My Mother, a Serial Killer

by Hazel Baron

  The end of their heyday would have destroyed a lot of people but Tregenza knew he had brought about his downfall himself. The demon drink. He was a demon who lived to drink. He drank to celebrate a win and drank to commiserate with himself when he didn’t.

  ‘Tre’ in the Cornish language means a settlement or homestead but it was only in his name that Tregenza had either. After he quit as a jockey, he drifted around the three states, working as a miner at the Mount Drysdale gold mine near Cobar in New South Wales, as a drover or as a shearer. He had even worked at Netallie as a station hand before the Bodsworths arrived there.

  His passions in life were drinking, smoking — and pea soup. In that order. His alcohol consumption led to a few run-ins with the law. In 1946, he had been ‘admonished’ and fined thirty shillings in Hay Magistrates Court after pleading guilty to the charges of drunkenness and using ‘indecent language’. Court records show he had been droving cattle down south and was on his way back north with his pay packet when he was found worse for wear on the Balranald Road after getting drunk on red wine. Tired of hearing him swearing loudly, which was disturbing his wife and family, a householder called the police and Tregenza ended up in the dock the next morning after sobering up overnight in the police cells. He paid his fine and moved on.

  *

  After being kicked off Netallie Station, the Bodsworths moved back to Wilcannia where, despite the rumours that followed them both from Netallie and from Burragan Station, people were still willing to give Dulcie a go. It could be said that she cooked her way into their hearts. Stanley Davis employed her in the position he called cook-general at the Club House Hotel where he was the licensee. His wife had been doing the job but she had to go to Tasmania for medical reasons. Truth be told, the patrons of the dining room said, while not wanting to be disrespectful to Mrs Davis, Dulcie was the better cook.

  The Club Hotel harked back to the days when it was one of thirteen hotels in the town. On the corner of Reid and Myers Streets, it was built in 1879 on the site of Wilcannia’s first hotel when the town was buzzing. In those days, the main street was sand and horses were tethered to the verandah posts. When Hazel and her family made the town their home, the place, while it looked grand, was still rough and ready. The population was around 100, with just over half Aboriginal. Hazel felt she was fortunate not to have been brought up racist; her family treated everyone the same despite their skin colour. Apart from anything else, they knew what it was like to have a tough upbringing.

  Tregenza wasn’t the only ‘piss-wreck’, as they were known among the more sober townsfolk, but he was one of the better known. Hazel thought of him as being ‘well worn’. He had a habit of nodding his head to the left when he said g’day, which Hazel thought showed he still had a spark of cheekiness.

  He would come into town from the outlying stations five or six times a year on a bender and liked to stay at the Club Hotel. His practice was to hand Mr Davis his bank book and his cheque book to look after. It meant he couldn’t lose them, they wouldn’t be stolen while he was in a stupor, and Mr Davis could bank money on his behalf at the Commonwealth Bank — and it also meant Mr Davis always got paid because he held all the cards.

  Mrs Davis had felt sorry for Tommy and it had been her custom to offer him bowls of soup and cups of tea, to make sure he had some sustenance between drinks. It was during one such bender in December 1956 when Mr Davis asked Tregenza if he wanted a cup of tea that the fact he had a tidy sum in the bank slipped out. And Dulcie was hovering around in the dining room in the background to hear it.

  ‘I can afford a cup of tea, Stan,’ Tregenza replied. ‘I’ve got two thousand pounds in the bank, eh, old mate!’

  Dulcie brought him both a cup of tea and a bowl of soup and sat down to talk to her new friend — which was when she learnt he had no family and his favourite soup was pea soup. She dug out a recipe.

  Dulcie had hooked Tommy, and she slowly reeled him in. He was no match for her.

  The lease came up for the dining room at another of Wilcannia’s three hotels, the 1870s Court House Hotel. The single-storey building with its wide verandahs covering the pavements on two sides backed onto the Darling River and was opposite the town’s courthouse and police station. For years it was the most popular hotel in town.

