‘He held a gun between my legs with the hammer cocked …’
BY the time the stripper starts, the men leering at her are half-pissed. Her moves to the taped music are not so much erotic as a parody of eroticism – but who cares? It does the trick for the mob of punters around her: they hoot, holler and whistle as the gear comes off. It’s a bucks’ night, a sleazy convention in their circles – a bogan brotherhood whose borderline criminal bravado is fuelled by booze.
The girl is in her twenties, more girl-next-door than vampy bombshell, not necessarily a disadvantage in a business with enough tricked-up transsexuals to make punters wonder what’s real and what isn’t.
But there are signs that not all her assets are natural and that at least one of the many contacts she has made since arriving in the Big Smoke is a plastic surgeon. Up close, the pert nose is a little too neat, the pert breasts a little too big, the teeth even and white. It’s not overdone – not a Michael Jackson nose above Pamela Anderson breasts but it’s obvious she has been ‘pimped’ in more ways than one. It’s the thing old school friends notice when they see pictures of her, especially other women. She’s instantly recognisable – but recognisably different.
She has the same, dark curly hair and white skin she had at high school but is more physical than the quiet, bookish schoolgirl she was back then. Not sporty as a teenager, now she flaunts the body of someone who works on fitness for a living, with the defined muscles that come from exercise and diet – strict vegetarian in her case – and with no signs of the drug use so common in her game. She looks like a professional and she is. And her profession, at least proverbially, is the oldest of all. That’s part of the attraction for the men crowding around, waiting for what they know will happen next.
She begins the strip wearing a version of police uniform: blue culottes, crisp white shirt and swinging baton. Off comes the uniform, piece by piece tossed among the tossers in the crowd, until she is naked, bar a tiny G-string. Then she gets down to some dirty work with the baton. The watchers are getting rowdy, making remarks ranging from suggestive to obscene but, some time in the years since leaving home and school, she’s been inoculated against that. Words are weapons but in a game where robbery, gang rape or bashing are occupational hazards, they can lose their sting.
She finishes the strip but the show’s not over: stripping was only the entrée, a tease for ‘fans’ now lining up in an unspoken pecking order behind the unblushing bridegroom-to-be. He will have sex with her first. Then his mates will. Any or all of them: first served, first come.
‘There were hands coming from everywhere,’ she would later tell a reporter. ‘They were all drunk, throwing beer cans at me and out of control. They were fond of me dressing up in police uniform and I had the complete outfit. I had such an effect on them that they were literally lining up afterwards for sex.’
At one strip show ‘about 60 of them were lined up and there were even punch-ups out the back over who would be first,’ she remembered. There were two other girls in the show but some of the policemen would be furious if they were not ‘the first to get the girl of their choice.’
If she were getting cash from each man the sordid deal would have at least some crude equity to it. But there is something different about this scene. It is not only – or maybe never was – strictly commercial. The stripper-turned-hooker is not dulled by narcotics – or strung out and getting cashed up for her next hit. Her bright and brittle bravado obscures the fact that tonight she’s debasing herself for next to nothing: working at a ‘discount’.
Why would she do that? Because the men queuing up for her are police – and she wants to be like them. Wanted to, she sometimes said later, ever since reading her father’s detective manual when she was a child. ‘I used to mess around in my Dad’s shirt playing police with my sister,’ she once revealed. A lot of children play dress ups but this one was different: Daddy’s little girl turned into a cop groupie who’d do anything for police because she wanted to be one, like her father used to be.
It was only when the ‘big blue gang’ rejected her that the trouble started. That’s when everyone got to hear about Kim Hollingsworth, the stripper who took on the New South Wales Police Force – and proved the truth of the saying about the fury of a woman scorned.
SO how did a nice girl like Kim end up in places like that, spending the best years of her twenties stripping for mobs of men, sometimes providing sex for as many of them as wanted to line up?
And what sort of police force would tolerate the fact the men in the queue were often serving officers, given that she performed for at least 30 police functions for crowds of up to 300 cops and their mates?
No wonder, perhaps, that Hollingsworth thought she could leave the sex game behind to become a New South Wales police officer: after all, she knew from personal experience that members of the force weren’t fussy about matters of morality. In the end, of course, it wasn’t morality that got her. It was hypocrisy.
