Half Wild

by Pip Smith

  I lay awake that night thinking of all the half-caste girls in the wealthy houses across Sydney, rising from their beds and vanishing the way the black girl had done at the laundry in Double Bay. Where did she end up? The police couldn’t find her, but they never looked that hard. Years later they became convinced she’d been my first victim; that I’d boiled her in the laundry tubs and turned her into glue.

  How do the wandering girls know where to go? It bothers people that there is no fixed place. When dawn broke, I thought I saw a girl close the door behind her, and turned to see that my clothes had been replaced with a dress—somewhere between blue and green—and a possum-skin stole. I wanted to ask the girl if she knew a black girl who’d worked in a laundry in Double Bay, but I could hear the girl pad down the hall and I thought how stupid of me, to think they all know each other.

  I wondered what was worse—to be invisible, or to become the kind of thick-skinned person who could ignore what they didn’t want to see. Both were reason enough to leave, and I packed the following day.

  Don’t be a fool, the Silver Lining said over her boiled egg. You’ve a house over your head, free meals, women who care for you. Where on earth will you go?

  No fixed address, I said.

  She eyed me from across the table with a pitying look. I was too old and stubborn to change the way she’d hoped.

  Rita, did you ever see an old woman watch you from the street? I was on my way to collect you when I left the Silver Lining’s place, only once I was outside the convent gate I couldn’t move. You were in the yard—there was no doubt it was you. Your dark curls were springing in all directions as you leaped over a statue of Our Lady without running up to it first. I thought to myself: You’re no granny for her, Jean Ford. She is at the beginning, she could go anywhere from here, and better ways than you ever did. How would I begin to explain where I’d been? I could blame Arthur for leaving you with the nuns, but I’d have to say something for myself, too, and I couldn’t say anything good. Once you’d run inside, I turned and walked back to the railway station. I should make something of myself first, I thought. I should be the sort of granny a girl wouldn’t be ashamed to climb all over.

  It’s now many years later, but I am something. I was a boarder at first. Then I cleaned the boarding house instead of paying rent. And then I cleaned for pay, and cooked too, and fixed the pipes when they were leaking. I scrimped and saved until I could afford to take up the lease on my own. I spruced it up, and offered clean, no-fuss housing at affordable rates. I kept myself to myself and my tenants kept to their rooms.

  Luckily no one at my boarding house ever looked at the legs of the kitchen table. If they did, they might’ve noticed how one leg resembled the leg of my first wife. It tapped its toes occasionally, demanding to be noticed, until I kicked it in the shin. There was quite a collection of bruises up that leg, all at different stages of the healing process. Some were blue, some were plum purple, some were yellow. Some were the colour of the sky before a storm. My guests never noticed the table leg, but they noticed the sound of my shoe thumping bone. I knew what they thought. I’d seen their eyes slide from side to side in their heads, looking at me then looking at each other. It got so I was always standing in front of the table, trying to shield the leg from view. I can’t go on like this, I thought, and I sold the business with the intention of moving us to a place where table legs look like table legs, and grandmothers can live with granddaughters without any questions asked.

  One hundred pounds seemed to be enough for a new life. I had it in my purse today—was it today?—leaving the bank, crossing Oxford Street, thinking: How will I find her? Then two shrieks in quick succession. A cockatoo above. I looked, remembering another I had seen. An automobile braked. The face of the driver rushed at me from a past no longer mine. I wondered if it was him as the car hit my hip and I flew back, carried by a tidal wave to smack my head against the—what was it?—against the side rail of the ship, and there’s Horse tickling me, although it isn’t a game anymore, is it?

  Your grandfather’s face. Dates. Names are slipping.

  Drunk. At sea. Only paying attention to our bodies and the urges that made them paw flesh, we came to life in the places the other had touched. I pinned him down. He tried to roll me over, but he was drunker, or I was stronger—not in terms of muscle, in terms of fight. I had his hips gripped between my knees, his penis in my palm. This is why I love you, he mumbled. You take matters into your own hands. It looked like a large purple mushroom, alien to us both. It grew out of black hair that could have been mine or could have been his, and when I touched it I felt the nerves spark up its length, as if they had been mine.

