My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  When the Bodsworths pulled into town in their big black Nash car in May 1955, Wilcannia was like the big smoke to the kids. Even though the town was just a shadow of its former self, the grand buildings from its glory days when it was known as the ‘Queen City of the West’ still looked imposing. Along the shore of the Darling River between the red gums, the beautiful old sandstone warehouses that used to be filled by the busy paddle steamers plying their trade seventy years earlier were empty but had not then fallen into disrepair. It was no longer the third largest port in New South Wales after Sydney and Newcastle but it was still at the heart of a vast farming district with a thriving community and a famous store, Knox and Downs, where it was said you could buy everything from a boiled lolly to a windmill.

  Even better was that no one in Wilcannia knew the Bodsworths, which was why Dulcie figured it was as good as anywhere to stop for a while. They set up in the campsite along the river where they managed to find a large tent and Harry asked around for work. Dulcie felt so comfortable that the children were even allowed to use their real names.

  Hazel was still only fifteen but Dulcie had put her age up two years, and she had been working as a domestic to supplement the family’s meagre income as they travelled from town to town. She certainly felt and acted older than she was so it was easy for her to pass as seventeen. All the kids had to grow up pretty quickly because of their way of life. There had been no time for Hazel to play with dolls; instead, she had moved on to the real thing — looking after her brothers and sister. Dulcie treated her like a grown-up and told Hazel that she had to go and get herself some work if they were going to stay in Wilcannia a while. About the same time as Harry heard that they might need some help at Burragan, Hazel got her first real job — as a nurse’s aide at the local hospital. She hadn’t done any nursing before but walked up to the front door, told them she was seventeen and asked if they had any work. To her amazement, they asked her how soon she could start. It was the turning point in Hazel’s life that made her the woman she became.

  The hospital was a beautiful colonial sandstone building along the river, fronting onto Ross Street. It was a magnificent example of early Australian architecture with wide verandahs shading it from the heat before there was any air conditioning. Nurse’s aides started in the pan room, literally: they cleaned up the shit. Hazel loved it because the aides also got to do everything the nurses did except for actually treating the patients, giving injections or handing out drugs. It had less than thirty beds but Wilcannia Hospital then operated like a general hospital. It had a maternity ward and there were operating theatres, although it had only one full-time doctor, the local general practitioner Dr John Louis Potts who was also the hospital’s medical superintendent. Other doctors were brought in when needed by the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

  Hazel’s uniform was a blue dress with buttons up the front, fitted at the waist with a white apron over it and she didn’t even have to press it because their laundry was done for them. On her head she wore a blue cap with a band around it.

  The best thing was that she moved away from Dulcie’s watchful eye. In the Nurses’ Homestead, she had her own bedroom, and there were clean bathrooms, a sitting room and a big table where they all ate their meals, which were cooked for them. Hazel felt she had stepped through a door into another world. The rules were strict but she took to them more easily than some of the other nurse’s aides — after all, they hadn’t been brought up with Dulcie as their mother. Matron lived in the nurses’ quarters as well and no one could begin to eat until she had sat at the table and said grace. Those were the days when matrons were looked on with awe and expected to be treated like the Queen, which the Wilcannia matron certainly was.

  However, Dulcie soon realised that by telling Hazel to get a job, she had relinquished some of her control over her daughter. To regain some of it, she made Hazel give her five pounds from the six pounds she was paid every fortnight. Arguing with Dulcie about it would have been a waste of time for Hazel. Hazel loved her job and she knew that if she didn’t agree to hand over most of her wages, Dulcie would cause trouble and ruin everything for her.

  But Hazel had made the first move, however small, to break away from the power exerted by her mother.

  *

  Burragan Station was not the easiest place to find. Margaret Fitzgerald, known as Madge, and her only daughter Elinor, known as Lin, were such fiercely independent and private people that they even had their mailbox set up on the opposite side of the highway from the driveway to their property. At one stage, it was positioned many kilometres away from the entrance. What few visitors there were rarely got past the woolshed, about halfway between the start of the dirt road and the homestead. Those who did make it were treated to the sight of a magnificent garden with fruit trees and, at the right time of year, a passionfruit vine laden with fruit growing over trellises between two splendid kurrajong trees. Invariably the visitors would comment on how much they loved passionfruit.

