The Worst Woman in Sydney

by Leigh Straw

  Young girls were expected to stay at home. When they didn’t, and were seen in public with little concern for their safety, attention turned to their families. Poor families attracted the most notice and were scrutinised for drinking, gambling or loose morals. When children from these families wagged school, didn’t regularly attend church and wandered the streets, the state intervened. Child welfare regulations from the 1880s gave state welfare officers and police greater powers to deal with families accused of neglecting their children.

  When neglect or abuse was reported, police and local authorities recommended removal to an institution. The reformatory and industrial movement in New South Wales, influenced by British example, aimed to reform more than punish young people. It focused on self- discipline within social-welfare programs as a way to limit the number of people sent to prison. Gaols were increasingly seen as the place for serious and habitual criminals. The Industrial Schools Act of 1864 ordered that girls should be left in institutions until the maximum age of eighteen. While the schools were designed not to be like prisons, they made the young women outcasts from society and forced them to lead penitent, religious lives and prove their worth through labour and domestic duties. Most of these young girls felt caught between penal and welfare regimes, and found it hard to overcome the ‘bad girl’ label.

  Kate Beahan would come to know the industrial- school world well. Remanded for eight days after her appearance in court in April 1897, Kate was sent to Parramatta Industrial School for Girls. Kate’s case was not, however, simply one of the state taking action against a wayward teenager. Kate later told a magistrate: ‘my mother sent me to a reformatory’. Timothy and Charlotte Beahan informed the police court in Dubbo that they had no control over their daughter and wanted her placed ‘under proper control’. Tim Beahan had tried. He kept Kate at home, threatened her with the belt and cut back on her meals. It didn’t work, and that’s when the authorities stepped in.

  It’s not difficult to imagine how hard this would have been for Kate Beahan. For all her outward toughness, she was still only sixteen and trying to find her way in the world. It’s unlikely she had considered taking off to the city, but now she was being sent almost 400 kilometres away from family and friends. She might have been overlooked at home, but Kate was very close to her younger brothers.

  The railway line that had only recently connected Dubbo to other towns and a route to the city now brought a train into town to take Kate Beahan away from her family. Kate never shared any of the details of this experience in public records, but we know from other girls taken away around the same time and in the decades that followed, that they were usually handcuffed to the seat. Others were also drugged to ensure their compliance. None of this would have helped curb Kate’s fieriness and mistrust of authority.

  This was a pivotal moment in Kate Beahan’s life. She was smart enough to know that Parramatta Industrial School was a form of imprisonment. She had suffered being cast out by parents who pleaded with the authorities to take her. Perhaps Kate was a handful, and maybe Charlotte and Tim were worried about the impact of her bad behaviour on her siblings, but agreeing to her being sent to an industrial school would have dented young Kate’s spirit. She had to steel herself to survive as best she could at the school until her eighteenth birthday, when the ordeal would be over, but it would be a tough couple of years.

  Kate’s new home at the industrial school was once the precinct of the Parramatta Female Factory. Established in 1821 as a place ‘for the confinement and industry of convict women and their children’, the Female Factory was a notorious establishment. Female convicts were divided into three classes based on their criminal background and ability to work in the colony. If you were in the third class of women, the lowest level, you had been identified as part of a criminal class. Third-class factory women were seen as the worst of the worst – ‘Amazonian banditti’, as they were described in the newspapers. Beyond reform, they were sometimes also beyond control. During one riot in October 1827, female convicts armed themselves with pickaxes, axes and iron bars then escaped into the streets of the surrounding neighbourhood. Most of the women were found and taken back to the factory, but their breakout inspired another four escapes and riots in the 1830s and 1840s. They weren’t just escaping to find freedom; they were outraged at conditions in the factory and took action against them.