  —Detective Sergeant Watkins of the Central Police. This is the woman?

  —Yes, Detective, but I’m afraid—

  —A finger missing on her left hand. How old did you say she was?

  —It’s hard to say. She had one hundred pounds on her. No identification.

  —Thank you, Sister. We’ll handle the body from here.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 2005, Sydney’s Justice & Police Museum hosted City of Shadows, an exhibition of early twentieth-century police photographs recovered from a flooded warehouse. Many of the accompanying files that would have given the photographs context had been lost, so they were mostly selected for their provocative compositions, the half-stories they told and the eerie, alter-Sydney they invoked.

  Visiting the exhibition was like witnessing a séance. From the walls of the museum, forgotten ghosts of the city gazed through us. For many of the photographs’ subjects, this would have been the only time in their lives they’d been photographed, and so—despite the trauma of their recent arrest—they’d made the most of it, dressing in their best clothes, possibly performing their role as criminal for a camera associated with the burgeoning popular art form of the movies. Even in the mugshots we did not see the deadpan expressions we have come to expect; instead we saw emotion—either performed, or caught when the subject was off guard.

  I left the exhibition with the accompanying book, and later poured over the photographs for traces of suburbs I thought I knew. One picture in particular captured my attention: a mugshot of a man in a cheap suit and tie, his short hair combed into a sideways part. What struck me most was the melancholy that haunted the man’s eyes. He seemed to be performing his normalcy, not his criminality, and only just managing to hold himself together.

  I flipped to the back of the book to read a brief footnote:

  Eugenie Falleni, 1920, Central cells. When hotel cleaner ‘Harry Leon Crawford’ was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife three years earlier, he was revealed to be in fact Eugenie Falleni—a woman and mother who had been passing as a male since 1899 …

  Turning back to the portrait of the sad man, his face—or my perception of his face—morphed into that of a woman’s. But in the moment that he, the sad man, morphed into she, the ‘cross-dressing murderer’, I have to admit that the thrill I felt was associated with my own jolt in perception, like the moment Escher’s black birds turn into white birds, flying in the opposite direction. The portrait was of an indeterminate person: an unstable man and a reluctant woman at the same time. One look at Falleni’s harrowed expression, however, and the thrill quickly turned into a chill. What would it have been like, to cause these jolts in perception? What would it be like to live your life oscillating between the different roles others expected to see?

  Half Wild is a work of fiction written through and around historical sources related to the various lives of Eugenia Falleni (1875–1938). Throughout my research, I have tried to get the facts of Falleni’s story as straight as I can. For me, it’s been important to remember how my city actually behaved in the presence of someone who called our assumptions into question. The problem is, genuine facts have been hard to come by, and in their place I have often found elusive, shape-shifting, fact-seeming fabrications. But these fabrications have proven just as revealing a
bout our past: they show us what we, as readers and writers, have wished to believe is true about the people we struggle to understand.

  When so much of Falleni’s story is uncertain, a range of narrative scenarios opens up. Many of these imagined scenarios have already been recorded as ‘fact’ by eager journalists of the 1920s, and continue to be referenced as credible to this day. I have chosen a slightly different tack. My challenge has been to turn these occasionally contradictory scenarios into a narrative, without collapsing them down into yet another singular, factually problematic, account of ‘what happened’ to Falleni.

  I do not claim to speak on behalf of Falleni with any authority, and although I have, at times, written from Falleni’s various points of view, these voices are imaginings, performances, and attempts at creating an empathetic bridge between then and now, archives and feeling, Falleni and us.

