The Hanging Of Jean Lee

Jordie Albiston studied flute at the Victorian College of the Arts but went on to become a published poet – her first collection of poetry, Nervous Arcs, in 1995, was followed in 1996 by Botany Bay Document: A Poetic History of The Women of Botany Bay. In 1998, she published The Hanging of Jean Lee based on historical material about the last woman hanged in Australia. The Hanging of Jean Lee was staged at the Sydney Opera House Studio in 2006. It spotlights the life of Jean Lee, 1919-1951, from adventurous girl to hanged woman. Above all, it understands. In Albiston’s lines, Jean’s last God-troubled speeches raise her mean life to suburban tragedy. Jordie Albiston addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 6 August 2014.

THE HANGING OF JEAN LEE

JORDIE ALBISTON

It took me six months to find Jean Lee. At the time, I didn’t know who I was looking for. I didn’t know her name or her circumstances; only that she would be Australian, she would be a woman, and she would have a story to tell…

That was back in 1997. I had just published Botany Bay Document, a collection of poetry concerning the first 50 years of white settlement in Australia, as seen through the eyes of various women. This book had required extensive research involving letters, maps, diaries, ship logs, paintings – all sorts of things – and I had enjoyed writing it so much that I wanted my next collection to focus on one woman alone. But she was not easy to find. The subject needed to be a woman who possessed enough of a story to sustain an extended suite of poems, but one who had not been written about too much already. And, of course, she needed to be someone with whom I could deeply and validly engage. I was working in a bookshop when a newly released biography arrived – still the only full-length prose account of Jean Lee’s story – and it was literally in my hands when I realised my search was over.

Jean Lee was the perfect subject for my purposes. I am interested in silence, and I felt that Jean’s story had been deleted by history, or by the teaching of history, in the sense that we learned at school about Ronald Ryan – the last man hanged in Australia – but not Jean Lee. Also, Jean didn’t leave any journals or letters and, apart from the crime itself and the very general narrative arc of her life, there is a distinct scarcity of facts. That allowed opportunities for me as a poet.

Jean Lee was the last woman to be hanged in Australia, and the only woman to be executed here in the twentieth century. She was hanged at Pentridge Prison in 1951, 100 years after the jail accepted its first inmates, and sixteen years before Ronald Ryan met the same fate.

Born in Dubbo, NSW, in 1919, Marjorie Jean Maude Wright was the youngest of five children. Despite a good family and an adequate, albeit incomplete, education, her life began to derail during her teens. Jean was intelligent, and her vivacity and red hair made her attractive to men. There were mishaps – including a possible early-teenage pregnancy – and by her mid-twenties, she had already married, divorced, abandoned the daughter she had had at 18, and was making a living as a prostitute and petty thief.

In 1949, Jean travelled to Melbourne for the Spring Racing Carnival with her boyfriend, Bobby Clayton, and an old mate of Bobby’s from his years in Long Bay Gaol, Norman Andrews. They were out to have as much fun and make as much money as possible, and indulged in a variety of scams. The Carlton Torture Murder, as it came to be known, occurred as the result of a robbery gone wrong. During a lengthy binge, the trio had landed at the University Hotel in Carlton on 7 November, where they quickly noticed an elderly man – Starting Price bookie, William “Pop” Kent – paying for his drinks from a large roll of notes. The game was on. With all four ending up at Pop’s nearby home, Jean attempted to steal Pop’s winnings the “sweet”h way, but failed. One thing led to another and, following a prolonged period during which Jean, Bobby and Norman heinously tortured Pop and destroyed his room, Bobby garroted the old man, and the trio fled into the night. It was only a matter of hours before police tracked them down to the Great Southern Hotel in Spencer Street, and on 25 March 1950, all three were sentenced to death.

To begin with, Jean Lee’s fate, though not without controversy, caused surprisingly little concern within the media or general public. This was probably due to several competing news items: raids on various Communist groups, increases to the basic wage, and author Frank Hardy’s arrest for libel. Among those to issue formal protestations were the Labor Women’s Organising Committee (spearheaded by Mary Barry, whose husband, Bill, was soon to become joint-leader of the ALP), the Howard Prison Reform League, and so-called “bleeding hearts” groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. As well, the Victorian Premier at the time – the Country Party’s John “Black Jack” McDonald – said: “The day I had to order the hanging of a woman was the saddest day of my life”.

Ex-army man McDonald, however, was deeply conservative, and an adamant supporter of the death penalty. Post-war Melbourne was in the grip of tangible sexual tensions, and had endured a recent spate of vicious and sexually-motivated crime, including six murders in as many weeks. The Premier was determined to justify his tough stance by using the hangings of Jean and her cohorts as a visible deterrent, a move designed as much to garner public approval as assert his own personal view.

