tHE REAL KATE COCKS

I first learned about Kate Cocks in a tweet in 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic, when my travel-writer husband and I were housebound and twiddling our thumbs in the Adelaide Hills. A year earlier, my debut historic fiction Long Flight Home had been published, telling the story of the South Australian Smith brothers and their pioneering flight across the world in 1919. I’d also co-produced a documentary about the flight which premiered on SBS TV. The era fascinated me, as did historic fiction, and I was on the lookout for a female protagonist who would help me delve into the history of Adelaide. The moment I saw that tweet, revealing Adelaide’s Kate Cocks as a pioneering policewoman, I knew I’d found my girl. Soon I was so drawn to her story that I decided to study it as part of a PhD.

Everything! When she was appointed to the South Australian Police Force in 1915 (unmarried and 40 years of age) she became the first policewoman in the British Empire employed on the same salary and with the same powers of arrest as men. Her job was to prevent immorality, and to protect women and children from harm. She cracked drug rings, marched teenage girls out of opium dens and arrested clairvoyants deceiving the grieving widows of WWI. But much of the time in her 60-hour(!) working weeks, she walked the beat – with a five-foot cane that she used to whack couples canoodling around Adelaide’s parklands and beaches. She was a strict Methodist and teetotaler, yet she loved to shop and she loved a tight perm. She and her team learned jujitsu. She pressed her hands to the nearest church for divine inspiration, and made abusive husbands get down on their knees and repent by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. 

By the early 1920s, Kate Cocks and her growing team had proven themselves so valuable that they were involved in all criminal cases involving women and children. This was well ahead of many jurisdictions globally, even Scotland Yard in London. In 1925, the Melbourne Argus reported “There is a saying in South Australia that it is easier to get into heaven than to join the women police” and the Women's Police Branch was hailed across the nation and around the world as an example of best practice in women’s policing. Kate Cocks was awarded an MBE and received five honourable mentions for her policing work – a rare feat. 

When she retired in 1935, after 20 years at the helm, then police commissioner Raymond Leane described Miss Cocks as “the biggest woman I’ve ever met”, who “never bungled anything” despite utilising “the most unorthodox” methods he’d ever experienced. By that time South Australia had 14 women officers. NSW was the next state in terms of numbers, with only seven.

The complexities of her character make for a fascinating fictional sleuth – not dissimilar to how we’re drawn to Sherlock Holmes despite his aloof arrogance. Kate Cocks was both of her time and ahead of her time. She didn’t believe in birth control because she thought motherhood was the nearest thing on earth to Creation, yet she found ways for unmarried women to keep their babies. She was sympathetic to prostitutes but not to the men who paid for their services. She lived by a strict moral code but she wasn’t moralistic. She was aloof and emotionally guarded, yet also empathetic and emotionally intelligent.  

I have tried to remain true to the known facts of her life, and to her values and personality traits (as much as the archives tell us) in order to do her justice as a significant woman from history and also for the sake of her family and those personally invested in her legacy. I have also woven some of her real cases into the fictional murder mystery narrative arc. Ultimately, however, my Kate Cocks is very much a work of fiction.  

I set the book in the summer of 1917 for a couple of reasons. Kate Cocks had been policing for only 13 months by then, so it allowed me cast her in a relatively 'green' light - still learning from her mistakes and battling sexism from male colleagues.  

I was also drawn to WWI Adelaide because I didn’t know much about the city during that era. South Australian settler history (at least what I learned in school) starts with colonial and 19th-century history before leapfrogging to the major social reforms of Premier Don Dunstan in the 1960s. I’d certainly never read a novel that brought early 20th-century Adelaide to life. I also liked the idea of offering a different take on Adelaide – one that wasn’t dominated by the City of Churches cliché. By WWI, there were already more pubs than pews in central Adelaide. And despite a veneer of virtue and six o’clock closing for hotels and bars, the city was home to opium dens, sly grog shops and brothels.