Given her profession, Hollingsworth’s view of police and the sex industry seemed oddly naïve. It began to sour when she felt the undertow of corruption as police put pressure on some of the brothels where she worked.
‘We thought we were earning a lot of money as prostitutes but the police were earning much more,’ she would claim later. She saw how brothel madams who paid protection money to police were given special treatment – and saw that police demanded special treatment in return, with some demanding free sex as well as the cash.
‘They expected it and got it for free. You wouldn’t dare refuse, after all. You do as a police officer tells you.’
One officer threatened to kill her when he didn’t get his own way, she would say. ‘He held a gun between my legs with the hammer cocked and there were six bullets in it at the time. When it’s in that position a gun only needs a touch of pressure on the trigger to go off, so had his finger slipped I would have been dead.’
But Daddy’s girl was dogged. She still wanted to wear the uniform for real, not as a prop in a sleazy strip act. So she applied as a recruit in the New South Wales police service and began training in May 1995, when she was 28.
The public did not hear of Kim Hollingsworth until two years later but the events that led to her hitting the headlines happened in mid-1995. In July that year, Hollingsworth’s short career as a trainee police officer ended abruptly after a gruelling interview with her superiors in a suburban Sydney police station, Daceyville. When she went into the room she noticed a document headed ‘Termination of SPO Hollingsworth’. It was obvious the dice was already loaded against her: they were just going through the motions. Next day, little more than two months after joining the force, she was sacked.
Her offence, officially, was that she had failed to disclose her previous career as a prostitute and stripper on the application form to join the force earlier that year. In legal terms, this threw doubt on ‘her veracity’. In fact, the application form was the perfect Catch 22 booby trap, able to be used against her at the whim of anyone in authority.
It was reasonable to assume that if she had volunteered every detail of her employment history on the form – as most shrewd people would not – it would have jeopardised her chances of entry into the force despite her physical fitness, engaging personality and higher than average intelligence.
Like a lot of police recruits her age, Hollingsworth had plenty of jobs on her resume – she had worked in shops, as a model, a flower seller, waitress and pharmacy assistant and on horse properties and in stables. In fact, she would later tell the authors of this book, her main motive in signing on was to join the mounted police. This was slightly at odds with her claim to journalist Ben Hills in 1997 that she wanted to work with dogs, but that doesn’t matter. Either way, it reflected her professed love of animals.
One of her friends was a mounted policeman. The friendship didn’t bring him luck. He would later commit suicide after being questioned about writing her a reference on police letterhead. But Kim Hollingsworth was made of sterner stuff. When she was faced with the prospect of being humiliated and rejected, she didn’t kill herself – she did something braver. She killed any chance of safe anonymity – of quietly reinventing herself away from the sex industry – by airing her grievance on the most public of stages.
The irony was this: the real reason for her sacking was not for her supposed dishonesty in airbrushing her past on the application form – but her honesty in blowing the whistle on a fellow police recruit with bad intentions and shady connections.
It happened like this. When she applied to join the police force in early 1995, she was routinely vetted by a sergeant assigned to that mostly tedious task. The sergeant would later claim to have checked police records, spoken to her neighbours and her landlord, as well as interviewing the would-be recruit herself.
The sergeant could find ‘nothing of an adverse nature’ and reported the applicant was ‘of good character’ and ‘a suitable person for police employment’. For her part, Hollingsworth left out colourful details of periods of ‘self employment’ over several years. She would later say there was no space to do so on the form, the sort of answer any serving police officer would be pleased to make under cross examination by a pesky lawyer. If she was not specifically asked details of her self-employment, why volunteer them? No copper in their right mind would. As the daughter of a detective, and street smart from time spent working variously as a stripper, as an escort and as a $400-an-hour pro in expensive brothels such as Sydney’s famous Touch of Class, she knew when to shut up. Although not enough, as it turned out, to bury her past.
She had been inducted into the police academy at Goulburn in May, 1995. For a few weeks, all was well. Fit, friendly and good-looking, with a breezy line of chat, Recruit Hollingsworth seemed to fit in. Had she gone to Perth or Darwin to join up, she might have been a police officer to this day, perhaps a good one. But to imagine she would go unrecognised – or that it wouldn’t matter if she were – was optimistic, if not naïve or even a touch arrogant. Sydney was too close for comfort. It was inevitable that the past would point a grubby finger at her.