  The Bodsworths had settled into life in Wilcannia, the first time they had dared put down roots. It was sufficiently isolated and far enough away from Victoria for Dulcie to feel as though she didn’t have to look over her shoulder every day for someone from Ted Baron’s family to find her.

  Harry was working as a caretaker at the local aerodrome and Dulcie took over the lease of the Court House dining room and set about ruling the roost. The family still had their Nash but they didn’t have to use it as their bedroom any longer. A galvanised iron cottage behind the hotel came with the job, which was where Dulcie, Harry, Allan, the twins and their half-brother* lived. There were a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom and a tiny kitchen but Dulcie didn’t have to worry about the kitchen because she could use the one in the hotel. The walls were whitewashed and it was quite primitive but it was more than they had been used to. The twins and their half-brother enrolled in the local school. The twins looked upon Harry as their father and Harry treated them as his own kids. He had matured fast himself and moved on from when he thought they were a bit of a nuisance. He even enjoyed their company. Allan got a job as a farm labourer.

  While they had become well known in town and the surrounding area by then, Dulcie still did not let all her fences down. She never drank nor smoked nor swore, not even a bugger or bloody or shit. It was not appropriate for women to talk like that, she said. Ever the hypocrite, Hazel thought; she had murdered but she wouldn’t swear. Dulcie still hid the real person with all her secrets. Hazel knew that behind her smile and her façade of kindness, she had not changed one bit.

  Hazel was still living in the nurses’ quarters and was not very happy about her mother being in town instead of kilometres away on a farming station. It was too close for comfort. Dulcie would walk along to the hospital to see her or send one of the kids to tell her to come down to the hotel. Hazel felt that she had little choice in the matter. She found it hard to be disobedient and out of both duty and fear, she would always go and visit Dulcie, never expecting any sign of affection from the woman she had long ceased calling mother. She was never disappointed.

  Dulcie’s attitude towards her oldest daughter was getting worse as she felt more settled and confident. Nothing Hazel did was any good. Hazel realised the constant belittling was her mother’s way of maintaining control but while it was so frequent that it should have been like water off a duck’s back, the words could still sting — even though Hazel knew they were not true. What hurt the most was when Dulcie expanded the personal insults to include the rest of Hazel’s social group and indeed the whole town of Wilcannia. No one liked Hazel, Dulcie said — no one. She would never amount to anything.

  As well as copping the insults, Hazel was still handing over most of her wages to Dulcie every fortnight. Hazel told herself she did it to help her brothers and sister but she knew that it didn’t do to get on Dulcie’s wrong side.

  Hazel wasn’t given to huge bursts of excitement, being rather a level-headed young woman and because she hadn’t experienced much in her life to get excited about. But she was looking forward to getting married. After they met, Bill had gone back to work on his parents’ property at White Cliffs, getting lifts into town when he could. His family had a house in Wilcannia where he stayed and where he had the use of one of his parents’ two cars. That ‘vacancy’ that Dulcie had talked about on Netallie Station had long fallen through when the Bodsworths were chased off the property, but after six months of the long-distance relationship, the ever-thoughtful Bill got a job in town and moved there full time to be close to Hazel.

  Hazel hadn’t told Bill of her suspicions that Dulcie had murdered her father or that she had somehow caused Sam Overton’s death.
It all sounded rather far-fetched in the cold light of day and she wasn’t ready to burden Bill with all that. She did, however, confide in him about her upbringing and how cruel Dulcie had been. Coming from a big, close and loving family who wouldn’t lift a hand against each other, Bill felt very sorry for Hazel and while he couldn’t imagine such a childhood, he believed every word. When he knew what to look for behind Dulcie’s mask, he could see for himself how hard a woman she was. When he proposed to Hazel, it wasn’t with the romance of red roses and getting down on one knee. It was much better than that.