While McDonald was pro-capital punishment, the Labor Party (without whose support, McDonald’s minority government could not have survived) was not. Yet Labor did little to challenge the convictions until (too) late in the day, as it was relying on McDonald’s ministry to achieve three key Labor issues: electoral reform, full adult franchise in the Upper House, and nationalisation of the gas industry.

In retrospect, it seems likely that Jean Lee – single mother, prostitute, thief – was also hanged as something of an example, sending out the message that not only bad behavior, but independence of thought and action in women, was no longer acceptable to conceptions of femininity in 1950s Australia. Protests about Jean’s conviction were predominantly concerned with the basic fact of gender. However, there was also some disquiet over the fact that – despite her unnervingly creative involvement in Pop’s torture – she had not committed the act of murder itself.

There was also criticism of Jean’s treatment by police and the judicial system, and it is true a number of questionable procedures and miscarriages of justice occurred both prior to, and during her trial. However, the three executions were deemed to go ahead and, at 8 am on February 19, 1951, an unconscious Jean Lee was tied to a chair and dropped through the gallows. It is possible she was already dead…

While I wanted to contend with the issues at hand in my poems about Jean Lee, I was careful to avoid taking any perceived position or view. Jean was both victim and perpetrator and, although it would have been easy to approach the story from either a high moralistic, pro-capital punishment standpoint, or a feminist polemic seeking to punish a sexist era, either approach would have reduced the complexity of the material to a dull, one-dimensional account. I wanted to bring Jean Lee to life, to afford her a sense of authenticity and breath, and this was not a forum for me to indulge any personal or political agenda of my own.

A few notes on my approach to Jean’s story in terms of documentary poetry:

I used the general trope of the newspaper as a unifying structural device, and my collection is divided into four tabloid-like parts: Personal Pages, Entertainment Section, Crime Supplement and Death Notices. So that helps hold things together.

No punctuation is employed (representing Jean’s lack of education), and this contrasts with the strict stanzaic construction of each poem (representing the formalities of police procedures and the judicial system).

I then looked at formalistic factors like voice. For example, the poem “School Report (1928)” – based on a real document – employs a teacherly manner of expression, while “Coroner’s Report”, “Pentridge Poem” and “The Hangman’s Handbook” – again, all based on archival materials – utilise a bureaucratic kind of language which became strangely moving when subjected to the unexpected pressure of poetic form.

I also listened to a lot of radio from the 1940s, and in a poem like “Saturday Arvo”, I’m hearing swing rhythms and that particular broadcast voice; those registers and cadences of the time. As well, I wove in police interrogations, court transcripts, newspaper headlines, advertisements of the day, even nursery rhymes, and each of these sources provided a different voice, a different kind of music to the whole. Finally, I included a number of “Dear Diary” poems, despite the lack of any such material to work from. This allowed me to exercise my intuition and imagination, to provide Jean with a (possible) voice of her own.

Perhaps my greatest satisfaction in having redacted Jean Lee’s story to poetry is that a number of artists have apprehended my work and taken it further – to other platforms and to other audiences – thus helping to secure a place for Jean Lee in the public imagination.

Sydney composer, Andrée Greenwell, adapted my book for opera, with the resultant work enjoying a season at the Sydney Opera House in 2006, and remounted at Arts House in Melbourne last year. The libretto was shortlisted for Best Music-Theatre Script in the 2008 Victorian Premier’s Awards, and the work is available on cd. My poems were also used as the text for a one-woman play at La Mama in Melbourne, and have been dramatised and broadcast in a variety of formats on several ABC Radio National programs. The book itself is now into its third edition, an uncommon privilege for an Australian collection of contemporary poetry.

I would like to conclude with a poem, spoken from Jean’s perspective on the night before her execution:

Dear Diary (1951)

God is pressing down on me

with His almighty rod a

cross my middle kingdom

colony He leans with all

His pounds God is pushing

down on me split that

spirit flip that lid He breaks

out wildly from the Bible

cries aloud the way He did in

olden other times God is

looking down on me with eyes

as large as psalms I talk

to walls carved with His name

say it slowly all I can as

He lifts up His silver arm and

brings it home again God

is hurling angels down I net

one in my heart pin her

to my useless future press

her wings up idly to the light

SOURCES

—       Albiston, J 3rd ed. 2013 The Hanging of Jean Lee Melbourne: Black Pepper

—       Lincoln, R, D Treble & P Wilson 1997 Jean Lee: The Last Woman Hanged in Australia     Sydney: Random House