It happened when a young detective who had seen her working at police strip nights recognised her. It wasn’t as if he were shocked – or motivated by altruism to identify Hollingsworth’s past to his superiors. He was (name deleted) later identified by the Commission as MK2, and a man with an eye for an opportunity. Hollingsworth said he asked her to act as a madam in a brothel he said he was planning to open in Sydney’s western suburbs, a fact that would imply he was probably associated with the Lebanese gangsters who were expanding from their western suburbs strongholds into the more profitable fleshpots of Kings Cross.
At first she thought it was a joke, she would claim. Then she realised she was being forced to make a choice. Faced with the unspoken but explicit threat of her past being revealed, she decided to fight. She had wanted a clean break from the sex industry but now, dragged back to face her past, she decided to tell the truth. She blew the whistle on the dodgy detective. This, she would tell the Wood Royal Commission (and the New South Wales Industrial Commission), was the real reason for her sacking. Her sin was that she wouldn’t play the game by joining ‘the joke’ to become a bent cop moonlighting as a brothel madam, an outrageous dual role to which the force might well have turned a blind eye at the time.
‘One day I was told I was a human being by senior staff at the police academy but after blowing the whistle it was a very different story,’ she would say later. ‘It was the end of my career. The police knew that I had a wealth of knowledge about corrupt police officers, having been involved in the sex industry.’
The Commission had no choice. It had to be seen to act. Its investigators came up with a faintly farcical scheme to set up Hollingsworth’s flat with a hidden video camera to mount a sting on the bent detective. It took a month, and the cast included a tow-truck driver pretending to be a crooked police inspector and Strip-O-Gram operator, a mechanic with ambitions to open a brothel above his garage, and a maintenance man from a Sydney escort agency. Eventually they filmed the detective accepting $100. He was dismissed from the force but denied being charged with taking a bribe or anything else. Nor were any of the other twenty police that Hollingsworth had named as having links with the sex industry.
Supposedly, her background as a stripper was not officially ‘discovered’ by the police hierarchy until half way through the sting operation. She was kept on until the sting was done, then sacked at short notice after the interview at Daceyville.
It was a cruel lesson about being a Crown witness – especially against police. The investigators had promised protection, support and a new identity, but now that they’d used her and the fun was over, it seemed they didn’t love her in the morning. In fact, they treated her as if she were just a hooker with a big mouth; she had done her trick for the boys and was now an embarrassment to be bundled down the back stairs and out of sight. Literally out of sight, in this case: they gave her a one-way ticket to Adelaide and (she would later testify) encouraged her to go back to work in a brothel to repay money she had borrowed from the Commission.
Realising her life could be in danger, she spent a couple of months ‘crying myself to sleep’ before sneaking back to the bright lights of Sin City, angry and determined. That’s when she decided it was payback time.
She engaged a lawyer and, ignoring threats, demanded that the authorities make her case public. Having run foul of bent police, it might have seemed that the safest place to stand was right in the spotlight – or maybe it was just that part of her craves publicity. Either way, she got it: an army of journalists turned up at the hearings of the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission to catch the jilted stripper’s tale. She didn’t disappoint.
Among the onlookers was veteran investigative reporter and author Ben Hills, who was bemused but not quite convinced by the stripper’s spirited performance. To him, the young woman suing the Police Department seemed more happy hooker than bitter whistleblower. There was a pattern to the coverage. Another hardbitten reporter, Ray Chesterton, wrote at the time that she worked the crowd, flashing ‘a smile that would empty your wallet at twenty paces.’
Hollingsworth could be alarmingly frank. Once, sitting outside the court room, she told Hills that her breast implants enabled her to move her breasts independently – and offered ‘to demonstrate this phenomenon to me’, he noted later. (He politely ducked the demonstration, but accepted a short-lived invitation to write a book. The negotiations didn’t end well.)
Anatomical entertainment was in the court room as well as outside it. Hollingsworth’s artificially enhanced breasts weren’t the only ones before the bench. In what one reporter called ‘theatre of the absurd’, the police service engaged a transsexual attorney to represent it.
