Brenda Hodge was the last person to be sentenced to death in Australia. She was found guilty of murdering her de facto partner in 1984 and was sentenced to death. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Early life

Brenda was born Dorothy Brenda White in Victoria in 1951 to Beryl Nanette MacKenzie. Her childhood was unhappy. She was frequently the victim of beatings by her alcoholic mother. Her brother, Danny constantly bullied her and grew up with numerous of her mother's partners. She claimed to have been sexually abused as young as four, by a babysitter who would continue to sexually abuse her for nine more years. As a child she began skipping school.

In 1965, her mother left her stepfather and brother, Edd, and took her to live in Carlton. Brenda got a job, but her mother began spending most of the money on alcohol. She took a job working on a farm, where she was happy at first, but left due to a dispute with the owner.

One night her mother sent her off with one of her male friends for the pub. After taking her to a park, he raped her, telling her her mother had allowed him to have sex with her in exchange for alcohol money. After being sent to court, she was charged with being a 'neglected child' and placed into a reformatory in Melbourne.

After escaping, she was sent between mental hospitals and reformatories, until her biological father contacted her, inviting her to live with him in Brisbane. She later found out he was an alcoholic too and pressured her into having sex with him. Soon after she ran away and was soon put into a mental hospital. She was eventually released into a charity worker's care. She started working in various places throughout Queensland, eventually moving to Darwin and eventually, Western Australia. Brenda married a man named David Hodge in 1972, divorcing in 1977.

She became involved with a police officer, Peter Rafferty, while working in Leonora in 1983. Their relationship was unhappy and plagued with several fights, due to his alcoholism and her depression. She decided to leave him.

The killing

On the day of the murder, Brenda was packing her belongings to leave. Peter began taunting her and yelling. She claims in her book, her memory of the incident is blurred. She claims only remembering aiming the gun at him and firing. She claims she does not know what was on her mind or why she did it and that there are moment of blackness in her memory. After being shot, Peter retreated to the shed, where Brenda followed, shooting him twice more, killing him.

After the incident, she stopped at a deli and ordered a coke. She went to a hotel and confessed the murder to a friend, who did not believe her. She later went to a lookout where she considered suicide. She then went to Kalgoorlie police station where she confessed to the crime.

Sentencing

In August 1984, she was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to hang by Justice Pidgeon. On being sentenced to death she recalls "(I felt)... Numb, detached. I felt nothing. I believe I am not the only person to have had that experience. Many people thought Lindy Chamberlain was guilty simply because she 'showed no emotion' at her trial".

Her sentence was commuted to life in prison. She recalls "It didn't mean anything to me at the time; I still had this vague idea my life was already over, almost as though I was already dead..."

She was sent to Bandyup maximum security prison where she remained until 1988, when she was transferred to Greenough Regional Prison. In prison she began to study. She learnt to touch type and enrolled in English and Literature courses as well as a TAFE trade apprenticeship in cooking. Becoming a model prisoner, she became friendly with parish priest and converted to Roman Catholicism while imprisoned.

After numerous appeals, she was paroled on 20 October 1995. She was contacted by her half-sisters in 2003 for the first time ever, not knowing she had any more family. She still keeps in close contact with them to this day.

She currently lives in Geraldton, Western Australia. Her autobiography, WALK ON: The remarkable true story of the last person sentenced to death in Australia was published in 2005. She appeared on Enough Rope with Andrew Denton in 2005 talking about her life for the first time in public.

Shortly after Hodge's sentence, Western Australia became the last state to remove the death penalty for murder.

Wikipedia.org

Brenda Hodge

Enough Rope with Andrew Denton

ABC.net.au

June 20, 2005

Sometimes a life is so shattered you just have to tread gently through the wreckage to find the human being at the centre of it. Brenda Hodge was the last person sentenced to death in this country when she murdered her partner, a policeman. She arrived at that point after a long and torturous journey. It's a story she's decided to tell in print in the just-published book 'Walk On' and tonight on television for the first time in public. Please hold your breath and reserve your judgement as together we walk gently, gently, through the life of Brenda Hodge.

ANDREW DENTON: Brenda, welcome.

BRENDA HODGE: Thank you.

ANDREW DENTON: Now, we have to talk about some pretty difficult things tonight. Are you up for this?

BRENDA HODGE: Oh, I hope so.

ANDREW DENTON: Okay. Well, let's get into it, shall we? Tell me, when you were a young girl, what kind of a mother to you was your mum, Nan?

BRENDA HODGE: She was just very punitive, very self-centred. There's reasons why she was like that. She had a hard life herself. The only mothering that I really got was from my grandmother - my step-father's mother - and she used to look after me every now and then, only for a day or two at a time.

ANDREW DENTON: When you were four, your mum arranged for you to be looked after by a young man called Eric. How did he treat you?

BRENDA HODGE: He just used me.

ANDREW DENTON: From what age?

BRENDA HODGE: Four.

ANDREW DENTON: Physically abused you?

BRENDA HODGE: (Nods)

ANDREW DENTON: Until what age, how long did Eric look after you?

BRENDA HODGE: Off and on really, until I left home.

ANDREW DENTON: Was your mum aware of this?

BRENDA HODGE: Yes. She was aware of it. It was never spoken about. I grew up thinking that incest, as I know it to be now, and abuse by relatives and friends and everything that happened to me, I just thought all of that was just normal.