  In order to accommodate contradictory possibilities, I have refracted Falleni’s story by dividing the novel into four parts. Each part is informed by a selection of sources, although the sources that inform different parts might contradict each other. ‘Who She’d Like To Be’ is based on Suzanne Falkiner’s interviews with Falleni’s New Zealander friends and family, as well as newspaper articles that appeared in the New Zealand papers of the late nineteenth century. ‘As Far As He Can Remember’ is based on Harry Crawford’s initial statement to police. ‘To All Outside Appearances, At Least’ relies primarily on the transcript of Falleni’s trial for its foundation, while ‘Some Lower Animal’ uses Falleni’s Smith’s Weekly interview as its foundation. In it ‘Eugene Fallini’ [sic] protested her innocence, and provided her own version of what took place over the long weekend of October 1917. No one part is intended to be presented as ‘more accurate’ or even ‘more probable’ than the others, only more appropriate to the perspectives from which they’re told.

  While I have laid out all the facts as far as I could determine them, I have also borrowed from sources that themselves were partially invented, and have invented my own newspaper article (guess which one!) and framed it as a source. I don’t do this to trick you, but to niggle at the borders of truth and narrative flourish in fiction that presents itself as fact. Also, to keep you asking questions.

  Amelia Grey is an invention of mine, although according to New Zealand newspapers, a friend did report Falleni to the Salvation Army after seeing her outside the Wellington Opera House ‘in male attire’. Harry Crawford, the stevedore and butcher boy in New Zealand, is also an invention, although it is true that a stevedore called Harry Crawford was murdered by a man named Raines in a drunken brawl shortly before Falleni left for Australia. Another Harry Crawford, ‘Ethiopian song and dance artist and legmania champion of the world’, toured New Zealand in the late nineteenth century. Fuckit and Buckit are inventions, although school records and histories indicate that the girls were notoriously ‘more crude’ than the boys at Newtown Public School in the late nineteenth century. Horse is also an invention, although a Horatio de Courcey Martelli (sometimes misprinted Martello in newspapers of the time) was born in Timaru, New Zealand, in 1876, and worked on sailing ships between New Zealand and London before becoming the third mate for the Eastern and Australian Steamship Company in 1897, around the same time that Falleni left New Zealand. His sister’s name was Rita (Josephine’s middle name, and her daughter’s name), and he later became a captain and harbourmaster in Hobart. Beyond these coincidences, there is no evidence to suggest that he is Josephine’s father, let alone that he committed rape. I doubt his sister’s name would have been carried over to his daughter and granddaughter if that had been the case, but it is possible.

  Almost all other character names (including Captain Gunion) have been drawn from sources, and while I have often taken dialogue and small biographical details verbatim from these sources, this is where the likeness between my representations and their warm-blooded referents ends; I cannot vouch for having accurately captured what they thought and felt. If I have caused any offence to living members of their families, I sincerely apologise.

  In the interests of keeping the novel relatively succinct, I have left out Falleni’s appearance at the Masterton court for vagrancy (read: trying to obtain work as a man) before Falleni left New Zealand. Another small distortion I will come clean about: Baby William was born to the Fallenis much later, although a son, Giuseppe, was born when Falleni was eleven. If you are interested in Falleni’s life, and would like to read a biography sensitive to the mysteries and uncertainties of Falleni’s story, I recommend Suzanne Falkiner’s Eugenia: A Man, in particular the 2014 edition. For a thorough analysis of her trial, I recommend Mark Tedeschi’s Eugenia.

  In this novel I have attempted to oscillate between various versions of Falleni’s story in order to capture the feeling of motion sickness that might rumble at the core of an indeterminate life. For me, the contradictions, mysteries and factual aberrations that colour the various ‘true’ accounts of Falleni’s story are intrinsic to how Falleni lived their lives, and how those lives have been played out in the media since the late nineteenth century. To resolve them would be to ignore what is most provocative and alluring about Falleni’s story: how it resonates with the common experience of being multiple, mutable and socially determined, and how difficult it can be to reconcile our many selves.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This novel began its life as Portrait of an Invert, a work of devised theatre that never found an audience. Thanks are due to Lexi Freiman, Anna Houston and Rochelle Whyte for indulging my mad ideas and meeting them with their own, as well as the University of Sydney’s Theatre and Performance Studies department for giving us a room and time to play. The project then turned into a creative thesis, written within the supportive environment of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. I would never have survived the five-year slog without the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award—may our governments continue to appreciate and fund deep and ongoing research forever more. Sincere thanks are due to my supervisors Ivor Indyk, Chris Andrews and Sara Knox for their guidance, and knowing when to curtail my exploration of infinite possibilities, as well as Matt McGuire for tactful advice on how to be less pretentious, and Melinda Jewell and Suzanne Gapps for humouring my requests for tall-ship insurance.