The barrister, formerly known as Terry Anderson, had swapped regulation dark suit and tie for a dress, handbag and frizzy ginger hair and asked to be called ‘Teresa Anderson’. If briefing Anderson were an attempt by the police brains trust to prove its broad-minded equal employment credentials, it didn’t work that well. When not alarming natural-born women by using the female toilets at the court, the new Ms Anderson scored a few points along the way. She said Hollingsworth had admitted ‘lying’ on her application form and scoffed at her portrayal as a whistleblower motivated by conscience. Instead, she painted Hollingsworth as a cunning and manipulative liar who would ‘say anything at any time to achieve what she wants.’
But after a nine-day hearing, Industrial Relations Commissioner Peter Connor decided that most of the lies and manipulation had not come from Hollingsworth’s side. He found that she had been denied natural justice and ordered that she either be reinstated as a trainee police officer – or paid compensation. The compensation figure was later set at $35,000 – but Hollingsworth wasn’t going to be brushed off with that. She wanted to be back in uniform as a police recruit.
‘I do hope I get the job back in future,’ she told reporters. ‘That’s been my ambition since I was a six-year-old and corrupt police will not be spoiling that for me. I have no ill-feeling towards the police service. I don’t think I ever will have. It’s something that happened in the past and all I can do now is try and get reinstated.
‘Of course there are going to be some police officers who won’t be happy,’ she conceded.
She was right about that. And the officers unhappy with the ruling included senior people running the force, according to anonymous sources who briefed reporters.
If the commission ordered she be reinstated, it would be unlikely she would successfully complete recruit training.
‘She’d be better off taking a compensation package,’ one source told a reporter.
Meanwhile, before the media caravan moved on, there was a chance to make a little extra cash. The Nine network’s Sixty Minutes reportedly paid her $19,000 to appear, and it was well-known that a division of Penguin had offered a hefty advance for a tell-all book.
Ben Hills was approached to write the book but says he pulled out when a lawyer advising Hollingsworth demanded the lion’s share of the advance for her. Hills, famously frank, told the lawyer where to go and no book was written. The approaches from film and television producers also came to nothing for many years. It was only when the makers of the Underbelly drama series revived contact with Hollingsworth years later because of her colourful Kings Cross connection that it looked as if a version of her story would reach the small screen.
By mid-1997, Hollingsworth was locked in a Mexican stand-off with the police force. She insisted she still wanted to join it – and the force insisted she wasn’t wanted. One tactic was to refine the charge against her. According to a barrister acting for the police at a new hearing before the full bench of the New South Wales Industrial Relations Commission in October that year, Hollingsworth’s time as a prostitute would have exposed her to ‘the criminal milieu’. The barrister said the police service wanted to draw a ‘very, very distinct, clear line’ in the case. The trouble was that the line was not clear because prostitution is not a crime in New South Wales. The case polarised – and titillated – public opinion as old morality collided with new political correctness. If there was no law against being a prostitute, then how could the fact of being one in the past legally be used against a job applicant for the police service or anywhere else?
The mix of sex scandal, corruption and political correctness was irresistible to the media and the public. Among the reporters who swarmed to the case when it was resumed in late 1997 was Luke Slattery of The Australian. Like Hills, he was not quite convinced by Hollingsworth’s portrayal of herself as a simple country girl-turned-fearless whistleblower confronting a corrupt and hypocritical system that denied her the chance to turn over a new leaf.
The astute Slattery wrote of ‘the rather theatrical form’ of Hollingsworth’s dual personalities as the police woman/prostitute: what he called ‘Good Kim. Bad Kim.’
‘Kim Hollingsworth’s eyes are a deep, lapis lazuli blue,’ he wrote. ‘Her skin is pale, sun shy. Her nose has been so finely shaped by a surgeon’s scalpel that it resembles more closely a piece of ornamental filigree than a breathing apparatus.
‘She is beautiful yet severe – all angles and planes. Too pointy, you’d think, to melt hearts. If she sashayed into a Sean Connery-era James Bond thriller as a wily seductress, you would wonder, as she and Connery slide between the sheets: KGB or CIA?’
But he made the point that the severity is softened by an open ‘at time naïve, country manner, a mouth that curls readily into a schoolgirlish grin, and a repertoire of broad Aussie dipthongs: “yes” is a husky “yieah” …’.
