Rebecca Jennings

What could compel a woman to murder a complete stranger? This is the obvious question posed by Sandra Willson’s execution-style murder of Sydney taxi driver Rodney Woodgate in 1959 following the traumatic end of her lesbian relationship with a fellow trainee psychiatric nurse. It is something that Willson grapples with in her searing memoir, which she wrote over several decades. Posthumously edited by historian Rebecca Jennings, it joins one of a small group of books that provide a first-hand account of the criminalisation and institutional repression of lesbianism and gender non-conformity in mid-twentieth-century Australia.