  Sixty years after the first major riot at the factory, the Industrial School for Girls was formally established on the site in 1887. While children were contained in adult prisons up to 1905, the Destitute Children’s Act of 1866 (also known as the Industrial Schools Act) was legislated to place neglected or ‘at risk’ children in institutions. When Kate Beahan entered the Parramatta Industrial School in 1897, destitute children and juvenile offenders were all housed in the same complex. While this was better than incarcerating young people with adults, non-offenders were housed together with habitual offenders, who often introduced young girls to criminal ways. This was obvious to the authorities in a series of outbreaks, riots and general disobedience by a large number of girls in the 1890s.

  The industrial school regime wanted to change girls like Kate Beahan. The belief was that teenage girls could be reformed if they only knew how to be good women. This meant Kate cleaned and cooked, sewed and washed clothes. Like the other girls around her – there were 186 girls in the institution in 1898 – Kate was trained as a domestic apprentice. In the controlled environment of the school, girls were closely watched, noted and severely reprimanded if they broke the rules. The Parramatta Girls Industrial School was first and foremost an institution charged with ‘saving the uncontrollable girl from the many pitfalls that are before her if she is left to her own devices’. Girls at risk of offending or having already committed minor offences were to be morally reprogrammed into useful members of society.

  The darker side of this story is the abuse girls suffered at the school. A recent royal commission has revealed decades of abuse at the institution before it was shut down in 1974. In their evidence to the commission, women recounted being forced into isolation and suffering mental and physical abuse. It wasn’t only at the hands of the superintendents. Other inmates abused the girls, sometimes in horrific acts of assault. This raises questions about what Kate Beahan might have gone through in the 1890s. It could explain her toughness and ability to hold her own against men and women.

  When finally she had served her time, eighteen-year-old Kate Beahan left the industrial school in 1899 to fend for herself on the streets of Sydney. News of her release reached Kate’s large family in Dubbo and Narromine. If they expected her to return to the country, they were wrong. Kate’s childhood taught her how to cope with hardship, and from it she moulded a tough, battler spirit. It was the perfect kind of training for the life that awaited her in the working-class slums of eastern Sydney.

  Sydney was an exciting place to be at the turn of the 20th century. Federation, first suggested in 1847, had finally been proclaimed and the new nation of Australia formed. The Western Australians created headaches with their campaigns for secession but finally came to the table. Celebrations were scheduled across the country, and Melbourne and Sydney naturally competed for the prize of biggest shindig. Sydney’s version kicked off on Tuesday, 1 January 1901, when the Sydney Post Office chimed the start of the Federation Procession from Sydney Domain to Centennial Park. It was a new year and the people were celebrating a new, federated nation. Flowing through the main streets of the city and under decorative arches, the 10 000-strong procession was watched by thousands of people lining the streets. While the lack of drama in the lead-up to Federation – no war, revolution or deaths – had kept the nation’s people largely detached from the final steps towards nationhood, it was a pivotal moment in Australian history. Australian nationhood was achieved without civil wars protesting union.

  Somewhere among the thousands of faces lining the inner-city streets was Kate Beahan’s, as she jostled for a good spot to watch
the procession. She wondered what the new nation would provide for her. It was a lot of fanfare for a young woman to take in, especially one from the country. This city still felt very new to her.

  The industrial school had done little to prepare Kate for the realities of life and work in eastern Sydney. She found work in local factories and shops around Glebe and Surry Hills, but struggled to make ends meet. It had become a whole lot load harder when she gave birth to Eileen May Beahan in 1900. In a court appearance in 1903, Kate declared she ‘had an illegitimate child’ and in that brief statement the social stigma is clear.

  Kate Beahan was an unmarried mother. Even if she then married the father, Kate had failed the respectability test. The state, churches and medical profession supported a view that sexuality should be confined to marriage as the ‘cornerstone of femininity’. It was not surprising in a former convict colony. Working-class convicts had chosen de facto life over marriage, and illegitimacy rates soared. The authorities, desperately trying to limit the number of unmarried couples, created a domestic ideal centred on the sanctity of marriage. In this overtly moralistic society, single mothers were condemned as lowering the quality of Sydney and wider New South Wales.

