by Leigh Straw
A Chinese man walks in after seven and asks for some tea. Kate’s having none of it. It’s late and they’re getting ready to close. Mrs Kiely, the wife of the cafe owner, asks Kate to give the man some tea. She grudgingly pours some into a cup but then he tells her he doesn’t want any now.
‘Go on, then, out you get,’ she tells him, walking over to the stairs leading to the upper part of the cafe.
The man is right behind her. Kate turns and flicks him with a towel but he ignores it, getting closer still. A young male customer attempts to help her and throws the man out on the porch. It’s then that he sees the knife in the man’s hand and hurries away up the street.
Kate sighs and drops her shoulders. Some knight in shining armour he turned out to be.
‘Get outta here. Bugger off and take that bloody thing with you.’
She says it quietly to the man, knowing the customers will complain if they hear her language. He isn’t leaving and looks ready to use the knife.
Kate walks over to Mrs Kiely and asks her to go out into the backyard and bring her the chopper she uses to cut wood.
The Chinese man rushes at Kate and tells her he’ll kill her.
Holding the backyard weapon up in her clenched hand, Kate shouts at him, ‘Keep back or I’ll kill you.’
Still he keeps coming at her. She lets loose on him and scrapes the weapon across his arms, cutting into flesh, but it doesn’t deter him.
From the corner of her eye, Kate sees Mr Kiely, the cafe owner, rush towards her. He grabs the chopper and threatens the man with it. Kate has a better idea. She lifts a chair and cracks it over her assailant’s head.
‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ she mutters. Even a chair can’t stop this man’s fury.
Mr Kiely looks like he might be regretting coming to her rescue. He has two fingers in splints from an earlier accident down at the wharf and the Chinese man is much bigger.
‘What in the bloody hell is wrong with him?’ Kate wonders. ‘It can’t just all be over a cup of tea.’
Kiely is suddenly stabbed in the wrist, lower chest and back. He falls to the floor and begs Kate to defend him. She tries anything. Kicks the Chinese man about the head and wrestles to get the knife out of his hand.
Kiely is weakening and Kate hears the shouts of men rushing into the cafe to help her. Local constables arrive shortly after and arrest the knife-wielding intruder.
Kate checks over her body and realises she’s come through the whole incident unscathed.
When the story makes the papers a couple of days later, Kate reads it and smiles.
‘Miss Leigh fought on with a power which she says she never before knew herself to be possessed of.’
She knows exactly where the strength comes from. Kate Leigh is an eastern Sydney girl. She knows how to look after herself.
2
FROG HOLLOW THIEVES
Eastern Sydney, with its rickety slums and close-knit working-class communities, became a haven for Kate Leigh when she needed a place to live after her release from the reformatory. It was here, bringing up Eileen and moving on from her first marriage, that Kate made a criminal name for herself. Leigh’s homes, described by police as ‘dens of iniquity’, became meeting places for thieves and ‘harridans’. After she moved her business out of Darlinghurst, Surry Hills became her adopted home. By the 1920s, the area was synonymous with crime and featured on newspaper front pages as a battleground for criminal feuds. It was the prime location for Kate Leigh’s underworld empire.
British invasion and the creation of a European settlement in Sydney from January 1788 led to vast tracts of Eora land being subdivided, renamed and sold to wealthy merchants and military men. It was an investor’s paradise but it came on the back of widespread dispossession of Aboriginal people. John Palmer didn’t give much thought to this when he created his Surry Hills Estate in 1814. Palmer was a farmer and grazier who knew colonial status was measured by landed wealth. He also knew greater profits could be made from rents. He sold off parts of the estate to local businessmen and started the area’s long history of high rents. By 1829, however, the land hadn’t been developed and the area was still sparsely populated. This started to change from the 1840s, when the City of Sydney prevented the building of timber houses. While rents remained high in the city centre, Surry Hills was exempt from housing restrictions and appealed to people looking for cheap timber housing.