ANDREW DENTON: When you were about 14, in exchange for drinking money, your mum gave you to a grown man for sex, and he raped you.

BRENDA HODGE: That's right.

ANDREW DENTON: And after that, the police took you as a neglected child and you ended up in various institutions?

BRENDA HODGE: It's called a Status Offence. Your status is that you're a juvenile, your status is that you're neglected, your status is that you're what they used to call "in moral danger". And so for that I was, I believe, charged in court for being a neglected child and in moral danger and I was locked up in a reformatory.

ANDREW DENTON: Let's move forward to when you were 15, when you were with your dad, Harry. What kind of a man was he?

BRENDA HODGE: Very intelligent, very cultured, pretty good looking, very polite to everybody. I never saw him angry. He was a chronic alcoholic but he was able to cover it up.

ANDREW DENTON: You saw the other side of it, didn't you? Why didn't you stay?

BRENDA HODGE: Well, I ended up in his bed, I suppose is the nicest way to put it.

ANDREW DENTON: At his insistence? Or invitation?

BRENDA HODGE: His invitation. I mean I'd been screwed all my life. To me, it was just... If someone asked you, you went to bed with them. If you wanted someone to love you, you went to bed with them. You sort of, you grow up... I mean most people think that if you're abused when you're young that you're going to be scared of sex, but what happens to a lot of people is you become promiscuous, because you never get the love, all you get is the sex. So you've got to keep looking for it, and so you keep going with people trying to find love.

ANDREW DENTON: Even your father?

BRENDA HODGE: (Nods) But then him and his wife had an argument and she told him to get rid of me, and so he took me to the courts. I don't know what he told them, but I was locked up again because of my inappropriate sexual behaviour, even though he didn't obviously tell them that he was a part of that, because he was a respectable, fairly wealthy man in a big city.

ANDREW DENTON: You eventually wound up in an institution called 'Sandy Gallop'. Can you describe that place?

BRENDA HODGE: Hell on earth.

ANDREW DENTON: Why?

BRENDA HODGE: It's just unbelievable. Unbelievable. Why I was sent there, I don't know, but probably because I had a history of, you know, not towing the line. If people pushed me too far, then I would just react.

ANDREW DENTON: How would you react?

BRENDA HODGE: Well, violently. In the whole time I was there, I had no contact with any other women except these warders or quasi-medical nurses or whatever they were. They drugged me up to take me to showers that much that two people would have to carry me for a shower, which was every two or three days as far as I remember. Then one day one of them was looking at me through the peephole in the door, and I just sort of went berserk and smashed the bed. The bed end fell off the bed and I smashed it through the peephole. So then the police came and they drugged me up and carted me off back to the nuthouse, to a place called Goodna Mental Hospital in Brisbane and I was put straight into a locked ward there. And it just kept going on and on, really. (Laughs)

ANDREW DENTON: There's not many laughs in this story, Brenda. You've really got to work on that.

BRENDA HODGE: I know, I'm sorry.

ANDREW DENTON: No, it's alright. Let's talk about some good stuff. You were 16, I think, when somebody did something nice to you. Tell me about Rita and Eileen.

BRENDA HODGE: Rita and Eileen were running a women's refuge or some sort of a home like that. When they decided at the hospital that I was ready to go out, she was contacted and said would she come and talk to me and could they take me and all this, because, for the first time that I can remember, the doctors were smart enough not to send me back to somewhere where I was going to be abused again. She was a very, very good friend, and Eileen was another lady who was a nun. And she was... there was only the two of them running the place, and they kept me there and looked after me until I sort of got used to being outside of an institution. It's very difficult to be in institutions and not get institutionalised.

ANDREW DENTON: Were they your first friends?

BRENDA HODGE: Yeah. I mean, people... I just didn't expect there to be - I know it sounds really dopey, but I didn't expect people to do anything for nothing for me.

ANDREW DENTON: And what was it like to discover that somebody would?

BRENDA HODGE: Very liberating, and I'll never forget it either.

ANDREW DENTON: Later, there was unexpected comfort from somebody you didn't even know in Alice Springs. And that stayed with you too, didn't it? What happened?

BRENDA HODGE: Yes, I met this New Zealand guy who was very nice and we lived together for some time. We were both working, and life was good. But then, I don't know what happened, I just left.

ANDREW DENTON: It's interesting you say that because, I mean, extraordinarily to me, when you were 21, you got married and that lasted eight years, to Dave. And then you had another relationship with a man called Gordon which was pretty good, and that went for five years.

BRENDA HODGE: Another nice person. Excellent, fantastic person and I left him as well.

ANDREW DENTON: Why did you run away from something good?

BRENDA HODGE: I think because I hadn't dealt with old issues, and I was looking for happiness outside of myself and expecting someone else to make me happy. I didn't realise that I still had a lot of stuff inside of me that was going to just make me keep running and running and running. And it did.

ANDREW DENTON: What drew you to Peter Rafferty?

BRENDA HODGE: I met him when I was in Leonora, which is sort of a small mining town in WA, out in the desert. He was sent up there as a relief sergeant, and we met up and just sort of, you know, got on well together. We weren't living together but we were sort of sleeping together and drinking together and socialising and all that stuff. And then he had to go back to Kalgoorlie and he asked me to go back with him, which I did.

ANDREW DENTON: And what led to the day you killed him?