  ‘We should get married and then I can look after you and you won’t be scared of her,’ he said with insight and meaning every word.

  Hazel realised even at the time that she didn’t know what love was, not ‘love’ enough to get married. She’d always thought love would be something that would sprinkle fairy dust on her and pick her up and fly her around the room, like in the Peter Pan book. Her feet stayed firmly on the ground and, as she saw, so did Bill’s. Neither of them was given to flights of fancy, which was just fine. ‘Peas in a pod,’ Hazel thought of them as. She did like Bill, liked him a lot, but knew she was marrying him primarily to be safe from Dulcie, and she was so grateful that he had promised to protect her. She felt like fifteen going on fifty with all the secrets on her shoulders and never having had anyone to lean on. She wasn’t being cruel but she thought that she could divorce him down the track if things didn’t work out.

  Knowing all that in her own mind, she was still looking forward to the wedding day and to setting up home with Bill. They decided to get married as soon as they could and the date of the wedding was set for 25 March 1957, the day after Hazel’s sixteenth birthday, which was the age of consent back then. Her birthday fell on a Sunday that year so the marriage took place on the Monday.

  Dulcie tried as hard as she could to spoil the wedding. She was livid both that Hazel was moving further away from her influence and also that her daughter might just have found the contentment that had always eluded her. Dulcie and Harry put on public displays that they were in love, kissing and holding hands, but Hazel always thought it was more of an infatuation. Dulcie treated Harry like a son and he was dependent on her. It seemed to Hazel that Dulcie always felt there was something better, as evidenced by the way she had discarded her first two husbands.

  Then there was the fact she wouldn’t be getting any of Hazel’s wages any longer, as they would be shared with Bill.

  First Dulcie declared she didn’t like Bill’s family, although she had never met any of them. She made it clear she wouldn’t be going to the wedding, which didn’t worry Hazel. Dulcie decided they were rich snobs even though she had no idea how well off they really were — Hazel thought it better for Bill’s health not to tell Dulcie that he came from money. Then Hazel asked Allan to give her away and he was proud as punch to say yes, but Dulcie belted him, taking a leather belt to his back. Then she banned the rest of Hazel’s brothers and sister from the church service and they were all too scared to oppose her.

  So Hazel asked one of her brothers-in-law to give her away but remained apprehensive right up to her wedding day in case her mother came up with something else to try to ruin it at the last minute.

  Dulcie didn’t even go with her daughter to choose a wedding dress. Bill’s mother Elizabeth took on that important role. Bill was a man of few words and he hadn’t told his family anything about Hazel’s upbringing. Elizabeth just thought that Dulcie was a difficult woman to get along with and wanted nothing to do with the wedding.

  Hazel’s mother-in-law was a lovely country lady, the sort of mother Hazel would have chosen for herself — warm, open, loving and, most important of all, straightforward. Hazel admired her. She drove Hazel the 200 kilometres down the Barrier Highway to Broken Hill, which was the nearest big town, where she told Hazel to pick out what she wanted. Together they selected a white bridal gown, all billowing white tulle skirt and fitted top. In another break with tradition, the wedding was also paid for by the groom’s parents. Dulcie was seething about the whole wedding but she couldn’t do anything about it.

  Bill and Hazel got married in the Wilcannia Catholic Church after Hazel had sent the priest away with a flea in his ear when he suggested they get married during mass. Those services took ages and she might be a Catholic but she wasn’t going to sit in a church for four hours for anyone.

  In the beautiful historic sandstone building, Bill’s family welcomed Hazel as their newest daughter-in-law. Bill’s parents and siblings and Hazel’s friends from Wilcannia Hospital were among the eighty guests that filled the small church. She saw Connie Paterson and her boyfriend Robert Knox sitting in the pews along with other nurses and ladies they worked with including some of the Aboriginal women. Hazel was happier than she had ever been, even as she walked down the aisle with the doubts in her mind about what love was. She also felt a great sadness about not having her father walk beside her and give her away.