Immigrants were also keen to pick up cheap housing and start a new life around Surry Hills. No longer just the Botany Bay of the imagination – popularised by the British as a hell on earth populated by transported felons – Sydney was starting to look more attractive as a place for British immigrants. The population increased and a village started to appear where grocers, publicans and water carters set up business. Housing numbers increased from 800 in 1849 to 1900 in 1859, and by the end of the century there were more than 5000 dwellings.
By the 1870s, trade businesses, factories and market gardens were scattered across the Surry Hills landscape. Small workshops and breweries were commonplace, including the Standard Brewery built in 1875. Locals still recall the smell of hops and how it gave the area a unique identity. Modern factories changed the landscape by the early 20th century, and more workers moved into the cheap houses to be closer to their factory work.
That’s when the real growing pains started. Rapid population growth led to poor housing and living conditions. Most houses were developed in ‘undrained, un- leveled, unshaped ways’. In May 1888, 50 dwellings were condemned. Overcrowding was a serious problem, along with poor drainage. Landlords, only half of them actually living in the area, were largely to blame. In their ‘rampant urban capitalism’ they maximised lots by building close to laneways and taking up as much vacant land as possible. By the 1890s, many of the tradesmen, labourers and their families were living in crowded, impoverished conditions. They lived in fear of destitution, sickness and being taken to the asylum. Plague had also become another fear for the very poor of inner Sydney. Bubonic plague was reported in Dawes Point early in 1900 and by August more than a hundred Sydneysiders had died from the disease.
Urban planners at the turn of the century argued that their job was to create healthy, respectable living spaces for developing city life, but Surry Hills was planned against the interests of the majority of the poorer inhabitants. When wealthier individuals and families started moving out of the two- and three-storey houses from the late 19th century, lured by better housing in the other suburbs, landlords divided each terrace house into individual rooms to rent out to as many people as possible. Large parts of Surry Hills were turned into slums and featured in popular lore as sites of crime and vice. Missionaries helping the poor in Surry Hills in the 1890s were shocked when they discovered that out of their survey of 700 dwellings, nineteen were public houses carrying on unlawful trading and a further 57 were brothels.
Other ways were found to avoid the slums entirely. Trams and trains bypassed Darlinghurst and Surry Hills on their way to the wider metropolitan areas. The wealthy chose larger blocks of land further past the inner city. Meanwhile, the poor of eastern Sydney were confined to overcrowded terrace houses that should have been condemned years before. One housing survey in 1901 found that 30 per cent of Sydney’s houses were in Surry Hills but close to half of those houses were defective. Their structural integrity was also well below the Sydney average. While visitors to Sydney found it picturesque and reminiscent of European cities, hovels, shanties and squalor marked the landscape of the eastern Sydney suburbs.
Despite the poverty, or maybe because of it, a sense of community was central to life in Surry Hills. Women met on doorsteps, on the streets or on the walk home from the factories. Men drank at the pub, sometimes joined by their wives. They developed close networks of support where work was shared, children looked after and food exchanged. Kids kept busy outside school hours wandering around the factory grounds and finding thrown-out goods they could take home to re-use. Contrary to
the sensational stories in the newspapers about life in the slums, where ‘[t]iny, half-clothed kiddies of all ages’ were ‘witnesses of all the vice going on around them’, children were happy in these streets. One local who lived in the area in the early 20th century recalled getting a billycart and
coming down the hills in the nearby street from Samuel Street and at one stage we came down the hill, which was rather a long, steep hill in Ann Street, around from Riley Street that we would start getting into the billycart and we would go down Ann Street as far as the billy-cart would take us and then we might repeat that. But riding a billy-cart was something that as a kid we looked forward to.