BRENDA HODGE: Oh, very difficult to say it was any one thing, but basically it was...(Sighs) There was no communication between us. We couldn't communicate on any level other than the, you know, "Do you wanna go prospecting?" "Do you wanna have a drink?" "Let's work the horses." All this sort of outside stuff. We couldn't communicate deeply and so we didn't understand each other. Neither of us had any real insight into ourselves or our own problems. By about January, I was into a very deep bout of depression which I wasn't getting any treatment for. I was just trying to cover it up. He was having alcoholic delusions and in a downward spiral, and it just became a really volatile situation, unfortunately.

ANDREW DENTON: Can you explain what was in your head when you shot him?

BRENDA HODGE: No, I can't because I was... I can tell you what I can remember, which is fragments, bits and pieces, but not what was in my head, because I was split from myself. I didn't have any sense of self. When I say, "I did this" or "I did that", at the time, it wasn't 'I', I had no 'me', it just sort of happened. I was packing to leave and Peter was helping me and he said, "If you're not back in 20 minutes, I'll chuck all the rest of your gear out on the road." I was just crying all the time, and I went out the back and he came running through the house and he'd been drinking all day and just started abusing me and...

ANDREW DENTON: Physically or verbally?

BRENDA HODGE: Verbally. No, he never abused me physically. And I just went into that whatever it is - there's been all sorts of labels put on it by experts. I still don't know what it was, but it's just... I had no hearing. All I could hear was the whirring in my ears. I just went and got the rifle and ended up shooting him.

ANDREW DENTON: Some of Peter's friends, maybe his family, will see you tonight.

BRENDA HODGE: I know, I know.

ANDREW DENTON: They'll be upset to see you. Is there anything you can say to them?

BRENDA HODGE: I can't say anything that'll make them feel any better, but I am so sorry, especially for Peter's children. I can't say any more than that because it won't mean anything. I know that, but... I've always felt like that, but this is the first time that I've had the guts, and the opportunity, to say it. And I just... You know, this happened 21 years ago and that's 21 years those kids had without their father.

ANDREW DENTON: What does it mean to you to be able to say this, to tell your story?

BRENDA HODGE: I need to say it. I need to try to show Peter's family that I didn't just lose my temper, I didn't just get the shits and go and shoot him. It wasn't that sort of... it was more than that. I'm still responsible - I don't deny that - but it's just more complex than what it appears to be.

ANDREW DENTON: You were sentenced to death for that murder.

BRENDA HODGE: I was.

ANDREW DENTON: What did that sentence mean to you?

BRENDA HODGE: Nothing.

ANDREW DENTON: Nothing?

BRENDA HODGE: Nothing.

ANDREW DENTON: Why nothing?

BRENDA HODGE: Because I wanted die.

ANDREW DENTON: You felt you deserved that?

BRENDA HODGE: They sentenced me to death and then said it's commuted to life imprisonment. I sort of still thought that they were going to hang me or do something. I don't know what I thought really, but I sort of thought I was going to die. Sometimes I felt as though I was already dead and that it was sort of all happening to someone else - all sorts of stuff that's very difficult to put into words.

ANDREW DENTON: You spent the next 12 years in jail and you've described jail as a living hell. Can you explain that to us?

BRENDA HODGE: The hell of being in prison was that I had to keep living, and it was worse than any nuthouse I've ever been in, I can tell you now. It was just chaos, every day is chaos, every day is anarchy, every day is madness, every day is - you just can't get away from it.

ANDREW DENTON: In amongst this madness, you met the prison psychiatrist, Dr Rollo. That changed things for you, didn't it?

BRENDA HODGE: It did because he recognised that I was grieving, and grief is more than just depression. He used to bring me in books to read. He was all into self-help and we tried all the drugs, and I hated being drugged and I hated not being drugged. I mean I hated everything. I hated myself. But, as I began to get into being educated and my understanding of life and people broadened through literature, and then I started winning prizes, so that was good, I felt good about myself in some ways. But it did, it gave me... it was my escape.

ANDREW DENTON: Were you grieving for Peter?

BRENDA HODGE: Yeah

ANDREW DENTON: Were you grieving for yourself?

BRENDA HODGE: Oh, well, both.

ANDREW DENTON: As you said, you won prizes, you started to study. Don't be modest, over those years, what awards and degrees did you attain?

BRENDA HODGE: I got a BA in English at Curtin University, then I did a Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing. That's when I got serious about writing poetry. And once I started writing poetry, I was alive again.

ANDREW DENTON: Was this the first time that you felt good about yourself?

BRENDA HODGE: Yeah.

ANDREW DENTON: You had the psychiatrist show compassion and lend you books, you had the education officers help you with your studies, you got awards, you actually found a way to express some of those things that you hadn't dealt with - the first place, really, that you hadn't been able to run away from. Was prison, ironically, a saviour for you?

BRENDA HODGE: That's right. Even though it's a horrible place to have to live and there's a lot to contend with, I actually learned to start looking inwards and looking for that happiness within myself, learning to understand why I was depressed. I mean, depression is a bit like alcoholism in a way. You never really stop being an alcoholic or a depressive, but you just learn to cope with it and you learn to stop it from ruling your life, from organising your life.

ANDREW DENTON: When you were released from prison on parole after 12 years, how on earth, after what you'd been through - a lifetime of violation and abuse, no self-esteem - how do you piece a life back together after that? What did you do?

