GIDEON HAIGH A Scandal in Bohemia: The life and death of Mollie Dean. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
In exploring the death – and life – of Mollie Dean, Gideon Haigh covers a lot of fascinating ground.
A young woman walks home after a Melbourne theatre performance, making a phone call to a friend along the way. Then, metres from her front door, she is brutally assaulted and killed.
This event, with its tragic familiarity, happened almost 90 years ago, in December 1930. The victim was Mollie Dean – teacher, aspiring writer, and member of an artistic bohemia.
Without the advantage of closed-circuit surveillance, the only seriously considered suspect – her mother’s much younger possible lover Adam Graham – never faced trial.
Conspiracy theories sprang from this lack of closure. Sigmund Jorgensen – son of Justus Jorgansen, who founded the artists’ colony Montsalvat, near Melbourne – voiced his suspicions:
The murder was never solved and all public records of the inquest and the police files have disappeared, thus fomenting another rumour of a high-level cover-up protecting perhaps a member of the establishment.
In exploring this unsolved crime, Gideon Haigh covers a lot of ground: interlocking social and cultural contexts; Melbourne’s between-war artists and writers; opposing camps in the local art world; the Depression; the field of education; the power of the media, and class and gender. He establishes the ambiance of Melbourne locales, as well as vibrant intellectual activity against a background of convention.
While he doesn’t completely dismiss the idea of a cover-up, he locates the ‘missing’ inquest files, transferred to a brief for a criminal trial as per the usual process:
… sixty-six pages of statements from thirty-nine witnesses that detectives had gathered in the course of their inquiries – neatly typed, double-spaced, and annotated by multiple unknown hands. The voices of friends, family, passers-by and police themselves spoke again …
With the admirable goal of giving the victim a voice, Haigh looks at her dysfunctional family, identifies possible pseudonyms for published pieces of writing, and explores the letters and diaries of those who knew her. Nevertheless, Mollie Dean is elusive:
… a good deal of Mollie’s adulthood had been spent in the fugitive role of the ‘other woman’, whose tracks are ideally self-obscuring. Her correspondence, purportedly racy, conveniently disappeared; likewise the manuscript for her novel, never finished.
The young woman’s school-principal father died when she was very young, but she followed his footsteps by training as a schoolteacher. By 1929, she had taken on the challenge – and slight pay increase – of teaching students with learning difficulties.
Most of the time, she lived uncomfortably under the same roof as her sometimes-violent mother, who disapproved of everything: her daughter’s teaching, journalistic ambitions, artistic friends, and potential suitors. She opened Mollie’s mail, and stalked and harassed suspected boyfriends in the street.
But Dean continued socialising in sophisticated and cultured circles, her associates including high-profile journalist Mervyn Skipper and his wife Lena, classical composer and conductor Fritz Hart, and writer Nettie Palmer.
Dean found romantic attachments within these circles. She wasn’t interested in men her own age, looking ‘instead for someone older, more worldly and seasoned’, notes Haigh.
At the time of her death, she was involved with artist Colin Colahan, a practitioner of the ‘tonalist’ approach and close admirer of its founder, Max Meldrum. Dean had posed nude for Colahan, including on the night before she died. The painting, Sleep, reproduced in Haigh’s book, has never been publicly exhibited.
In fact, Colahan is the last person with whom Dean is known to have spoken. She called him from a phone box around midnight, apparently discussing her ambition for a full-time journalism career.
Colahan had a complicated love life, with children born to both his wife and an on-and-off mistress. Some acquaintances believed that Dean was determined to marry him, but Haigh conjectures that the relationship was shaky. He cites a fictional account written by another of Colahan’s lovers:
It was as if he could not feel quite sure of a woman until she was half dead; and when she became a pale, tortured shadow of her former self, he would turn his attention to another potential corpse.
Colahan briefly fell under suspicion for the murder. Years later, he gave a dramatic account of the events to writer George Johnston, who incorporated a version of them in his 1964 novel My Brother Jack. (Australian artistic and literary circles intersect in interesting ways: Sidney Nolan, designer of the first-edition cover, was a former primary-school student of Mollie Dean.)
Haigh traces Dean’s appearance in a surprising number of additional artistic creations. Conductor Fritz Hart’s 1942 unpublished novel James Comes Home to Dinner includes seductive schoolteacher ‘Eileen Coote’. There is a 1944 British film, Headline, based on the novel Reporter by Ken Alliwill (1933). More recently, singer-songwriter Lisa Miller wrote and recorded the murder ballad ‘Mollie Dean’. But in spite of her numerous incarnations, Dean’s perspective is presented only in playwright Melita Rowston’s Solitude in Blue (first performed at the Griffin Theatre in 2002).
Mollie, therefore, continues to elude. Haigh presents catty comments about her from those whom she irritated and offended, but chooses not to speculate about the psychological dimensions of her life choices. She did, after all, grow up fatherless and with a rejecting mother, she displayed a repeated attraction to father figures, seemingly craved approval and used her sexuality in an attempt to gain it.
Haigh is, nevertheless, sensitive to uncomfortable truths about her situation, acknowledging that while women numerically dominated teaching, it was ‘a system skewed again them’. The financial realities of women’s lives are recognised in his conjecture that any plan Dean had to marry Colahan was possibly less about romance and more about establishing a stable place to live and write.
He notes too, that Dean ‘did not, quite, engage a community’s sympathies’ because her ambitions differed to those ‘of the vast majority of young women [who] were directed towards matrimony and motherhood’.
The most poignant observation, though, is that she didn’t quite fit, even in the bohemia to which she gravitated. He notes ‘the ambivalence about Mollie within that circle … whose protocols she flouted as a woman by expressing desires and ambitions’.
But no one – including Haigh – can give the murdered woman her voice, and this remains a haunting void in this well-researched, carefully written book.
Gideon Haigh A Scandal in Bohemia: The life and death of Mollie Dean Hamish Hamilton 2018 PB 320pp $32.99
Jeannette Delamoir is a Queenslander and former academic who is passionate about writing, reading, culture and food.
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