Life played out on the streets of Darlinghurst and Surry Hills in the early 20th century. One story, shared by George Blaikie in Wild Women of Sydney, reveals the tough, humorous character of the locals. One man spent most of his days collecting packing boxes from the wharves at Woolloomooloo that he later chopped up to sell as firewood. He often spent his money at the Tradesman’s Arms Hotel on Palmer Street, Darlinghurst, and after closing went to local sly-groggers for more booze. One evening, his wife had had enough. She locked him out of the house, in front of a large crowd of onlookers, and when he refused to calm down, she threw a bucket of hot water over him. Infuriated, he told the onlookers: ‘I done the bitch over before I married her. She was no bloody virgin I can tell you!’ Hearing him, the wife appeared at the upstairs window and replied: ‘Yeah, so you did do me over before we married AND SO DID ALL YOUR ROTTEN MATES.’ The crowd cheered and the husband settled in for what would be a long night on the front step.
People made ends meet as best they could. Teenagers went out and got work to help out with money at home. According to one former local:
Young people weren’t ambitious, as long as they got a job, that was the main thing. You just went to work, and worked hard and kept yourself. Because most families were having a pretty tight time. There wasn’t the government handouts there are now, it was either sink or swim. You either went to work and earned your own way, or you had dubious means of employment.
Life in the Hills was hard and tough, but the people were resilient and dedicated to their community. They also didn’t appreciate criticism from people on the outside. Ruth Park captured this well in the 1940s with her fictional commentary on the Hills locals in her book The Harp in the South: ‘Some of the women felt a little resentful … for they were fiercely aware of the fact that they were just as good as anyone else in Sydney, and if the rest of Sydney persisted in looking down on them, then the rest of Sydney could just lump it.’ Kate Leigh later looked back on the area and thought it was a ‘citadel of peace’, where everyone looked out for each other.
The Irishness of Surry Hills was essential to Ruth Park’s stories. From the 1860s, large numbers of Irish immigrants began settling around inner Sydney. As many were unskilled workers, they were attracted to factory, railway and industrial work around Waterloo, Paddington, Redfern and Surry Hills. In these working- class areas, Irish families were bound by faith, hard work and a hard life that shaped a resilient character. It wasn’t far from what Kate Leigh had known in Dubbo, and the Irish-Australian identity of the Hills brought more familiarity to her city life.
Poverty in the eastern Sydney communities was made worse by a rise in crime. British social reformers had worried about crime in the large cities since the 1850s. Londoner Henry Mayhew, famous for using a hot-air balloon to view London from above, wrote a number of books highlighting a link between poverty and crime in London’s working-class communities. ‘Dangerous Classes of the Metropolis’ were those who were regularly unemployed and ended up involved in crime.
Mayhew’s work influenced Australian responses to city crime. Urban planners wanted to know if London’s problems with poverty and crime were symptomatic of city life in general and would affect the major Australian cities. By the turn of the 20th century, Sydney certainly seemed to be headed the way of London.
The authorities feared the rise of what we now call an underclass, made up of the long-term unemployed and impoverished families. In struggling to understand poverty and its links to crime, authorities and charitable institutions in the early 20th century were faced with a reality not only that many criminals were reduced to poverty because of their crime, but that the very poor were driven to crime due to their poverty. It was a vicious cycle few could break.
Fears about urban poverty allowed police, magistrates and newspapers to publicise so-called dangerous types roaming the city streets. They were men and women who looked for vulnerable adults and children desperate to make ends meet. Newspapers featured stories about poor families in eastern Sydney fighting battles against poverty and crime. Economic pressure denied them the same life opportunities as wealthier Sydneysiders and forced some into crime.
Sydney’s inner-city neighbourhoods were the heart-lands of crime. In October 1913, Truth newspaper sent one of its representatives to investigate claims from some residents in Surry Hills that it was being overrun by ‘rowdyism and bare-faced immorality’. Houses around Campbell, Riley and Bourke streets were characterised as harbouring a hard, mean and violent community regularly boasting ‘some notorious crime or criminal’. Knife, revolver, tomahawk and bottle fights were the area’s ‘daily medley’. Arguing for increased police involvement, the local newspapers ran stories on immoral women, drunks and ‘gangs of toughs’ threatening the rest of the community. Surry Hills, particularly its youth gangs, was treated almost like a plague that could infect the rest of the city.