BRENDA HODGE: I had a lot of determination and I had a few very good friends and someone gave me a job. That would be it in a nutshell. I had to become a person, become part of the community - which I am, I contribute in the community. I don't do it just as a feel-good thing. I do it because I want to do it for other people because people have done so much for me. It's what I call 'passing the baton'.

ANDREW DENTON: You've got a lovely expression in the book, which is that "anger is fear in daytime clothes".

BRENDA HODGE: It is.

ANDREW DENTON: Do you still feel that same sense of anger that you felt when you were younger?

BRENDA HODGE: No.

ANDREW DENTON: How have you dealt with it? Where have you put it?

BRENDA HODGE: I don't know where it's gone. But when I get angry now, I feel angry at injustices, corruption, all those sorts of things. I get angry with people who are in prison... I'm not saying I was one of them, but there are many people in prison who shouldn't be there, schizophrenic, manic-depressives. Everybody now, they just get chucked into prison. So I get angry about that stuff. I can't do a lot about it. I do what I can, and the rest I just send it up to Louie. I mean, I can't carry it all, I can't handle it all and I only make myself not very functional if I try to. So I've had to learn to prioritise, as they say.

ANDREW DENTON: At the start of the book, you write an apology to Peter, his family and his friends for his murder. Can you ever reconcile that inside your own mind?

BRENDA HODGE: No. No, you can't, not 100 per cent. I mean, I don't persecute myself with guilt like I used to, but it's just a very hard thing to live with.

ANDREW DENTON: You've talked about some very tough things tonight. I appreciate your honesty. Brenda Hodge, thank you.

BRENDA HODGE: Thank you.

A fairly content killer: Brenda Hodge

Salon.com

July 1, 2012

Brenda Hodge is another example of a woman who just about got away with murder. She is a confessed, tried and convicted murderess — was actually sentenced to hang. She survived her hanging (we’re glad to say), and has lived long enough to see the image of her criminal self transformed from a figure of the blackest dye to take on the radiance of a sainted citizen. Once a murderess, then a culture heroine. We’re all for forgiveness and perhaps we should be pleased to see redemption in Hodge’s tale.

Except, except.

One would like a little less self-satisfaction, a little less demure ego on the murderess’s part, a little less complacent denial among Hodge’s claque on the literary Left.

A man’s life is worth more than this. More than the inner-urban celebrity bestowed on this ordinary jill who killed him — bestowed by a few junior academics with careers to make, and by one or two up-to-the-minute publishers of poetry pamphlets.

An unhappy relationship complete with its quota of spats does not weigh in the balance against a human life, whatever women may say. It is one of the distorting effects of the clitorarchy that the fashionable and the unthinking have come to assume that you don’t need much, if you’re a woman anyway, to justify your taking a man’s life. A threat, a dark look, any gesture that might be interpreted as a hint of violence — any or all of these may be bundled into a tale of ‘abuse’. Which is rationale for murder.

You need so little because in part your murder is payback for the long millennia of ‘patriarchy’ — as represented in the feminist distortion of history.

We’re not speaking of the real patriarchy that guided us out of the savannah and found the land bridges and secured our viability among competing animals and hominids; and cut perinatal death for mother and infant; and brought girls the washing machine and the hair-dryer and the car and contraception — we don’t mean any of that. We mean the patriarchy that never was, the pointlessly death-dealing patriarchy of feminist myth.

*****

Hodge was born in Victoria in 1951, left school for work at 13 and was employed on farms and in the Northern Territory outback. For Christmas 1983 she was in the mining town of Leonora when she started knocking about with a police sergeant called Peter Rafferty, the father of four teenage children. Rafferty invited her with him when he returned to Kalgoorlie in January. They’d been living together there for three months when, during a humdrum domestic argument, she turned on him with a single-barrel shotgun and shot him four times, killing him. That was in March 1984. Peter Rafferty was 39 and Hodge 33.

It should be said that Hodge has accepted responsibility for the shooting, pleaded guilty at her trial, and as a woman now approaching 60 has apologised to the dead man’s family and continues to express remorse for her murder. We need to bear in mind too that she served her prison term, and that in the United Kingdom at least 12 years is regarded as about the average for a life sentence.

At the same time, the fact that in all her accounts she has remained vague about the crucial moments that led to the killing, may suggest a deeper psychical resistance to facing what she’s done.

We have to sympathise with anyone who finds it hard to cope with an event so violent and catastrophic. The trouble is that Hodge’s mental inhibition can easily look like practical evasion. In the crude public culture that’s developed throughout the anglosphere during recent decades, her converting her ordeal into poetry and prose is easily made to seem like a way of turning crime to profit, as well as a means of crossing over to respectability.

Authorship transforms her into an interesting artistic and psychical phenomenon. For certain reading persons at least, she is no longer merely an evil-tempered drunk who ruthlessly terminated an actual person’s life. She perhaps even becomes someone in the thelma’n’louise mould, a person to admire.[1]

One of the better explorations of her state of mind at the moment of the killing may be found in a television interview she gave after publication of her autobiography in 2005. There are intervals of acuteness, but in general she covers the crucial event with generalities, verbal clichés and psychopop — disjunctions and willed lacunae:

“ANDREW DENTON: And what led to the day you killed him?