When I started my PhD, I also discovered the shocking absence of women in the WWI narrative (and Australian history more generally). Understandably, we focus on the 60,000 young Australian servicemen who sacrificed their lives at Gallipoli and in France. But the women of WWI Adelaide (and Australia) were amazing. Most were intensely patriotic and actively dedicated to the war effort. Others were incredibly brave in asserting their objections to war and support for peace. Like those interstate, Adelaide women ran the volunteer effort with the same efficiency and zeal as their husbands were running the Australian Imperial Force. There were 369 Red Cross groups in SA alone. Our Government House became Red Cross headquarters, and the Governor's ballroom was converted into a receiving depot for donations. Across Australia, 80,000 women volunteered in the Australian Red Cross, raising £14 million to comfort and care for sick and injured returned soldiers, and sending 14,000 parcels to the Western Front every month! 

Thankfully, many of Adelaide’s beautiful bricks and mortar landmarks are still here. Socially, though, it was a different world. In reality, most South Australian women in 1917 remained the property of their father until they became the property or their husband, and had little choice but to remain in bad marriages. Women still had no rights to property or inheritance other than in ‘exceptional circumstances’. Men could divorce their wives on the grounds of adultery, but women could not. Fathers retained custodial rights over their children, and exercised total authority on religion, schooling, work and punishment. 

The other major difference socially was the stigma and shame around unplanned pregnancy. Nearly half of all first babies born in early twentieth-century Australia were conceived before marriage. Miss Cocks’ five-foot cane and catch-cry ‘Three Feet Apart!’ might seem moralistic and maternalistic through our 21st-century eyes, but it was one of few practical measures available to her to protect young women from an unwanted pregnancy. 

The epitaph on Kate Cocks’ headstone at Payneham Cemetery reads: ‘First policewoman of the British Empire. Everybody’s Friend.’ But it’s fair to say she was not universally adored. Her derisory nickname in some quarters was ‘Three Feet Apart’ because of her mantra and five-foot cane. Despite actively diverting women from the justice system over her 20 years as head of the Women's Police Branch, she did have girls institutionalised for repeated promiscuity and she did have women imprisoned for crimes (prolonged drunkenness, for one) that would raise little more than an eyebrow today. Her policing methods and court evidence were called into question during a controversial case involving politician Bert Edwards. You'll find more on this below.

In 1935, at the age of 60, Kate Cocks retired from the police force, and soon afterwards gained the support of the Methodist Church in SA to create a home for unmarried, pregnant women and their children. Under Cocks’ supervision, babies could remain at the Brighton-based home for up to three years while their mothers got themselves into a position where they could take care of their child. Remember, this was decades before Prime Minister Gough Whitlam introduced the single parent pension that removed the stigma of pregnancy outside of marriage. It was a time when taking your own life was often preferrable to being pregnant with an ‘illegitimate’ child.

Documents show that during Cocks’ 15 years in charge, 560 of 1500 children (or thirty-seven per cent) were adopted. No records survive from the home to shed light on individual cases, but newspaper reports and photographs show there were Aboriginal children at the home during Kate Cocks’ tenure. When Cocks died in 1954, the home was posthumously named the Kate Cocks Memorial Babies Home in her honour. By 1971, seventeen years after her death, the number of adoptions had risen to ninety per cent. In 2011, during a federal inquiry, Uniting Care Wesley Adelaide Inc and the Uniting Church in South Australia issued an unreserved apology to mothers who were coerced or forced to give up their children for adoption at the Kate Cocks Memorial Babies’ Home, and also to children forcibly removed. 

The lives of many individuals and families were enriched by the work of the babies' home. Many South Australians also take pride in their efforts to support the home while it was operating, through everything from donating eggs and milk to volunteering their time to play with the babies. I don't want to take anything away from that. But I do want to put on record my abhorrence and sadness for past policies (and, sadly, societal values) that led to the Stolen Generations and Forgotten Australians, and express my sincere sympathies to anyone who equates the Kate Cocks Memorial Babies’ Home with sorrow and loss. 

As well as founding the mothers’ and babies’ home, Kate Cocks founded a refuge for unmarried single women over fifty. She and her Women's Police Branch team provided informal counsel to up to 6000 women every year. During the Great Depression they helped to find employment for hundreds of men and women, and Cocks was heavily involved in supporting former women prisoners. 