One of several contradictions about Hollingsworth was this: why she would want to return to the police service at all, given the treatment she swore she had endured during her two months there in 1995.
According to her affidavit, what began as a few sarcastic remarks at a nightclub about her past turned into sexual harassment and bullying by fellow police. One classmate said: ‘Tell me, did you get your gear off?’ and then two trainee detectives approached her and said words to the effect: ‘We remember you from the strip shows. How would you like to make some money and do another show? We could organise one on a boat.’
Soon, she said, notes were pinned on her door, such as: ‘Strip moll’, ‘Blow me, Kim’, and ‘Fill me up, Kim’. She got obscene telephone calls and male recruits banged on her door late at night demanding sex. She would later tell reporters that she was ‘treated terribly’, ostracised and ate her meals alone.
In an affidavit, she said: ‘The harassment got so bad that, at night, I would sit in my room alone with only the desk light on and put towels around the bottom and paper up the top of the door so the light did not shine through, so that no one would know I was in there.’
It was hard to keep the subject of sex out of the Industrial Commission hearing. The court tittered with laughter when the transsexual barrister Terry/Theresa Anderson tried to nail Hollingsworth on the issue of ‘trick sex’ because Hollingsworth had claimed earlier that she simulated sex with clients rather than providing the real thing.
The transcript reads:
Q: Ms Hollingsworth, the men who you performed trick sex on or simulated oral sex on …
A: Yes, yes …
Q: – were men who had in fact sought from you that you participate in true sexual intercourse?
A: That’s correct.
Q: And that you participate in true oral intercourse?
A: Yes.
Q: And to the extent that they did that, they paid you upon that basis?
A: That’s correct.
Q: And to that extent, you deceived them?
After objections from Hollingsworth’s lawyer on the grounds of relevance and some legal quibbling, a bemused Commissioner Peter Connor shot down the barrister’s line of attack that Hollingsworth was nothing but a crooked hooker: a mattress actress who short-changed honest johns by simulating sex.
Connor said testily: ‘Are we going to prosecute every prostitute for –’ before interrupting himself to answer his own rhetorical question. ‘No, we won’t. You can’t answer that question.’
Apart from such diversions, the case would drag on, turning into a saga. In the end, Hollingsworth landed a punch on the police service because Commissioner Connor found she had been unfairly dismissed and ordered her reinstatement with the next intake of recruits in November 1997. This result prompted one tabloid to run the inevitable headline ‘Happy Hooker’ but she wasn’t happy for long, because the police appealed for a stay against her reinstatement.
Hollingsworth turned up in a dark blue suit over a light blue silk shirt, a businesslike outfit that did not hide her striking figure. A reporter watching her walk into court noted a passing businessman swivel around to stare at her.
Hollingsworth was represented before the full bench of the Industrial Commission by Ian Barker QC, famous for his notoriously successful prosecution of Lindy Chamberlain – who was, of course, subsequently cleared of murdering her baby daughter Azaria.
Barker, who had played the Chamberlain jury like a violin, this time took the softly, softly approach – arguing that his client be allowed to start again as a trainee police officer rather than be fully reinstated as a police officer. That way, he said soothingly, the police service would have time to assess if she were suitable for the job. If this were meant to appease the police, it didn’t work – at least, not judging by the language used by the police barrister, Paul Menzies QC. He gave a caustic critique of Hollingsworth’s character, talking of her ‘absence of credibility, absence of credit’, accusing her of avoiding tax and stating: ‘The Police Commissioner does not wish to have such a person in his police service … The Commissioner does not want her there.’
It worked. After a few minutes the commission president delivered judgment: the stay was granted. Meanwhile, however, Hollingsworth was to be paid the equivalent of a trainee salary: around $200 a week. In other words, about what she could make at the Touch of Class brothel in half an hour. But it wasn’t about the money for Kim Hollingsworth. She had a point to prove, maybe to herself.
All the scurrilous stuff about her had already been aired and couldn’t hurt her any more, so she was free to cause as much grief for the police service as she liked. Which is exactly what she did. She posed for photographs with her pet rat Caspar on her shoulder and became an evangelist for animal rights as well as for herself, a poster girl for positive thinking.