  ‘That’s nice,’ old Madge would say but never offer them any, even as her fruit lay rotting on the ground.

  Mother and daughter had no option but to take on help after Madge’s husband, Des, died in 1948. Des Fitzgerald had owned parts of the sheep and cattle station since 1903 and by his death, the family owned 70,000 acres. His demise brought Lin home from boarding school in Adelaide aged fifteen, where she took to working on the land harder than any man, out there from sunup to sundown 365 days of the year. She mustered sheep, hauled them on their backs to crutch them, hoisted 44-gallon drums full of fuel onto the back of utes and kept the bores clear for fresh water. Her mother, then in her seventies, always kept a frugal house, wearing an apron made from hessian sugar bags tied around her waist.

  As the formidable widow and her daughter struggled to maintain Burragan, it would often be weeks before they would get into town, about an hour’s drive away, and the two of them became even more secluded. They had a couple of station hands, including Laurie (who Lin married in 1964 much to her mother’s disapproval because he then saw it as his right never to work again), and in 1955, took on Harry Bodsworth and his stepson Allan, then fourteen and strong enough to work on the land.

  The family moved into the two-bedroom cottage next to the homestead, with the twins and their half-brother living with Harry and Dulcie, and Allan living in the shearers’ quarters about four kilometres away. Dulcie rarely called Jim and Margaret by their names; they were invariably ‘the twins’, as in: ‘Twins, get the washing up done.’ Old Madge only needed the muscle the men brought but she thought Dulcie might as well do some housework and cooking. The main house wasn’t grand but it was solid and filled with old colonial furniture, some of it antique like the carved round table with spindle-back chairs. There were brass beds, meat safes and the then-obligatory treadle sewing machine. They didn’t have a washing machine and the laundry was still done in tubs.

  There was much more room in the homestead than in the cottage and Dulcie couldn’t see why she shouldn’t take it over. Why should old Madge have it when she had only the one daughter while the Bodsworths were a young family? It wasn’t fair. Dulcie had tried to ingratiate herself with Madge but while her act worked with men, the women could always see through her. Madge was on to her quick smart. Madge was not the friendliest of people anyway and she dealt with Dulcie by keeping her at arm’s-length, polite but very firm. Madge was nothing if not direct and she couldn’t abide people who were two-faced. She knew that Dulcie had been bad-mouthing her behind her back but pretending to be nice to her face. She had no idea how dangerous the woman could be if she perceived she had been slighted.

  Dulcie’s thoughts became a plan, which she put into action. She thought if the mother and daughter had enough bad luck, they would move into town, leaving her and Harry to look after Burragan.

  She started to talk about how the owners were ‘too big for their boots’ and treated her badly, even if she was convincing no one but herself. Hazel had bought
a pushbike which she was paying off at ten shillings a fortnight but it was too far to cycle out to Burragan so the only times she visited were when Harry or Dulcie picked her up and gave her a lift. On one visit, Allan told Hazel that their mother had said the two Fitzgerald women should really move into town and then she could live in the homestead and manage the property. He told her how Dulcie had already staged a couple of accidents by making one of the rainwater tanks spring a leak. On another occasion, the forever malleable Harry had taken a part out of the engine in the truck so it wouldn’t start for Lin Fitzgerald.

  Hazel knew that it was pie in the sky stuff for Dulcie to imagine the Fitzgeralds would move.

  ‘It’s never going to happen,’ she told Allan. ‘They have grown onto the buildings and this is their life. They are part of their farm.’

