Pip Smith
Allen & Unwin
Otago Daily Times, August 18th 2017
It is the middle of winter 1920 and Sydney is transfixed the most scandalous court case; the trial of Harry Leon Crawford for the murder of his first wife, Lily Nugent. But it is not the gruesome nature of the case – it took three years for her badly burned body to be identified – that has captured the imagination of the city, but the defendant himself. For Harry Crawford Crawford is in reality Eugenie Falleni, a New Zealand-born woman who has been living and working as man for decades without anybody (even his wives) suspecting ‘he’ is not who he seems.
Reports of the man-woman trial fill the papers for months and, despite the evidence against her being decidedly flimsy, Eugenie’s exposure as both an ‘invert’ and a masterful dissembler made the guilty verdict inevitable. But why did she adopt the life of a man, and how did she get away with it for so long?
These questions and Eugenie’s extraordinary life form the basis of Australian poet and short-story writer Pip Smith’s first novel, Half Wild, and they are every bit as fascinating today as they were a century ago.
Smith is not so much concerned with her subject’s guilt or innocence as the ways in which she was perceived and portrayed both before and after Eugenie’s true identity was revealed, and the story takes the form consists of on a range a collage of accounts that mirror the multiple narratives that arose around the case.
The first and last sections, dealing with the beginning and ending of Eugenie’s life, are told through her eyes, although it is not always clear what is real and what exists only in her imagination, while the central portions tell and retell events surrounding the alleged murder from multiple perspectives, including those of her daughter, Lily’s son, their landlady, neighbours, police and the multitude of Sydney housewives who flocked to the trial.
These voices come from a variety of of real and invented secondary sources; newspaper articles, interviews, court records, police notes – and for those interested in learning more about this extraordinary story, the author’s note generously provides both a breakdown of the factual and fictional components of the novel and recommendations for further reading. They are well worth following up.
As a reader I found this experimental approach a little patchy, particularly the first section, which is set in Wellington but is so lacking in of sense of place that I struggled to connect with the story. However, the overall effect of the overlapping and contrasting perspectives is a potent one.
Half Wild is a portrait of a woman who has spent her life trying and failing to fit into the shape that society expects of her, and although she eventually acquires a veneer of acceptability, Eugenie struggles to connect the successful businesswoman she has become with her younger selves. As she puts it “I was what other people made me”, a sentiment that will resonate with all of us who have felt a dislocation of identity between the faces we present to the world and the ones that hides behind them.
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