From Kings Cross to animal liberation. It was all a long way from her hometown.
TEACHERS don’t need crystal balls to predict the futures of most of the kids that pass through their hands. There are plenty of signposts pointing out the likely course of adult lives.
Here’s a placid girl, friendly and mature, the part of wife and mother already written for her. There’s the cocky, overgrown boy strutting around near the top of a pecking order that will make him a small town hero on the sports field until he ends up a bar room bore, unless he is the one in a hundred who can make the big league.
There’s always a few troublemakers – often from troubled homes – smoking in the toilets, drinking at the dance, doing drugs, fighting and fornicating. Some are only temporarily wild, hostages to hormones or easily led, but among them are the ones doomed to end up on the wrong side of the law.
Then there are the studious few, bent over their books and ignoring the temptations of the present because they dream of the future, an escape to the outside world.
At Wodonga West High in 1984, Kim Hollingsworth was one of the studious ones. She was never loud or vulgar, one of the so-called class ‘tarts’ with short skirts and long fingernails and cigarettes in her handbag. In fact, in all her time at Wodonga, no one would later recall her doing anything that made her stand out from the middle ground. She was quiet, like her brother Jason and sisters Melissa and Melanie. Quiet, in fact, like their mother Glenys, who lives in the same mission brown double-storey house and is so reserved she rarely speaks unless spoken to first if an acquaintance sees her in the street.
What little that Kim Hollingsworth’s contemporaries and teachers recall of the quiet girl is what she didn’t do, rather than what she did.
She didn’t smoke in the toilets, ‘pash’ boys behind the bus stop or pinch stuff from the shops down the street. She didn’t turn up late for school and didn’t disturb others in class when she got there. She did her homework not only on time but well. About the only thing that stood out was that she and her closest schoolfriend, JoAnne Wiltshire, were Boy George fans. Even then, Kim wasn’t the leader nor remotely outrageous. Teachers remember that it was JoAnne, who still lives in Wodonga, who wore the androgynous Boy George outfits and joked about going to England to see him sing.
Nothing about Kim’s school days hinted at what was ahead: that she would not only become a stripper and a hooker but such a relentlessly extroverted cheerleader for her own cause – not addicted to drugs, like most sex workers, but to self-promotion, like many showbiz performers. When she left school – and the town – she left barely a ripple behind her. Ask people in Wodonga about her and they shake their heads and wonder what happened to change the girl they now realise they barely knew.
Even the few who did know her are puzzled about what happened to the studious schoolgirl. Even in hindsight, none of them claims to have picked anything in her behaviour to indicate that she would end up in the sex industry – or wanting to be a police officer, for that matter.
Kim’s embracing of causes – not just her own crusade to join the police service but that of animal liberation – bemuses one of her few close friends from school. The friend, who doesn’t want to be named, became close to Kim in Year 11.
‘She was pretty straight but a bit of a loner,’ she says. ‘Neither of us made friends easily. She was definitely brighter than most of the others and always studying.’ She was good at English and German.
She recalls the Hollingsworths having cats and a collie dog but little to indicate Kim’s later passion for animal rights. ‘That could have come when she went to Sydney and got in with a new group of people,’ she ponders. Nor can she recall Kim the devoted vegetarian, more that she was interested in music.
Half a lifetime later, the details have faded but she recalls vaguely that something went wrong for the Hollingsworth family that she can’t quite identify. Kim’s father left the police force before the girls finished school, and soon after separated from his wife.
‘It was a big house in the snobby bit of Wodonga. I think they (Kim’s parents) were still together when we met but they separated and he moved downstairs. He was always very friendly to me. I think he made stuff out of glass (for sale) in the garage. Kim’s mum didn’t like visitors but she didn’t mind me.’
Whatever it was that went wrong for the Hollingsworths might well have derailed Kim’s final year at school. At least one teacher recalls that she didn’t see out the school year in 1984. Her former classmate’s memory is that she moved out of home and across the Murray to Albury, renting a flat and working in an ice cream shop, first of a series of casual jobs that would lead her to the sex industry.
It sounds like the start of the independent, sexually adventurous life but the friend says not. ‘She didn’t have a boyfriend. She was never into boys then – apart from Boy George. It wasn’t until later that she became more of a show pony.’