  However, she didn’t miss her mother, not even at the reception, which was at the Country Women’s Association hall where Dulcie had a name for putting on a great wedding spread. On this day, everyone brought a plate and Bill’s parents put on the beer and wine. All in all, it was one of the most peaceful days of Hazel’s life thus far. By the end of the day, she could almost relax because Dulcie had not been able to spoil it.

  The newlyweds moved into a little unlined fibro shack on the way out to the aerodrome. Their first home was a bargain even then at 100 pounds. There was no way they would ask Bill’s family for any money; this was the start of their own little adventure, their life together, and they needed to do it their way. It was exciting. It had dirt floors and consisted of a lounge room, a bedroom, kitchen and laundry where they had one of those green top-loading washing machines. It was like the ones Dulcie had told Hazel about when she was working as a domestic in the big houses, only second-hand. Not that it mattered.

  The couple lined the walls of the shack with newspaper and flour glue. When the paper fell off, they slapped some more glue behind it and stuck it back on the wall. Newspaper was a good insulator. Having lived part of her life in the back of a car, her first real home was like a palace to Hazel and she treated it as such. She covered the dirt floors with lino and paper, which she could shake the dust out of or replace. Hazel put up rods and curtains across the corners of the bedroom to use as wardrobes. Their furniture came from the tip but it was scrubbed with kerosene and then washed down with soap and water. The bed base had no legs so they set it on four drums and bought a good second-hand mattress, pillows, one pair of sheets and a set of pillow cases. There was only one window in the house and Hazel hung up old sheets over the curtain rod as a curtain.

  At the tip they found an enamel kerosene stove which had a tank alongside it and they used it for cooking and heating. Hazel scrubbed down a door, also brought back from the tip, which they rested on two drums and which did as a table. She made hand-sewed cushions for another four drums which served as their dining room chairs. After a few months of married life they splashed out on a second-hand red laminex table with four vinyl chairs even though they worried they were being a bit flash.

  On the back verandah was a charcoal cooler in which they kept butter. It was a simple timber frame with charcoal-filled sides kept continually moist so the warm air drawn through the charcoal evaporated and thus cooled it down. It was about as basic as you could get and Hazel was amused decades later when the climate-change lobby took up the idea as something they had invented. They used powdered milk and bought meat as they needed it. Hazel was just thrilled when they could afford a second-hand fridge.

  It was probably the cleanest fibro shack in the country. Hazel loved keeping it spotless and cleaning everything. Visitors commented how it always smelt of polish. Outside, the small garden was bright with zinnias. The best thing was that she was so happy being with Bill and if that was how love felt, it was something very special. Bill loved taking care of his yo
ung bride and they slipped into married life easily. They were like kids playing at being grown-ups and it was fun.

  Some evenings when they sat on the back verandah, resting after the meal that Hazel had lovingly made, she could smell the dry red soil as she breathed in deeply through her nose. It was as fragrant as any flowers and for the first time in her life, she felt that her soul was at peace. She was proud of what she had created with Bill. They liked being together in what felt like their little world. If only the outside wouldn’t intrude.

  One person who never visited their new home was Dulcie. She could look down and see her daughter’s married home from the family’s cottage further up the hill but Hazel never invited her to come inside and Dulcie was far too proud to ask. However, there were times Hazel could feel her mother’s eyes on her even from that far away.

  Dulcie hated losing control of her daughter and when Harry told her that a job had come up for a general hand at the aerodrome, she told him to ask Bill if he wanted it. It sounded easier than farm work and Bill accepted. Hazel even wondered — ever so fleetingly as it turned out — if Dulcie had softened because she was being nice to Bill. Some evenings after work at the hospital, Hazel and Bill even had dinner at the Court House Hotel where Dulcie worked. There were no takeaways in those days.