HODGE: Oh, very difficult to say it was any one thing, but basically it was …. [sighs] There was no communication between us. We couldn’t communicate on any level other than the — you know — ‘Do you wanna go prospecting?’ ‘Do you wanna have a drink?’ ‘Let’s work the horses.’ All this sort of outside stuff. We couldn’t communicate deeply and so we didn’t understand each other. Neither of us had any real insight into ourselves or our own problems. By about January, I was into a very deep bout of depression which I wasn’t getting any treatment for. I was just trying to cover it up. He was having alcoholic delusions and in a downward spiral, and it just became a really volatile situation, unfortunately.

DENTON: Can you explain what was in your head when you shot him?

HODGE: No, I can’t because I was …. I can tell you what I can remember, which is fragments, bits and pieces, but not what was in my head, because I was split from myself. I didn’t have any sense of self. When I say, ‘I did this’ or ‘I did that’, at the time, it wasn’t ‘I’, I had no ‘me’, it just sort of happened. I was packing to leave and Peter was helping me and he said, ‘If you’re not back in 20 minutes, I’ll chuck all the rest of your gear out on the road.’ I was just crying all the time, and I went out the back and he came running through the house and he’d been drinking all day and just started abusing me and ….

DENTON: Physically or verbally?

HODGE: Verbally. No, he never abused me physically. And I just went into that whatever it is — there’s been all sorts of labels put on it by experts. I still don’t know what it was, but it’s just …. I had no hearing. All I could hear was the whirring in my ears. I just went and got the rifle and ended up shooting him.”[2]

There’s no real sign of personal responsibility here, is there? All the causation, dimly understood, is external to Hodge herself. Even her depression is objectified as an external force over which she had no control, and she invents a ‘split personality’ to remove from herself what she actually felt and did. If knowledge is available to her — and it may not be — she doesn’t want to face it. As she puts it elsewhere: “all I know is I was trying to leave, he was following me around and saying horrible things and I shot him.”[3]

Say horrible things and I’ll shoot you — fair enough. Perhaps that’s the female estimate of the equilibrium in things (we know girls love even-handedness, balance). She goes on, in this version:

“It certainly wasn’t a decision, I was what’s called dissociated, I was split from reality and split from my sense of self, it’s hard to put into words. All I can remember is just seeing blackness and then I was looking at the back of the rifle. I felt like I was walking on the moon, everything just slowed right down.”

It’s become a literary or a filmic experience. In these remarks Hodge makes no mention of the fact that, after she’d first shot him, Rafferty ran off and took refuge in the shed, and that she pursued him with the single-shot gun, reloading it several times and firing three or four blasts into her victim before she’d despatched him. Nor does she hesitate to label the man she murdered a chronic alcoholic — like herself. (Didn’t some social movement invent a slogan once: “Don’t blame the victim”?)

Like the thousands of other travestied male victims of female violence, Peter Rafferty does not rise from his grave to contest his murderer’s self-exculpations. And so her unpersuasive narrative stands ….

Or — to take the same events from the same source, but set down by a different author:

“On the day of the murder Brenda was packing her belongings to leave. Peter began taunting her and yelling. She claims in her book that her memory of the incident is blurred. She claims only remembering aiming the gun at him and firing. She claims she does not know what was on her mind or why she did it and that there are moments of blackness in her memory. After being shot, Peter retreated to the shed, where Brenda followed, shooting him twice more, killing him.

“After the incident she stopped at a deli and ordered a coke. She then went to a hotel and confessed the murder to a friend, who did not believe her. She later went to a lookout where she considered suicide. She then went to Kalgoorlie police station where she confessed to the crime.”[4]

The point about Hodge’s post-release utterances is that while she says all the suitable and proper things about her remorse and about taking personal responsibility for the killing, she does not on the whole behave as if she grasps the meaning of her phrases.

To poetry and misery memoir

Tried and sentenced to death in 1984, Hodge had her sentence immediately commuted to life imprisonment (Western Australia was the last of the states to abandon capital punishment, in that same year). She served a little under twelve years before being released in 1995.

While in prison Hodge took to study; she finished her secondary schooling by correspondence and is said to have topped Western Australia in matriculation English. It may be true. She took a degree in that subject and a graduate diploma in Creative Writing from Curtin University. And at the end of that she published a book of poems about prison life: One of Many.[5]

All that’s okay, we think. And here is what a decent literary publisher could say about her material:

“The poems in this collection were written while Brenda Hodge was serving a life sentence in the Western Australian prison system. Powerful, clear-eyed, and with the ability to shock, the poems as a group form a remarkable diary of the writer’s inner life and the daily reality of imprisonment. Violence, drugs, death, are never far away, nor is the possibility of human connection or the writer’s ability to distil a moment or recurring event with clarity, compassion and force.”[6]

Such praise is the small change of literary life. The poems are nothing much; healthy exercises in paring down language, but not with much residue once the exercise is over.

This is anti-poetry really, of a style familiar since the 1960s and unexceptionable in its kind — suited to the minimalism of gaol. It’s sub-Carlos Williams, in the objectivist tradition, and needs a literary genius like Williams to carry it off.

This is also a style which seems to offer refuge for the versifier who has no special verbal talent — who may believe she can hide in the minimalism, pretending that the deadpan lack of significance is something more than deadpan lack of significance.