The friend claims to share Kim’s philosophy: ‘I do what I like as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.’ But she concedes that Kim changed after she left the district and joined ‘the scene’.
A lot can happen in three years. When Kim returned to Wodonga for her classmate’s 21st birthday in 1988, she had changed – in more ways than one.
‘She was a “dancer” then. And I think she’d had her boob job done by then, and I reckon a nose job.’ But what she remembers most is Kim giving ‘my Dad a real big kiss – almost a pash. No inhibitions at all.’
After that, they kept in touch intermittently but rarely saw each other. The friend had married young and they were taking different paths. Interestingly, she says, Kim’s sister Melissa also joined ‘the scene’ in Sin City, whereas brother Jason stayed back in Wodonga with his mother, working steadily and not having much to do with his father or his well-known sister in Sydney.
KATRINA Francis was – and is – a friend of the Boy George fan JoAnne Wiltshire more than she ever was of Kim Hollingsworth. She recalls Kim wanting ‘to be a vet’ and loving animals.
‘I don’t think Kim had many friends,’ she says. ‘She was one of those students who would sit and study. Always had her head in a book. She wasn’t out to make friends – was what you’d call a nerd.
‘She wasn’t a very attractive girl when she was younger. She looked anorexic to me – like a stick figure.’
Katrina was living in Sydney in the late 1990s and was surprised that Kim contacted her and arranged to meet her. ‘We met at the train station and she gave me flowers,’ she recalls. She had been a little bemused by the unexpected gesture – wondered if there were a motive – because they had not really been friends at school.
Like other Wodonga West teachers, Brian Rock recalls the high school fondly. ‘We had some of the most magical teaching ever, there,’ he recalls. ‘The school was built in a paddock and grew form by form each year. It was more a country style school then – friendly and part of the community. Relationships between staff and students were strong.’ The sort of place, he says, where ‘if the circus came to town we’d close the school for the day and go to the circus.’
The school had its success stories: two of the best from battling families not as well off as the Hollingsworths. One former student, Mark McDonald, became a senior researcher at the British Museum. Another, Michael Clifford, is a surgeon who has distinguished himself overseas.
But Kim from Castle Heights, the ‘dress circle’ middle-class enclave where the principal lived, didn’t kick on the way Brian Rock and his fellow teachers thought she would.
‘She was the last kid you’d pick to end up as a stripper or in prostitution,’ says Rock. ‘My first reaction was that she must have been affected by drugs or mental illness – but that wasn’t it. She was quiet, studious, shy, not outspoken.’
He thinks she didn’t finish the year’s study (in 1984) because of some domestic upset but can’t recall the details. ‘I’ve got a niggling suspicion that something went wrong at home.’
One thing is clear: by the time Kim reached VCE in 1984, her police sergeant father was on extended sick leave for reasons that time has partly obscured. Fellow police recall unproven suspicions that some members had been ‘milking’ petrol from police cars. And that, angered by rumours that bounced around the station, Alan Hollingsworth had taken a stand: he would take all his accumulated sick leave then resign. He was a proud man and wasn’t going to suffer the humiliation of being questioned over nonsense like allegations of siphoning petrol as if he were some supposed petty thief, even if it were only a departmental matter. At around the same time, tensions at home came to a head and he split with his wife, Glenys, living for a while under the same roof. Then he left, heading for Sydney and a job as ‘a chauffeur’, according to one bemused former police officer who worked at Wodonga at the time.
Whether it’s right or not, the impression he left behind is of a strict and secretive man who dominated the family until he left it. A police officer stationed at Wodonga at the time recalls that Alan Hollingsworth transferred there from Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs in the late 1970s, before Kim was ready to start high school. He was a sergeant in uniform but not one to curry favour with the public and fellow police. He kept to himself – and so did his family.
‘The wife and kids never really spoke to you unless they had to,’ the officer recalls. ‘It was as if they had been instructed by the father not to talk to people. No “nice day today” or anything like that. If he brought them into the station to collect his mail or anything, the kids would never talk to you. I don’t think many people would go to the house. He was a bit of a mystery man.’
THE only paying customers who get to see Kim Hollingsworth these days aren’t buying sex. They are riders who pay by the hour to do trail rides at the Scenic Hills Riding Ranch near Campbelltown. It’s easy to find, she says: the name is spelled out in big, white letters, Hollywood style, on a hill near the M5 freeway south-west of Sydney.