  She noted Allan’s concerns but although it sounded ominous, Hazel was too excited with her new life to take the warnings very seriously and she didn’t think anything really bad would happen. She didn’t want to say anything to Dulcie because she knew she would get belted. So she left Dulcie the five pounds for that fortnight and went back to the nurses’ quarters and her new friend Connie Paterson, who had moved up from Adelaide as a registered nurse.

  The woolshed got it first. Dulcie chose a day when all the station hands were out in their trucks and utes, and on 7 October 1955, she got Allan to drive her to the woolshed where she poured a mixture of sugar and kerosene onto the bales of wool and set them on fire. She knew she could rely on Allan to keep his mouth shut as he was too terrified of her to speak up. They drove back to the main house before the blaze was discovered. By the time the others smelt the fire and followed the smoke back to the woolshed, it had been destroyed. Dulcie could not have been more sympathetic to the Fitzgeralds. What a terrible thing to happen! Madge had the police come and investigate but there was nothing left of the shed and it was put down to an accident, perhaps a cigarette butt, although no one admitted to having been smoking near there.

  The only heating in the homestead was from fireplaces in two of the rooms and the cooking was done on a wood-fired stove. A few weeks later, on 3 December, Dulcie started a fire in the wood heap next to the main house and it burnt the whole place to the ground. (Luckily it was before the Fitzgeralds started to hide their fortune in the house, after it was rebuilt. When Lin died in a nursing home in Broken Hill in 2011, hundreds of thousands of dollars were found hidden under floorboards, in the back of cupboards and wrapped in the pages of newspapers.)

  Dulcie had met her match in Madge Fitzgerald. Madge had again called the local Wilcannia police and fire brigade and while there was no evidence, she was sure Dulcie was behind both the house fire and the blaze at the woolshed. After watching everything she owned go up in flames, she gave Dulcie and Harry their marching orders, told them to pack up and get out. The family once again put their shearer’s mattresses and the waggas in the trailer and got into the Nash. Taking the wheel, Dulcie drove to the highway, shaking Burragan off like the dust from the car’s wheels.

  Sam Overton was to prove a much easier target for Dulcie. Not even the bush telegraph could have put him on alert because the Fitzgeralds kept themselves to themselves. They weren’t on the radar.

  As the Bodsworths moved to the other side of Wilcannia and onto the 60,000-acre Netallie Station, Hazel was finding out what it was like to have friends for the first time in her life. She had never had other kids to play with, just her brothers and sister, and it was fun to go out to the tearooms in Wilcannia or organise a picnic on the banks of the Darling River on a day off. Her best friend Connie — Sister Paterson to the patients — had moved to Wilcannia for love. She had met Robert Knox in her home town of Adelaide and followed him to the bush where his family owned the Knox and Downs store. He was something of a catch with his wealth and prestige, a bit like the James Packer of Wilcannia. He had taken over from his father, also called Robert Knox, as the chairman of the Knox and Downs company after Mr Knox senior died in 1948. The pioneering family had played a major role in opening up the White Cliffs opal fields and were also into shipping.

  Hazel always thought them a strange match because Connie was tall, elegant and beautiful while Robert was quite dumpy and turning to fat, but they were in love. Connie was staying at the Nurses’ Homestead until they got married.

  At Netallie Station, Sam Overton was managing it for his wife’s family, the McClures, a farming dynasty who had owned it since 1917. It already had its own little spot in history as Constance Desailly, the daughter of a previous owner, had married Edward Dickens, known as Plorn to friends and family. Along with his older brother, Plorn had been encouraged to migrate to Australia by their father, the great novelist Charles Dickens. The man who gave the world Oliver Twist and Ebenezer Scrooge thought his sons would have a better life away from the filthy cities of industrial England. Constance became Mrs Dickens in 1880 and the couple held their wedding reception at Netallie Station while her husband went on to become the local MP.