It’s of interest in the context of our overarching rgument that the neo-imagist or objectivist style involves a rather masculine way with words — sans emotionalism, sans ornamentation or frippery. We don’t know whether Hodge adopts that approach simply because some verse-writing instructor has told her this is the way to do it; or because she finds it the easiest way; or because there’s something powerfully masculinising about the prison experience:

“Lockdown. Doors slam.
Keys rattle.
Footsteps fade.
Silence.
Alone and looking
at a blank page,
I light a smoke.”[7]

One of the hard things using this style, as these lines show, is to achieve point and avoid bathos. The haiku-esque “I light a smoke” doesn’t quite do it. You’re okay so long as you’re just going with the image, the thing being limned —

“A blowfly in my cell
is trapped
splitting the silence
ping-ponging
off the white walls ….”[8]

— but then you somehow have to answer the question, Yes? Yes? So what?

And other lines seem to refute the claim that Hodge has got the point about eschewing sentimentality:

“Only last week you were in intensive care,
close to death, for the third time this year.
But still you’ve come to visit me ….”[9]

We don’t — of course — deplore the human feeling. We point out only that Hodge hasn’t quite understood about handling it, or her chosen medium; may not even be aware she’s chosen a medium. And she’s wholly at sea when she tries to launch out into the deeps of social analysis, as when she comes to address problems of crime and punishment:

“ … a crime wave never seen before:
it is a social war.”[10]

To which lines we can only respond, No it isn’t. No it isn’t.

*****

Encouraged by the reaction to her poems, Hodge worked from about 2003 on an autobiography she called Walk On — presumably thinking of herself, and not so much of the dead man who would not be doing any walking on again.[11] Her book owes something to that larrikin Australian genre, the confessions of a badhat auntie: a tradition exploited by Dorothy Hewett in Bobbin’ Up, 1959, and secured for aboriginal writing by Ruby Langford (or perhaps we should say “by Ruby Langford’s ghost writer”) in Don’t Take Your Love to Town, 1988.

The chief originary strain for Hodge’s book is, however, that international genre which, for all the cash it rakes in, has come to be known dismissively as ‘the misery memoir’: the underdog’s self-justificatory plaint against life.

Life in the misery narrative is a Hobbesian sort of affair: nasty, male-oppressed and brutish. Life is arranged with a spite directed straight at the author herself. This is an overwhelmingly female genre. Women who in the past would have confined themselves to boring a neighbour — or a doctor or the girl in the corner shop or the Jehovah’s Witness with her foot in the door — these days such women may confide through their keyboard and, if they’re lucky and enterprising, may turn out something that catches somebody’s eye, and change them into some sort of common-or-garden celebrity — famous for being themselves and in no way superior to anyone else.

Women’s books for a women’s market, conceived in self-indulgence and read in the same way. Because of their fantastic element their proper affinity is with hospital romance, to which we may say they are the grunge successors, or the disabused obverse. The heroines of these yarns rarely marry their doctor and move to the suburbs. They usually end where they started, though now they make some magical claim that they’re sorted — that now they are the woman they had always struggled to be. It’s meant to be heuristic.

Such memoirs are meant for a mass, uncritical audience and are often read as uncomplicatedly factual. They are often used to indoctrinate, often spin off as school or college texts, since schoolteachers and contract academics are so often in our day under-educated types who see it as their purpose to inculcate students with their own social opinions, which they believe are ‘progressive’, and therefore right and good. Such prentice intellectuals have a soft spot for bad news which they can frame as a vaguely whingeing indictment of the status quo.

These are books which may be ‘developed’ by publishers in collaboration with an unpractised author. They may be full of personal intensity while lacking art or conceptual reach — so for all their ‘passion’ or ‘commitment’ they tend, paradoxically, to be formulaic. They are ‘sensational, true’ accounts which do not shun fiction. Their purpose is often to show an everyday strongwoman struggling into effectiveness against impossible social and cultural odds. They like to close with a bit of factitious uplift.

That lets an empathetic reader feel that, although her own life is just like the author’s in being sheer hell, there are definitely better things lying ahead, especially if the reader starts to impose her own ‘choices’ on her life, imports a spot of ‘self-empowerment’. That may or may not be code for further excesses of selfishness.

*****

Brenda Hodge’s confessions won some predictable hearts. Those of the well-meaning and credulous — as well as those of her own approximate demographic who imagined her tale was about themselves. The following pop’s vox responses are quoted without alteration from listeners to 774 ABC Melbourne’s Breakfast Program:

“I find this woman truly remarkable and my heart aches for her. How can one woman or person be subject to so much in one life and still have the will to carry on and better themselves”

“i would love to know how i can get in touch with Brenda. i too am recovering from depression and since i was a child i have used my poetry as an outlet. i would just like to let her know how much her story ment to me and how wonderful i think she is. thank-you”

So they queue up to heap their bandit English at the feet of their grunge heroine, and it would be unkind to seem to begrudge them …

Hodge conducted a round of media interviews in June 2005, confessing the murder for which she’d long before been found guilty and sentenced — but also dwelling with gusto on the unhappy life that she said had led to her unfortunate killing of an innocent man. (Can any man truly be regarded as innocent? Don’t we all deserve a violent death, when you think about it?)

She said nothing about exploiting the murder of an innocent man to try and build a new life, and possibly a career. Now and then during her promotional chats Brenda shed a tear for herself, or for the way her past misdeeds had been misunderstood.