She’s a casual riding instructor – saddling horses to ride out with the public who turn up at the ‘ranch’ on weekends and holidays. It is the latest in a line of jobs she has had with horses since quitting prostitution and being forced to abandon the police service after a determined effort to embarrass the authorities for snubbing her. She has worked at racing stables – riding work for various Sydney trainers. She is light but strong for her weight – testament to a vegetarian diet, exercise and the fact, she says, that she has never done drugs. At 42, she looks years younger in photographs, with few of the tell-tale signs of surviving the sex industry.
She refuses to deny or be demeaned by her past. Luke Slattery wrote of her in 1997: ‘She carries herself with a confident air, all the while striving to lay claim to a fresh self.’ She still does.
When the authors spoke to her in 2009, she was living at a small property at Appin, between Picton and Wollongong, and working part-time at the riding school, half an hour’s drive away. She was as bright and engaging as any sales person – or well-schooled escort. She tells her stories with apparent frankness, but there is a sense that they are well-honed anecdotes of the sort that performers roll out on chat shows. Cute on cue.
She tells, for instance, how a little girl at the riding school asked her innocently one day, ‘Were you a policeman?’ and when asked why she’d asked, said it was because of the way Kim sits up straight, shoulders squared, hands neat and low. There is a discipline and precision in the way she does things that is at odds with the sex and drugs and dirty money of life in the Cross.
In the end, of course, the big question is: Why? What made her take up the sex industry?
The story she has told everyone for years hasn’t changed.
‘I was a late starter,’ she confides, beginning her routine as if it’s for the very first time. It isn’t. ‘I didn’t do anything in Albury-Wodonga. But then I had a bad boyfriend. I thought everyone was out of a Jane Austen book but I walked in on him with two prostitutes. I was all sad and crying and they looked after me and ended up offering me a job. When I asked, ‘How much?’ they said I could make at least a grand and more likely two grand a week. My wage at the time was $160 as a waitress.’
But the motive wasn’t the money, she says. At first she was just trying to get back at the bad boyfriend. But once she tasted the money it was hard to go back to low pay.
She says when she started stripping, she and her sister and another woman (‘two blondes and one brunette’) took their skimpy stripper costumes and tape player into the grounds of a kindergarten next door to their apartment and practised on the hopscotch court. Once they got their moves down pat, they were in business.
She doesn’t avoid talking about her years in the sex industry but is happier talking about her love of animals. She claims to have declared herself against eating meat when she was a tiny child, to her parents’ astonishment, and to have stood by those principles all her life. It hasn’t been easy, she says.
Her ill-fated mounted policeman friend was called Roy De Coque. Because she wanted to get into a Bachelor of Applied Science course in equine studies she needed a reference stating that she was an experienced horse handler. De Coque obligingly wrote one for her – on police letterhead. When he was summoned to the Wood Royal Commission to answer questions about this he panicked and shot himself. But the story does not quite end with that senseless tragedy.
The postscript Hollingsworth adds is that the fatal reference got her into the course but she couldn’t stand it. Why? The college had a pig production unit that upset her. And her lecturers put down a pregnant mare so the students could study the foetus. She ditched the course. So De Coque’s fatal favour didn’t do anyone much good.
IN mid-June 2009, in the news room of the Albury newspaper, the Border Mail, the chief of staff fielded a telephone call. On the line was Kim Hollingsworth, calling from Campbelltown. She said she wanted to announce that she – meaning a character based on her – was going to be in the next Underbelly television series, to be screened in 2010.
The chief of staff, Anthony Bunn, was mildly surprised at the naked self-promotion but happy to play along. Hollingsworth, an old hand at the publicity game, was only too pleased to pose with her clothes on in front of the Campbelltown police station so that her local Camden newspaper could photograph her. The same picture (and story) could be used in both that paper and the Border Mail. She told Bunn the Campbelltown police weren’t happy at her using their station as a backdrop – but not to worry, she’d do it anyway. And that’s exactly what she did.
Kim Hollingsworth pleases herself. There was a time when that meant she provided happy endings for the police, but not any more. She’s a big girl now.