  Overton used to have a property of his own, called ‘Ellameek’, at Frances in the southeast of South Australia, coincidentally not far from Naracoorte, where Dulcie had lost her last four babies. His wife, Margaret McClure, worked as a nurse in Adelaide and usually visited at Christmas and Easter, bringing with her their son David during the school holidays. The McClures were part of Adelaide society and when the couple married in November 1939, it made it into the social pages of South Australia’s The Advertiser, her dark hair under a white veil and him looking dashing with his thin moustache on top of a wide, smiling mouth. For no reason at all other than jealousy, Dulcie took an instant dislike to Margaret Overton. Not that she ever let Margaret know her true feelings.

  The mid-1950s were boom years for Australia’s wool industry and the magnificent prices made farmers happy for a change. The McClures had done as well as the other families living off the sheep’s back and invested in large homes in the middle of Adelaide and in the Adelaide Hills. Margaret was one of a very close family of three brothers and four sisters and one of her nieces, Miss South Australia Julianna McClure, married Squadron Leader Kym Bonython, part of the Bonython family who were even higher up the social scale than the McClures and were like royalty in South Australia. Kym, the youngest child of Sir John Lavington Bonython, had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in World War II and would go on to welcome (as the promoter’s representative) the Beatles to Adelaide in 1964.

  These were the people Overton had socialised with as he lived in Adelaide for a few years after selling Ellameek and moving to Netallie Station, so he had accumulated a good city wardrobe, which he had brought with him. He was noted as one of the best-dressed men in the area. While the station hands and other station owners dressed like drovers in the dust, Overton wore the best riding boots and liked each pair to be kept polished. Hanging up in his bedroom, he had neatly pressed slacks, trousers, two good suits and three tweed sports coats. He was a strong, tall man at about five feet ten inches, who weighed about thirteen stone, had brown hair and was at the peak of good health. Actually, Dulcie realised, he was about the same size and build as Harry. When she polished the boots, she even checked their size — a 10, just like Harry. She thought Overton’s clothes would look even better on her husband, especially those sports coats. She could picture Harry in them.

  Harry was working as the overseer on the property in the summer of 1955 and early 1956 when the temperatures soared to forty or fifty degrees in the day and drought was a constant companion. Once again the family had fallen on their feet and they lived in a stone cottage about fifty metres to the north of the rambling homestead. Every morning Harry walked to the main house to get his orders for the day from Overton. On a good day, Netallie was the most beautiful place in the world, the flat lands going on forever as if they were falling off the ends of the earth. But it was harsh land, the ground as hard as the hobs of hell, trodden solid by the hooves of the sheep. The day Dulcie chased Tom th
e cook out of the kitchen was the day he handed in his notice. While Harry was in control outside, Dulcie now had control inside the house. She was cook as well as housekeeper. And her heart was as barren as the land.

  Dulcie never dwelt on the past, as evidenced by the fact the only person she told about her secret family was Hazel. She had never gone looking for her first four children. She had never spoken about the shocking births at Naracoorte, which almost took her life. Ted Baron was as lost to her as those dead babies — unless she needed him, when she would roll him out like a prop in a play. Now that she had Sam’s ear at the dining table, she launched into her hard-luck stories, the ones that worked so well on men. She was a widow, had loved her husband and it had been a shock when he died. They had done it tough but how lucky was the family when Harry came along. Sam was sucked in. They got on well and became friends, because Dulcie could be witty and entertaining. But she never became too familiar or put a foot above what she knew was her station. That would never have done. She knew she needed Sam on side. To everyone, including him, she was always Mrs Bodsworth. To her, he was always Mr Overton. He thought she was an excellent cook, certainly better than Tom, with the tea on the table by five on the dot. She always did him proud at breakfast with his favourite — lamb chops with eggs and thick gravy.

  Everyone in the bush could shoot; and after Mrs Overton and David had left in January 1956 to return to Adelaide following their Christmas holiday, Sam took up his favourite sport again. He called on Dr Potts, who’d been in town only for as long as Overton had, and the local parish priest, both single men, and they would ride out on the property to shoot ducks. The three men enjoyed each other’s company, a drink and the food served up by Dulcie when they got back. Sometimes they would take Allan along with them and he spoke about it as some of the best times he ever had.