  Despite the stigma, Kate didn’t give up Eileen and made every effort to provide for her as best she could. Just how she did, though, depended on the opportunities available to her in the city. The reality was they were severely limited for a young woman with little family support. Factory and shop work didn’t pay well and only provided enough to rent a room in the poorer, working-class areas of eastern Sydney. Here Kate lived in streets that wealthier society shunned, from fears that the very poor would ‘contaminate and subsume the respectable working class’. Those who were regularly out of work were labelled a social problem. The unemployable included children, old people and women around childbearing years, but also ‘lunatics’, the sick, criminals and those simply unable to hold down a job.

  Vagrants – people living on the streets with no means of support – were ‘disruptive to the social order’. Rather than being pushed off the streets and institutionalised or imprisoned, the very poor made ends meet through both legal and illegal methods. Even if they didn’t commit crimes, they often lived close to or were acquainted with known criminals, and for this reason were tainted by association. Kate Beahan was arrested for vagrancy in February 1901 and received fourteen days’ hard labour in prison. She probably wasn’t living on the streets as such. It was more likely she was associating with known criminals and might have looked suspicious about the streets.

  Making ends meet in these poor streets, Kate Beahan had met Eileen’s father, small-time crook and gang member James Lee. A year younger than Kate and only two inches taller than her at five foot three (160 centimetres), James was described on his prison record as a ‘half caste Chinese’, which meant one of his parents was Chinese. Although he was born in Tumut, a small town at the foot of the Snowy Mountains, James’s Chinese heritage would not have been out of place in the neighbourhoods close to the Chinese markets near Sydney’s Central Railway Station. Chinese immigrants had started to arrive in significant numbers from the 1840s and first worked as agricultural labourers, before many headed off to the goldfields in the rushes of the 1850s. By the late 19th century, Chinese gardeners and hawkers were in great demand for their regular supply of fresh vegetables, and such businesses became an everyday part of life in inner Sydney.

  We don’t know how Kate and James met, but it seems likely they would have come to know one another about the streets of eastern Sydney. Two years after the birth of their daughter, James and Kate married in May 1902 in the Independent Presbyterian Church in Hunter Street. Kate was brought up a Catholic, but having a child out of wedlock may have prevented her from being married in a Catholic Church. The Presbyterian Church was more suited to James’s faith.

  James Lee did little to allay earlier concerns from the authorities about Kate’s lifestyle. Lee had worked as a miner, according to his prison record, but in the city there wouldn’t have been a demand for this particular work. For a time he worked in a factory, but he soon turned to crime. He was a notorious character about the inner-Sydney streets and often included Kate in his criminal activities.

  The Lees appeared together at the Central Criminal Court in July 1902, charged with breaking and entering a house on May Street and absconding with a number of items. They were acquitted at their trial the following month, but their reputations were muddied. The judge was suspicious of the Lees’ activities and raised questions about Kate’s association with the Chinese victim, Willie Ping. In early 20th-century Australia, women living or associating with Chinese men were repeatedly brought before the courts on vagrancy or idle and disorderly charges, and were subject to allegations of prostitution by police and magistrates. At a time of immigration restrictions and a nation federated on the premise that it was a nation for white men, racism against Chinese men shaped these women’s public lives.

  Worried about racism directed at them as the Lees, James and Kate started to use the more anglicised version of their surname, Leigh. While James often used both versions, Kate was distinctly known as Kate Leigh after 1902. Even after another two marriages, Kate was always largely known as Kate Leigh.

  The Leighs didn’t stay out of trouble for long. They appeared in court in 1905 in a sensational assault case that made the papers. Patrick Lynch, licensee of the Tradesman’s Arms Hotel, claimed he had been assaulted by the Leighs in a room they rented from him at one of his other premises. Lynch told police he was checking on rents on 27 January and was asked to inspect some wall-paper in the room the Leighs were renting. Standing up on a chair and looking at the wallpaper, Lynch was suddenly pushed down and the force of it knocked him out.