Kate Cocks was most certainly driven by religious conviction. She was policing at a time when Australian society was far more conservative, and women in particular had far less autonomy over their lives. That’s why Cocks was employed in the first place, and it’s also why she’s such a fascinating study and fictional sleuth. Readers are free to make up their own minds about her, but after studying her life and work I don’t believe she was a zealot. 

In the two decades Kate Cocks led the Women's Police Branch, the non-Aboriginal female population of South Australia increased by 32 per cent, from 221,708 in 1915 to 292,288 in 1935. Over the same period, the number of South Australian women convicted of a summary (or minor) offence fell slightly, from 625 convictions to 622. That result, achieved during WWI and the Great Depression, contrasts markedly with convictions for men. She actively diverted women from the justice system, and was a firm believer in the second chance.

She was also ahead of her time in many ways. When policing prostitution, she believed it was important to hate the sin but not the sinner, and was known for her sympathy to sex workers. In 1924, when women police were called on to forcibly remove an Aboriginal baby from his mother at Adelaide Railway Station (for no other reason than the mother was Aboriginal), Cocks questioned the “apparently harsh law” and requested clarification from then Police Commissioner Leane. The child was subsequently released back into the care of his mother. In a 1936 newspaper interview, after she’d retired from public service and was free to comment publicly, she was reported as saying Australia had nothing to be proud of in its treatment of Aboriginal people, and could not expect to progress as a big nation until it did justice to them. Even before she founded the babies’ home, she was known to take unmarried mothers into her own home. 

Academic Christine Trethewey describes Cocks as a “model of moral rectitude (but never moralistic)”. This fits with Cocks’ own quote, “Who are we, poor mortals, to judge one another?”.

Bert Edwards was a prominent (and controversial) publican, philanthropist and Labor politician in early 20th century Adelaide. The Newmarket Hotel, on the corner and North and West Terrace, was one of his pubs. Born and raised in Adelaide’s tough West End, Edwards was a brash and flamboyant champion of the underdog. He became known for asking informed and embarrassing questions of other MPs in parliament – including allegations of murder by a police constable – and had many enemies in political and conservative circles. In the early 1930s Edwards was charged and subsequently imprisoned for an “unnatural offence” with a 15-year-old boy. In Bert Edwards: King of the West End, historian Patricia Sumerling describes how Cocks interviewed a chief witness alone, which was within the rules but caused problems when the young woman later claimed in court that Cocks had “added additional material” to her witness statement. Cocks also rifled through the girl’s diaries when she was not home and was admonished by the Magistrate for being “a most difficult witness” when she avoided giving evidence about the police operation. Her work on the case resulted in her fifth and final Honourable Mention, alongside four male colleagues, for the “intelligence, acumen, zeal and integrity” displayed in bringing Edwards to trial. 

For those interested in learning more about Kate Cocks, three short biographies have been written about her: 

• Edith Abbott’s Everybody’s Friend (1939) taken from a series of 1936 articles in The Advertiser, which you’ll find in the National Library of Australia’s Trove newspaper database. A Trove search more generally will also generate hundreds of newspaper articles.
• Reverend George Shapley’s Miss Kate Cocks, Her Life and Work (1964)
• Dorothy O’Neill’s Kate Cocks: Her Life and Work (2005)

You’ll find all three at the State Library of South Australia, as well as numerous other relevant source materials.

For women’s policing history in South Australia and Australia:

• Patricia Higgs and Christine Bettess: To Walk a Fair Beat (1987)
• Tim Prenzler’s 100 Years of Women Police in Australia (2015)
• The South Australian Police Historical Society is also a wealth of information.

For women’s history in South Australia and Australia, I often turned to:

• Helen Jones’ In Her Own Name (1986)
• Susan Magarey’s Passions of First Wave Feminists (2001)
• South Australia on the Eve of War (2017), which includes a great chapter on ‘New women and the modern family’ by Margaret Anderson and Alison MacKinnon

A search of the database of Adelaide's fantastic independent publisher Wakefield Press will also generate a stack of books on South Australian history (including my own debut novel Long Flight Home!) 

If you have other questions or would like to be directed to archival materials relating to Kate Cocks’ work, please email me on lainieanderson@internode.on.net.