Youth gangs were notorious in the Australian cities from the late 19th century. Mainly made up of young men, who were called larrikins and street rowdies, ‘push’ gangs roamed the streets mugging people and making a nuisance of themselves. Some of the most notorious gangs resided in Sydney, particularly the Rocks Push, Surry Hills’ Forty Thieves, and the Big Seven in East Sydney. Gang street battles were common in Surry Hills from the 1880s. Knives and razors were used and territory claimed with blood. Young hooligans played into ‘respectable fears’ about violence and disorder.
Slum life created the gangs. As the neighbourhoods deteriorated, gang membership increased. Young people looked for a place to belong – something offering a sense of purpose and economic security. Gang life offered this opportunity but it also led to involvement in more sophisticated criminal operations. Created through violence, gangs function through protection and coercion, territorial gains and lucrative (usually illegal) business. In many respects they are a stepping stone to organised crime. It was the same back in the early 20th century.
Police in Sydney called them ‘basher gangs’. Where they had once operated in pairs, the gangs were now organised in packs and frequently robbed and violently assaulted their victims. A gang member would pick out a victim, usually in the hustle and bustle of the city. He would move away once the other members were close by. When the coast was clear – meaning there were no visible witnesses – the gang leader would tip his hat or scratch his ear, a sign that the victim could be attacked. Undercover policeman Frank Fahy was given the task of identifying the main gang groups and tailing them to houses across the inner city, which were later raided by other officers.
While the police often focused on male gang members, street gangs also often used a ‘female decoy’. Popularised as the thieves’ woman, the decoy played a key role in gang activities by luring men into dark alleyways where the male members of the gang attacked them. Bloodied and robbed, the victim had been duped by the gang’s decoy. Such women were named and shamed in the press as companions of thieves and undesirables, and singled out in court for preying on supposedly unsuspecting men. In one case in 1915, two women were charged with having ‘decoyed’ a man to a secluded spot in North Bondi, where their male friends robbed him of a ring, watch, chain and money.
Kate Leigh was no stranger to gang life. She was friendly with notorious gang members around Surry Hills. One of them was Englishman Samuel Freeman. ‘Jewey�
� Freeman, as he was known, was the leader of the Riley Street Gang and is credited with turning it into a professional outfit. Freeman arrived in Melbourne from England and made his way up to Sydney around 1896. By the time he was twenty he had notched up various criminal convictions. He took off to Western Australia around the turn of the century, police hot on his heels. Going by the alias of James McKay, Freeman went from pick-pocket and small-time thief to violent robber and prison escapee. He served time in Fremantle Prison for violent robberies, before heading back to Sydney upon his release in 1911. Freeman ran most of his gang business out of a shack in Frog Hollow, Surry Hills, and it was here that Kate Leigh would often stay with him.
Located on the western side of Riley Street, on a sheer cliff adding to the rickety nature of the housing structures, Frog Hollow was a notorious slum. It was nine metres lower than the other buildings and could be accessed from three different places. This meant that anyone escaping from police had a number of exits. Frog Hollow was one of the few remaining completely insanitary areas in inner Sydney, and newspapers ran regular stories about its criminal inhabitants. Sydney City Council was pressured in the 1920s to bulldoze the area. Most of the buildings were demolished by 1930, but it wasn’t until 2007 that the area was redesigned as parkland, ‘urban green space’ in what is now a very gentrified Surry Hills.
It was in Frog Hollow, as she tried to make ends meet and look after Eileen, that Kate Leigh fell in love with Samuel Freeman. He was only an inch or so taller than Kate – just over five foot two (157 centimetres) – but his bulky, thick shoulders gave him a tough, rugged look. Samuel’s tattoos included the Australian flag, a flower on the inside of his arm and the bust of a woman. Whether it represented Kate is unknown.
Kate’s relationship with Freeman would be her undoing. In 1914, Freeman hatched a plan with his mate, Ernest ‘Shiner’ Ryan, to pull off a robbery at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Redfern. Freeman wanted out of the slums of Frog Hollow, and both men stood to make hundreds from the robbery. For their troubles, they would go down in history as the first gangsters in Australia to use a getaway car.