poetry
Dorothy Hewett
Jordie Albiston
The Hanging of Jean Lee
Black Pepper $19.95pb, 75pp, 1 876044 25 X
THE HANGING OF JEAN LEE is the third verse novel I have reviewed
recently, except that this one is closer to the verse
documentary.
As one might expect, it is a grim, tough story of the
deterioration of a young woman's life and its brutal end. It is
divided into four sections with deliberately cold-hearted titles,
Personal Pages, Entertainment Section, Crime Supplement and Death
Notices. The Hanging of Jean Lee is economically and
imaginatively conceived with a strong narrative drive. In a
series of short connected poems, Jordie Albiston has made a
heart-breaker out of her material, ringing the verse changes,
using rhyme and blank verse in short chopped lines, colloquial
language, reportage and newspaper headlines with considerable
skill.
Jean Lee was born in Dubbo in 1919, the daughter of a railway
man. Later the family shifted to Chatswood, 'a normal family in
a normal house in a normal suburb on Sydney's north shore'. Yet
it took Jean only fifteen years to reach the gallows, the last
woman to be hanged in Pentridge jail. An attractive, lively redhead, she attended a Catholic school, passed her intermediate, and began moving from factory job to factory job, all well below her intelligence level. She married at eighteen but it ended only a year later, leaving her with a baby daughter and 'a trail of rent bills from Redfern to Glebe'.
What a waste of a wedding!
With the outbreak of World War II, she becomes 'a soldier's girl':
What a fool of a bloke!
Call me yank lover
It doesn't take her long to graduate into prostitution.
cunt to my face.
This is work and as far as I can see
Her lover and pimp is Robert Clayton, a well known petty crim, embezzler, housebreaker and drunk roller. She calls him 'her Bobbie'. In the underworld of Sydney, Perth, and eventually Melbourne, she is known as Skinny Jean. Together they work the streets, cheap rooms and pubs, Jean as decoy, Bobbie as standover man and blackmailer.
You wanna touch? You wanna feel?
You wanna pay the lonely man's fee.
He calls us Bonnie and Clyde.
Their criminal career ends with a brutal murder. With the help of an accomplice, they torture and strangle an elderly Carlton bookmaker during race week in Melbourne. The victim is left with his nasal bones fractured, a tennis ball cheek, a dinnerplate thigh, cigarette burns, a broken bottle slashed in his face, dents to his head and his larynx garrotted by hand.
He thinks we have their kind of style.
How then to transform Jean Lee, this sleazy cold-hearted whore, into a figure fit for human sympathy? Albiston uses Lee's days in solitary confinement waiting for death as a vehicle for a series of passionate interior monologues of considerable strength and energy. With Jean Lee alone in the condemned cell, God doesn't answer but some tatty angels do rustle in.
Hark
It isn't so long ago, 1951, since Jean Lee was hanged. We are left with a horror for the whole brutal proceedings of capital punishment and grief for the wasted life of a beautiful young woman. Quite an achievement.
the Herald angels sing Jean Lee
is going to die They lick their
tacky tabloid wings