The central district of nineteenth-century Brisbane boasted an array of public houses, shops, and hotels. Pugh’s Queensland Almanac listed an extraordinary number of businesses in the area. The city police court records reveal Queen Street, North Quay and the immediate streets, especially Albert Street, as notorious for number of public order offences as well as assaults. Male defendants on average outnumbered females four to one. Typically, women were brought up on charges of drunkenness, vagrancy and solicitation, and less frequently assaults.
With the rise in prominence of culture of sensibilities, Victorian-era women were fashioned as gentle creatures, incapable of aggression and violence. An ideal woman then was virtuous and pious. This simultaneously redefined previously commonplace sets of behaviours as felonious, and the Victorian-era police organisations, including the Queensland Police Force, were tasked with enforcing these morals and social norms. Female criminals were judged and penalised for profligacy and sexually depravity as well as criminality, betraying the gendered nature of the justice system. As a result, female offenders were often assigned harsher sentences than males for comparable offences.
Plan of the Fortitude Valley Women’s Prison, colloquially known as the Fortitude Valley Police Gaol.
In 1904, it became the Fortitude Valley Police Station. (Queensland Police Museum Collection PLFV01)
Susan Hegarty, alias McGowan also M’Gowan, aged 18 years first appeared before the police magistrates in July 1880 for using obscene language in a public place and was sentenced to a week in prison in default of paying the £2 fine. Between 1880 and 1890, she made 29 appearances in the police courts and prison records.[i] McGowan’s life trajectory that followed was common for a nineteenth-century working-class woman, who was unsuccessful in securing a domestic service job or factory employment or getting married. When faced with social persecution, these women often took control of their situation using any means available, including vagrancy. Since McGowan was already well known to the local police as she just became an adult and it would have been almost impossible for her to break out of the cycle of petty crime which also increased her chance of being victimised.
Between 1883 and 1885, McGowan was repeatedly assaulted by Joshua Stead, her pimp or boyfriend, or both.[ii] In The Larrikin Girl, cultural historian Melissa Bellanta asserts that ‘the violence dealt out to women by rough working-class youth known as “larrikins” lends a chill edge to the history of relations between sexes in late nineteenth-century Australia.’[iii] In 1885 only, McGowan was assaulted quite severely six times.
Further Reading:
Dukova, Anastasia. To Preserve and Protect: Policing Colonial Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 2020. <https://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/Book.aspx/1537/To%20Preserve%20and%20Protect-%20Policing%20Colonial%20Brisbane>
[i] Dukova, A. To Preserve and Protect: Policing Colonial Brisbane, UQP 2020, 101.
[ii] ‘Return of Prisoners to be Discharged from Her Majesty’s Penal Establishment, St Helena, During the Month of March, 1885’, Queensland Police Gazette, March 1885, vol. 22 , no. 6, p. 105.
[iii] Bellanta, M 2010, ‘The Larrikin Girl’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 34, no. 4, p. 499.