  When the case came before the Central Criminal Court later in the year, trial evidence revealed an even more scandalous story. James Leigh stood up in court and accused his wife of adultery. He walked into the bedroom and found his landlord in bed with his wife. What was he to do? He thumped the man and chased him out of the building. As the whispers circulated around the court, few believed Kate would stand for it. To everyone’s surprise, she told a similar story.

  The magistrate was having none of it. He charged the Leighs with perjury. While they were acquitted of the charges, Kate Leigh’s public reputation was in tatters. She had told a packed courtroom that she was in bed with another man. She might have been trying to get James off the charges, but the truths and untruths of the case combined to single Kate out as an unrespectable woman. Her notoriety was growing.

  Despite the Leighs’ solidarity in court, their marriage didn’t last. Cracks had surfaced not long after their wedding when, in November 1903, Kate claimed in court that she had been living with her father in Narromine ‘for some time’. Once it was all over, Kate wasn’t shy in telling courtrooms that James had failed as a husband.

  The Leigh marriage seems to have been over by January 1910, when Kate was called to give evidence in an opium possession trial. In one of the few times she was a witness and not the accused, Kate claimed she knew the man facing opium charges through his connection to her husband. She couldn’t rely on her husband for money because he was often away on his boat, fishing and taking opium. When the prosecuting officer queried how she earned a living, Kate declined to offer an explanation, telling the court she didn’t need to work. Neither was she a ‘fizzgig for the police’, which meant she wasn’t a police informer. Kate was probably involved in the sale of opium, but according to her moral compass, her husband was far worse: he was an addict, something Kate detested, even when she later added to it with her trade in sly grog and cocaine.

  Opium was big business in Sydney in the late 19th century, but anti-Chinese sentiment at the time led to the introduction of opium laws in New South Wales. It was argued that the Chinese were threatening city life through crime and drugs. Kate’s testimony would have been scrutinised closely by the Sydney Anti-Opium League, fo
rmed in 1902. Only two years before Kate’s appearance in court, opium smoking was banned under the 1908 Police Offences (Amendment) Act.

  Kate Leigh left court in 1910 closely watched by the police officers investigating inner-city crime groups. She might not have been the one in the dock, but police knew she was making a criminal name for herself. In the years following the breakup of her marriage, Kate was convicted of using insulting words and keeping a house frequented by prostitutes. She was named as a known ‘undesirable’ and regularly featured in police reports. Police knew the ‘undesirables’ well. They put together all the mugshots of known criminals and called it the Rogues Gallery. Detectives were required to know all the faces. Frank Fahy, the first undercover officer in the NSW Police Force, was taken on board in 1919 after he successfully identified all the criminals in the Rogues Gallery. Kate Leigh was one of those ‘rogues’.

  The tough young girl who stood up to a bully at school was now a ‘rogue’ in Sydney. Only a decade or so after she arrived in the city, Kate Leigh was an underworld identity. While her involvement in Sydney’s underside went directly against what was expected of young women – to be passive, sexually pure and moral backbones of society – Kate refused to change to suit middle-class ideals, which were often incompatible with life in poor neighbourhoods. Kate’s tough, bush-hardy, working-class identity was perfectly matched to a life in the slums of eastern Sydney. It was what led her on the path to becoming the so-called Queen of the Hills.

  IT’S A REGULAR SATURDAY EVENING for Kate Leigh in May 1913. She’s in the Senatorial Cafe on Elizabeth Street, serving customers and hoping to knock off soon. Eileen is at home and waiting for her mum to finish work. Kate smiles as she serves a couple over by the entrance, thinking about Eileen. She’s a chip off the old block, that one, tough and streetwise.