Sandra Willson - Between Me and Myself: A Memoir of Murder, Desire and the Struggle to Be Free

On 29 April 1959, Sandra Willson, a twenty-year-old trainee psychiatric nurse from Paddington, devastated by the break-up of her relationship with her female lover, left her home and hailed a taxi. Asking the driver to take her to a remote location on the coast near Cronulla, she waited until he had stopped to consult a map and then shot him in the back of the head.

Found not guilty of murder on the grounds of insanity and sentenced to detention at the Governors Pleasure, Willson spent the next eighteen years in prison and psychiatric hospitals, becoming the longest-serving woman prisoner in New South Wales.

Her memoir, largely written in prison and now published for the first time, describes the events leading up to the shooting, the day itself and the years of incarceration that followed. Raw, compelling, Between Me and Myself is a fascinating insight into life on the social margins of post-war Sydney, an indictment of the justice systems treatment of gay women, and a tragic story of abuse, mental illness, desire and repression.

I first stumbled across the fascinating story of Sandra Willson while researching a book on the lesbian history of Sydney. Looking through a range of feminist journals from the 1970s for references to lesbianism, I came across her name and was intrigued by what I read.

A pamphlet produced in February 1977 by activist group Women Behind Bars outlined Sandra Willsons early experiences of social marginalisation as a lesbian, her detention in Parramatta Girls Training School as a teenager, her periods of psychiatric treatment, her murder of Sydney taxidriver Rodney Woodgate and subsequent eighteen years in prison and psychiatric hospitals, which led to her becoming the longest-serving woman prisoner in New South Wales. An article entitled Who Is Sandra Willson?, published in the Sydney Womens Liberation Newsletter in February 1977 and based on the Women Behind Bars pamphlet, asserted: Since she was very young Sandra has suffered societal prejudice and punishment because of her sexual non-conformity. A few months later, Melbourne Womens Liberation Newsletter published a statement issued by women from the Free Sandra Willson Campaign, which asked: Why is Sandra Willson still in prison? Is it because she is a murderer? Or is it because she is a lesbian?

Intrigued by these accounts, I wanted to discover more about Sandras story and to understand how the tragic sequence of events she was involved in came about. Was she simply a victim of a post-war Australian culture that persecuted lesbians and oppressed women, or were other factors at play? What, I wondered, had driven her to kill, when other lesbians of her generation, who had endured the same hostile culture, had responded in other ways? I began searching for further references to her. Tracing articles about Willson in feminist journals allowed me to follow the history of the campaign by Women Behind Bars to secure her release, while further research into the mainstream press of the late 1950s provided the details of her crime. These sources enabled me to begin to build up a picture of events, but key elements of the story, and of Sandras own thoughts and feelings, remained elusive. Sandra herself had died in 1999, but a number of articles in the feminist press made reference to a memoir, which Sandra had been writing in the 1970s. Unfortunately, without further leads, I was unable to find any trace of this document and was forced to assume that it had been lost.

In 2009, I gave a first, speculative talk on Sandra Willson as part of a History Week event at the State Library of New South Wales. Soon after I received an email from a friend of Sandras, Kym Barrett, informing me that the memoir had survived and was in her possession. I learnt from Kym that, after a lifetime spent in Sydney and the surrounding area, Sandra Willson had retired to Queensland. In the early 1990s, Sandra and her partner, Mary, undertook a road trip north and happened upon a property in Wolvi, near Gympie, which caught Sandras eye. She bought it immediately and began a new life, making new friends who were not aware of her past.

Throughout her life, Sandra had been drawn to a variety of religions and philosophies, but had never found one in which she felt she could fully express herself. However, her new neighbours in Wolvi, Heather and Bob Bush, introduced her to the Orthodox Catholic Church of Australia, a Christian denomination that also embraced the concept of reincarnation. The focus on reincarnation allowed Sandra to make sense of her experiences of marginalisation and incarceration as a stage in a much longer journey of self-discovery and development, and enabled her new friends to accept her homosexuality in a way that she had not experienced in other Christian churches. Father Peter Strong and his congregation welcomed Sandra into their community, and it was here that she finally found a sense of belonging.

She died seven years later, leaving half of her estate to the church, including a trunk containing her memoir and other papers.

Sandra Willson began producing written accounts of her life in her teens and continued up until her death in 1999. When the police searched her flat in 1959, following the shooting of Rodney Woodgate, they found a number of notebooks, including one entitled One Life, which focused on her thoughts regarding her mental condition and sexuality. During her time in prison and psychiatric hospital in the 1960s and 1970s, she wrote articles, poetry and plays, which reflected her experiences and gave voice to her emotional state, in addition to keeping a diary and maintaining a large correspondence with prison and hospital officials, members of religious groups and librarians at institutions through which she was pursuing her studies. She spent much of this time searching for answers about the world around her and her own place within it, and kept notebooks in which she pasted newspaper clippings and recorded her thoughts on topics as diverse as aliens, premonitions and religion, the weather, poetry and ancient languages.

She began work on her memoir in 1971, when she was incarcerated in a maximum-security ward at Parramatta Psychiatric Centre. During this period, she had passed her Leaving and High School Certificates and undertaken a number of writing projects, including a book that was to be a vehicle for the expression of my views upon life, living, people and historyand the interpretation of such. Sandra was given permission to use the occupational therapy room to undertake this work and was sometimes left alone there to write. She was, at first, reluctant to consider an autobiographical book, objecting that:

If I mention my homosexuality, I must take it through all its stages till I met Norma [the nurse with whom Sandra had a relationship]; and the disruptive outcome. If I do this, I may destroy any of the privacy and anonymity that Norma may have since found. If I recount the apex of my involvement; the murder of RW, then I risk bringing back to his parents consciousness, the loss of their son, when they may have by now folded it away in the hinter regions of their memory. I must respect their feelings, and my own are this: I do not want to capitalise on what has happened.

However, a year later, her views on the subject had changed and she informed the medical superintendent, Dr D. D. McLean:

The main object of this present version [of my book] is to tell my whole life story, as it happened, plus memories and feeling, attitudes at the time of events. It is positive about my homosexuality (rare for homos to write about homosmostly books are educated guesses by heterosexuals) and plays downtho does not omitthe happenings of 29/4/59 [when Rodney Woodgate was murdered]. It is written 1) with the realisation that people involved in my life may read it and 2) for the main purpose of being used by medical staff and students. It is therefore not aimed at the general public, sensationalism has been kept out as much as possible and I prefer that, if published, advertising be done discreetly and objectively.