She was the criminal of course who had never stood a chance. More abused than wicked: raped at the age of four and all the rest of it, a party to incest, tyrannised by callous institutions before ‘spiralling down’ through drugs and depression. It’s a sort of writing-by-numbers fiction; fill in your own clichés: the familiar list of male misdeeds and oppressive environmental factors. Much of it was true and none of it was Brenda Hodge’s fault.

We try to have sympathy, and sometimes we really feel it. But to what extent is Brenda Hodge a priority? Our mind keeps coming back to the point that she seems to be implying that, unlike the rest of us, she had to murder someone in order to express herself and find a way forward, discover truly who she is. And we’re not buying that. Sympathising, aren’t we at risk of losing touch with what a momentous thing it is to kill a person? To terminate a life is not a prank or shenanigan, still less a celebrity act. It is a tear in the natural universe — an outrage, the worst of crimes.

Some people really are deprived or abused

But wait there a moment. Hodge is rare among female authors and criminals or defendants in that her tale of abuse sounds crushing and genuine — not merely a tale cobbled up to sway a jury or to lighten a sentence.

Assuming that what she says about herself, and what others say about her, is substantially true, there is not much doubting her claim to ‘abused victim’ status — though this is only one side of her personality. The other side (which she mentions freely but does not foreground) has amounted to an aggressive, violent, directionless, promiscuous drunk.

We quote the following account:

“Brenda was born Dorothy Brenda White in country Victoria, 1951, to Beryl Nanette MacKenzie. Her childhood was unhappy. She frequently was the victim of beatings by her alcoholic mother. Her brother Danny bullied her and she grew up in the company of numerous of her mother’s partners. She claimed to have been sexually abused at 4, by a babysitter who allegedly continued to abuse her over nine more years. As a child she began skipping school. In 1965 her mother left her stepfather and brother Ed, and took her to live in Carlton (Melbourne). Brenda got a job, but her mother spent most of the money on alcohol. She took a job on a farm, where she was happy at first, but left after a dispute with the owner.

“One night her mother sent her off with one of her boyfriends to the pub. After taking her to a park he raped her, saying her mother had allowed this in exchange for drinking money. She was judged by the courts to be a ‘neglected child’ and sent to a Melbourne reformatory. Escaping, she was shuttled between various mental hospitals and reformatories, until her biological father invited her to live with him in Brisbane. She found out he was an alcoholic and formed a sexual relationship with him. She ran away and was placed in a secure mental hospital, from where she was released into a charity worker’s care. She worked in various places throughout Queensland and eventually moved to Darwin and then Western Australia. She married David Hodge in 1972, and they divorced in 1977. She became involved with Peter Rafferty while working in Leonora in 1983. Their relationship was unhappy and punctuated with quarrels, through his alcoholism and her depression. So she decided to leave him.”[12]

It’s an important point about Hodge that she is always leaving — abandoning situations that are adequate as well as those that are not. This is one of the hints we have (if we need any) that as a youngster she was impossible. She left the farm where she was happy, after a squabble with its owner. Later she enjoyed a couple of decent longterm relationships, and abandoned both of them.

She lived happily with a New Zealand man for some time in Alice Springs — “But then, I don’t know what happened, I just left.” She married at 21 and the marriage lasted eight years and was succeeded by another lengthy relationship — “Another nice person. Excellent, fantastic person and I left him as well.”

“ANDREW DENTON: Why did you run away from something good?

HODGE: I think because I hadn’t dealt with old issues, and I was looking for happiness outside of myself and expecting someone else to make me happy. I didn’t realise that I still had a lot of stuff inside of me that was going to just make me keep running and running and running.”[13]

We’ve seen that she was leaving Peter Rafferty the day he lost patience with her and she responded by shooting him dead. The fact that Hodge was evidently an impossible, wholly uncontrollable young person is always present, but receives not much emphasis in her account.

The book’s ‘positive’ motif — the self-help or ‘can-do’ or redemptive element — comes through at the point where she sees the light in Bandyup Prison. There, against all the odds and while serving her 12-year sentence, she mends her life (she says). For one thing, she’s prevented from running away. For another, she’s restricted in her time-wasting, has to cut down on such pointless states as drunkenness. She has behind her the weight of education and penal officers, chaplains, who point her towards schooling. Prison, for all its misery, provides her with the discipline that she lacks in herself, which a fragmented family and fatherless upbringing denied her.

Meanwhile some ho-hum literary types are maundering on about her in the hope of marketing this former crim, perhaps in the hope of making a bit of dosh from her — anyway of making something out of little, and doing a sort of provincial Eve Ensler by raising a celebrity on not much literary talent. “This is the unflinching true story of Brenda Hodge,” they want to tell us, “the last person sentenced to death in Australia. A story of triumph over crippling adversity and the redeeming power of love.” That’s the publisher dripping on. At least he stops short of mentioning a ‘triumph of the human spirit’.

We shouldn’t sneer. We have no doubt the Literature Board has helped. How could it not? She’s as Aussie as a feral aunt.

This then is what literature has dwindled to under the clitorarchy. The book as unabashed therapy — yet another girl’s dreary ‘How to save your own life’ handbook, sprawling nowhere in particular, hanging out between the ‘Self-help’ and the ‘Women’s issues’ sections.[14] ‘Real-life fiction’.

Do you remember that distant time when it was bad manners to talk about yourself at length, and to bore people with your own problems? It was a better time, wasn’t it?

