street.
What little that Kim Hollingsworth’s contemporaries and teachers recall of the quiet girl is what she didn’t do, rather than what she did.
She didn’t smoke in the toilets, ‘pash’ boys behind the bus stop or pinch stuff from the shops down the street. She didn’t turn up late for school and didn’t disturb others in class when she got there. She did her homework not only on time but well. About the only thing that stood out was that she and her closest schoolfriend, JoAnne Wiltshire, were Boy George fans. Even then, Kim wasn’t the leader nor remotely outrageous. Teachers remember that it was JoAnne, who still lives in Wodonga, who wore the androgynous Boy George outfits and joked about going to England to see him sing.
Nothing about Kim’s school days hinted at what was ahead: that she would not only become a stripper and a hooker but such a relentlessly extroverted cheerleader for her own cause – not addicted to drugs, like most sex workers, but to self-promotion, like many showbiz performers. When she left school – and the town – she left barely a ripple behind her. Ask people in Wodonga about her and they shake their heads and wonder what happened to change the girl they now realise they barely knew.
Even the few who did know her are puzzled about what happened to the studious schoolgirl. Even in hindsight, none of them claims to have picked anything in her behaviour to indicate that she would end up in the sex industry – or wanting to be a police officer, for that matter.
Kim’s embracing of causes – not just her own crusade to join the police service but that of animal liberation – bemuses one of her few close friends from school. The friend, who doesn’t want to be named, became close to Kim in Year 11.
‘She was pretty straight but a bit of a loner,’ she says. ‘Neither of us made friends easily. She was definitely brighter than most of the others and always studying.’ She was good at English and German.
She recalls the Hollingsworths having cats and a collie dog but little to indicate Kim’s later passion for animal rights. ‘That could have come when she went to Sydney and got in with a new group of people,’ she ponders. Nor can she recall Kim the devoted vegetarian, more that she was interested in music.
Half a lifetime later, the details have faded but she recalls vaguely that something went wrong for the Hollingsworth family that she can’t quite identify. Kim’s father left the police force before the girls finished school, and soon after separated from his wife.
‘It was a big house in the snobby bit of Wodonga. I think they (Kim’s parents) were still together when we met but they separated and he moved downstairs. He was always very friendly to me. I think he made stuff out of glass (for sale) in the garage. Kim’s mum didn’t like visitors but she didn’t mind me.’
Whatever it was that went wrong for the Hollingsworths might well have derailed Kim’s final year at school. At least one teacher recalls that she didn’t see out the school year in 1984. Her former classmate’s memory is that she moved out of home and across the Murray to Albury, renting a flat and working in an ice cream shop, first of a series of casual jobs that would lead her to the sex industry.
It sounds like the start of the independent, sexually adventurous life but the friend says not. ‘She didn’t have a boyfriend. She was never into boys then – apart from Boy George. It wasn’t until later that she became more of a show pony.’
The friend claims to share Kim’s philosophy: ‘I do what I like as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.’ But she concedes that Kim changed after she left the district and joined ‘the scene’.
A lot can happen in three years. When Kim returned to Wodonga for her classmate’s 21st birthday in 1988, she had changed – in more ways than one.
‘She was a “dancer” then. And I think she’d had her boob job done by then, and I reckon a nose job.’ But what she remembers most is Kim giving ‘my Dad a real big kiss – almost a pash. No inhibitions at all.’
After that, they kept in touch intermittently but rarely saw each other. The friend had married young and they were taking different paths. Interestingly, she says, Kim’s sister Melissa also joined ‘the scene’ in Sin City, whereas brother Jason stayed back in Wodonga with his mother, working steadily and not having much to do with his father or his well-known sister in Sydney.
KATRINA Francis was – and is – a friend of the Boy George fan JoAnne Wiltshire more than she ever was of Kim Hollingsworth. She recalls Kim wanting ‘to be a vet’ and loving animals.
‘I don’t think Kim had many friends,’ she says. ‘She was one of those students who would sit and study. Always had her head in a book. She wasn’t out to make friends – was what you’d call a nerd.
‘She wasn’t a very attractive girl when she was younger. She looked anorexic to me – like a stick figure.’
Katrina was living in Sydney in the late 1990s and was surprised that Kim contacted her and arranged to meet her. ‘We met at the train station and she gave me flowers,’ she recalls. She had been a little bemused by the unexpected gesture – wondered if there were a motive – because they had not really been friends at school.
Like other Wodonga West teachers, Brian Rock recalls the high school fondly. ‘We had some of the most magical teaching ever, there,’ he recalls. ‘The school was built in a paddock and grew form by form each year. It was more a country style school then – friendly and part of the community. Relationships between staff and students were strong.’ The sort of place, he says, where ‘if the circus came to town we’d close the school for the day and go to the circus.’
The school had its success stories: two of the best from battling families not as well off as the Hollingsworths. One former student, Mark McDonald, became a senior researcher at the British Museum. Another, Michael Clifford, is a surgeon who has distinguished himself overseas.
But Kim from Castle Heights, the ‘dress circle’ middle-class enclave where the principal lived, didn’t kick on the way Brian Rock and his fellow teachers thought she would.
‘She was the last kid you’d pick to end up as a stripper or in prostitution,’ says Rock. ‘My first reaction was that she must have been affected by drugs or mental illness – but that wasn’t it. She was quiet, studious, shy, not outspoken.’
He thinks she didn’t finish the year’s study (in 1984) because of some domestic upset but can’t recall the details. ‘I’ve got a niggling suspicion that something went wrong at home.’
One thing is clear: by the time Kim reached VCE in 1984, her police sergeant father was on extended sick leave for reasons that time has partly obscured. Fellow police recall unproven suspicions that some members had been ‘milking’ petrol from police cars. And that, angered by rumours that bounced around the station, Alan Hollingsworth had taken a stand: he would take all his accumulated sick leave then resign. He was a proud man and wasn’t going to suffer the humiliation of being questioned over nonsense like allegations of siphoning petrol as if he were some supposed petty thief, even if it were only a departmental matter. At around the same time, tensions at home came to a head and he split with his wife, Glenys, living for a while under the same roof. Then he left, heading for Sydney and a job as ‘a chauffeur’, according to one bemused former police officer who worked at Wodonga at the time.
Whether it’s right or not, the impression he left behind is of a strict and secretive man who dominated the family until he left it. A police officer stationed at Wodonga at the time recalls that Alan Hollingsworth transferred there from Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs in the late 1970s, before Kim was ready to start high school. He was a sergeant in uniform but not one to curry favour with the public and fellow police. He kept to himself – and so did his family.
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