  I salute the under-acknowledged staff of trove.com.au, the National Library of Australia, the Mitchell Library, the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington Library and Archives and State Records NSW—what a treasure chest you are all sitting on!

  The novel’s final part was written at the Faber Academy, under the guidance of Kathryn Heyman. I was especially lucky to study amongst a cohort of particularly generous readers and writers. Without attending the Faber Academy I would never have met Grace Heifetz, my energising Australian agent; Catherine Drayton, my discerning US agent; and Jane Palfreyman, my lioness of a publisher.

  I’d like to thank Ali Lavau for her sharp eye and sensitive edit, Sarah Baker for her patience with my complicated layout requests, and everyone else who is responsible for Allen & Unwin’s stellar reputation.

  Thank you to Tom Cho and Kaya Wilson for sharing their views on trans identities, who should write them, and how they should be written about. Thanks to Dean Robinson for helping me understand the legal process; Jan Dickinson and Clea Mhilli for their assistance with the Italian; everyone on board the STS Lord Nelson and STS Tenacious for help with sailing terminology (and keeping me alive while traversing the Tasman); David Finnigan and René Christen for tolerating and even encouraging my obsession; and especially my parents, Ross and Sally Smith, for their patience and support.

  Thanks are also due to Chad Parkhill for his knowledge of whiskey (or should that be whisky?) and dedication to the hunt for anachronisms; to David McLaughlin for taking on the oddest acting job of his career, and performing Harry Crawford in my flat; to my early readers Tom Hogan, Lucy Parakhina, Lauren Crew, Cameron Foster and Paul Jones for their feedback; to
writing friends Rebecca Giggs and Fiona Wright for their moral support and time for wine; to Peter Doyle, Nerida Campbell and all at the Justice & Police Museum for the fresh insights on Sydney’s history that were brought to light in the City of Shadows exhibition, which provoked my initial interest in Falleni’s story in 2008; and to Suzanne Falkiner, Ruth Ford, Mark Tedeschi and Lachlan Philpott for their fresh perspectives and rigorous contributions to research on Falleni’s lives.

  And lastly and most importantly, to Eugenia Falleni, Annie Crawford and all who have suffered trying to live and love in ways that don’t fit. My hope is that our cultures will evolve to accommodate more possible ways of being, and being in love.

  ILLUSTRATIONS AND INSERTS

  To give a sense of how it feels to open an archival box and piece together the first draft of Falleni’s story, the illustrations and inserts included in ‘To All Outside Appearances, At Least’ (page 129) are facsimiles of original sources. Clippings from the original transcript of Falleni’s trial—complete with its wonky typing, corrections and erasures—have been included on pages 134, 276–7, 281–3 and 294–9, though I have sometimes rearranged the words to create a ransom note from the past, to the present, and back again.

  The newspaper headlines on page 286 are from the following newspapers:

  ‘A Startling Story’: Truth, Sunday, 11 July 1920

  ‘In Male Attire’: Daily Telegraph, Wednesday, 7 July 1920

  ‘Woman Charged With Murder’: Daily Telegraph, Wednesday, 7 July 1920

  ‘Eugene Falleni and Her “Wives”’: Truth, Sunday, 11 July 1920

  ‘What the Police Have Learned’: Daily Telegraph, Wednesday, 7 July 1920