Heavy bored, we mustn’t complain. Perhaps Brenda Hodge is just Samuel Smiles for the other sex and in the modern age. Tending towards the fictive rather than the factual; demanding sympathy instead of urging ambition; preferring fuzzy self-indulgence to determined self-improvement.[15]

As to the proficiency of her writing, we can say that this is probably a low priority both to Hodge and her support. She is wedded to unobjectionable down-home self-esteem pap, of no particular interest …

Of course we are sorry for Hodge’s wasted life and glad that she’s no longer a criminal. It would have been better had she not been a criminal at all, had not had to write these books because she’d killed someone in the first place.

*****

Hodge’s victim’s children are not so certain that her motives in producing her autobiography are as heart-warming as her publisher would have us think:

“She had 21 years to apologise. All of a sudden now that she’s written her book, she decides to apologise in public. I think it’s nothing more than a publicity stunt. … There’s four children, three of us want absolutely nothing to do with it … [but] my older sister Debbie would like a face-to-face confrontation with her. Debbie feels that if she at least has her say and lets her know how much pain and devastation she’s caused us then maybe [Debbie’s] pain may be eased a little. If she wrote the book partly as an apology to us, where’s our copy? … Why haven’t we been able to read it? The last thing we’re going to do is go out to the bookshop and buy it!”[16]

And here’s a twist. In mid 2005 the Western Australia director of public prosecutions was looking at the question of whether royalties from the autobiography should be regarded as the proceeds of crime.[17] The sort of thing that can happen when ‘liberal’ gush spills over into a remote and philistine spot.

*****

[1] There are precedents for such a crime-to-art transformation. Jean Genet’s 1949 Journal du voleur [Thief’s Journal, translated 1966] comes to mind, though its criminality is of a conceptual rather than actual kind. In Australia, Arthur Calwell, leader of the Labor opposition, was the target of an assassination attempt by 19-year-old Peter Kocan at Mosman (Sydney) in June 1966. Kocan was tried and convicted for attempted murder, and sentenced to life. He was soon transferred to a secure asylum where he was held for a decade. He went on to write poetry and fiction, much of it based on his experience. See his tales ‘The Treatment’, 1980, and ‘The Cure’, 1983, reissued as a single volume by Europa Editions, New York, 2008; and particularly the novel Fresh Fields, Europa, 2007 (‘Peter Kocan’, Wikipedia, supplemented from other sources).

[2] Enough Rope (interviewer Andrew Denton), abc television, 20 June 2005, transcript posted at www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope and accessed on 27 October 2010.

[3] ‘Tales of a traumatic life’, Morning Program (presenter Liam Bartlett), ABC Western Australia, 14 June 2005, posted at www.abc.net.au/wa/stories and accessed on 28 October 2010.

[4] ‘Brenda Hodge’, Wikipedia, accessed on 28 October 2010.

[5] Brenda Hodge, One of Many: Poems from Prison, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Western Australia, 2000.

[6] The publisher’s blurb to One of Many.

[7] ‘Cell-ramps’.

[8] ‘On the Edge’.

[9] ‘A Special Visit’.

[10] ‘What Price?’ The lines quoted appear in Jeltje Fanoy’s review of Hodge’s volume in Hecate: Australian Women’s Book Review, volume 12, 2000. “Jeltje Fanoy is a Melbourne poet”; she avers that the pieces ‘Summer Issue’ and ‘Mother’s Day’ “stand out in terms of starkness and precision of language” among Hodge’s poems, but she does not quote from them.

[11] Brenda Hodge, Walk On: the remarkable true story of the last person sentenced to death in Australia, Rowville Victoria, The Five Mile Press, 2005. The book cover shows the back of a shawled and booted woman, probably not Hodge herself, as she tromps determinedly down a track towards tangled woodland.

[12] The text has been lightly copy-edited from the section called ‘Early life’ at ‘Brenda Hodge’, Wikipedia, accessed on 27 October 2010.

[13] Enough Rope, ABC Television, 20 June 2005, posted at http://www.abc.net.au/tv and accessed on 27 October 2010.

[14] “ … once I started writing poetry, I was alive again” (Enough Rope, ABC Television, 20 June 2005, posted at http://www.abc.net.au/tv and accessed on 27 October 2010).

[15] Samuel Smiles, 1812–1904, was a celebrated author of the Victorian era. Born in Scotland he became editor of the Leeds Times and a leading advocate of political reform. His Self-Help, 1859, was one of the prized, characteristic books of the epoch. It advocated thrift, self-improvement, hard work and practical achievement — all as antidotes to social deprivation.

[16] Shelley Rafferty as quoted in ‘Grief and profit’, The Morning Program, abc Western Australia, 16 June 2005, posted at www.abc.net.au/wa/stories/s1396989.htm and accessed on 28 October 2010. Shelley was 17 at the time of her father’s shooting.

[17] Ken Bates: “It will be necessary to look at the book, examine it, and make the judgement as to whether it can be said that any profit from the book has been derived from the person’s involvement in a criminal offence. Our position is that if Brenda Hodge wants to write a book as part of her rehabilitation and tell her life story she’s more than entitled to do that but our concern is that she not profit from a book which essentially deals with her commission of a criminal offence” (‘Grief and profit’, The Morning Program, abc Western Australia, 16 June 2005, posted at and accessed on 28 October 2010).