Fractured Silence. Emma Curtin
roomy inside … all rooms had high ceilings of fifteen to twenty feet and elaborate plaster mouldings executed by master-craftsmen. Every room had a fireplace for burning black coal and mantelpieces were usually fashioned of exquisitely carved marble”.
This was the design the McLeods adopted in their own Queen Anne style home. Derived from the English architectural revival of design elements from Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), houses in this style were intended to create a sense of grandeur, even if on a small scale, with elaborate roof lines and high ceilings of detailed plasterwork, often using art nouveau motifs. Some Queen Anne houses used timber panelling on lower walls in front rooms. Otherwise rooms had picture rails and made use of a growing range of wallpaper options, or pressed metal.
The McLeods’ double-fronted red-brick villa had nine rooms. These were: a large formal drawing room at the front of the house over-looking the crescent; a dining room at the rear, next to a small kitchen; a study, also at the back of the house; a boxroom or dressing room across the passage from the study; and two large bedrooms. There was also a bathroom, although the toilet was outside - the idea of toilets inside the house was still not common, even in new houses built well into the 1920s. A laundry was accessible via the back of the house. Verandahs adorned the front and back, in keeping with the Queen Anne style. Fireplaces warmed the key rooms of the home.
I haven’t been able to find any descriptions or images of inside the McLeod home in 1929 … and it would be a couple of years into my search before I walked into the house, which I’ll get to later … but I did learn a little bit about their furniture from an auction notice printed after Norma’s death. This gives us some insight into family life. The auction advertisement highlighted “superior household furniture and effects”, which included an “Upright orchestral GRAND PIANO, by Cable”. The Cable Piano Company was an American business based in Chicago; Suttons of Bourke Street were their agents in Melbourne. They also had an outlet in Ballarat and it’s likely that Norma’s mother, Edith McLeod, had bought the piano with her from her family home in Ballarat, where she was born and raised.
I would later discover that Edith came from a very musical and literary family – her father Abel Rees had been raised in the Welsh Congregational Church. He was a lay preacher known for his poetry and musical associations, including the organising of annual Eisteddfods in Ballarat. Several articles in the Ballarat Star in the 1880s recorded community events where either Edith or one of her eight sisters sang, usually for church-related causes. Other members of the Rees family also showed great talents in music. It seems highly likely then that Edith would have passed her passion for music to her children – maybe Norma too enjoyed playing on the grand piano. Norman was also known to play, although visiting family members were not always appreciative of his “banging away” at the instrument.
Other furniture items listed in the McLeods’ auction included “Splendid Carpet, Lounge Suite, in Cor. Velvet [corduroy velvet]; Walnut Bedroom Suite, Wireless set, Electric sweeper, Lot of Good Crockery and Glassware”. Carpets in the 1920s were not fitted as we know them today, but were bought in squares to decorate and warm polished wooden flooring. In this decade, Australia was by far the largest export customer for British carpets. Bathrooms, and sometimes even bedrooms, had linoleum flooring. Keeping carpets clean made the electric sweeper or vacuum almost a necessity in the average home, although they were still something of a novelty in this period. The growth in the use of electricity was one of the outstanding developments of the 1920s, with “the large-scale conversion in Australia of lighting, of machinery and household appliances to electric power”.
Corduroy velvet lounge suites, like the McLeods’, were popular ‘must-haves’ for the well-to-do 1920s home. The Big Paterson furniture company in Fitzroy, for example, promoted fawn or blue velvet corduroy cushion lounges in 1924 as “a most comfortable lounge” of a “very pleasing design” and “wonderful value” at £35 (the minimum wage in 1924 Australia was about £220, so these suites would certainly not have been within everybody’s reach). The walnut bedroom suite listed for sale may well have been Norma’s, perhaps bought locally from C. P. Jeffery in Prahran, similar to one shown in a 1928 advertisement (below), and now sadly redundant.
The McLeods’ advertised ‘wireless set’ was a bit of a luxury item. In 1924, the Weekly Times recorded that “It is only twenty years since Marconi first demonstrated the possibility of sending and receiving sound waves through air. Now many thousands of people are listening on wireless receivers in their own homes”. But, it noted, many of these receivers were homemade at the cost of a few pounds. Until mass production brought costs down, shop bought sets were only affordable to the affluent.
Advertisement in the Advocate, 22 November 1928
Like their ‘automatic’ telephone, the wireless set and everything we know about their home suggests the McLeods liked to display all the trappings of their status as respectable members of the affluent Toorak community. Their home was an important symbol of their place in society.
Norma had lived in this “fair garden home”, as it was poetically described in the press, from the age of 14.
While I had a shadowy image of her, cobbled together from newspaper accounts, I wanted to know how Norma had spent her years in Toorak and what kind of a woman she was.
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As a starting point, we’re pretty sure that Norma was born on 31 July 1900 (although, if you remember, some reports said 1901). And of course we’re certain she died on 9 September 1929. Getting to ‘know’ her beyond that, however, proved a more difficult task. As I said, newspapers provided some details of her life, and many opinions and assumptions, but the image created was only part of the story. I wanted to go beyond a two-dimensional impression of Norma ‘the victim’. I needed to dig deeper. So, armed with the power of the internet (with sites like Ancestry and Trove), and delving back into the Public Records Office archives, I took up the challenge of finding Norma beyond the newsprint.
Without doubt, one of the main attractions of the ‘Norma McLeod case’ for the press and the scandal-hungry public stemmed from the caricature of her as a well-bred, well-educated, wealthy, party-going socialite. Norma was touted as a “well-known society girl”, living and dying tragically in one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs. The story was a journalist’s dream and a reader’s delight. A voyeuristic fascination with ‘how the other half live’ seems to be part of our human make-up. This certainly still holds true today, with our insatiable appetite for gossip about the rich and famous continually fed by the ever-intrusive media.
With regard to Norma, when it came to the term ‘society girl’, I immediately conjured up images of drunken dances, flirtatious encounters and a frivolous life that few but the ‘best’ could experience. But was Norma really a ‘socialite’? A search through the social pages of Melbourne’s newspapers, a marker of status among the city’s ‘beautiful people’, provided few references to Norma – one relating to a trip to Ballarat with her mother, another an appearance at a “delightful dance” in 1926, and a third to a 1928 trip to Lorne for a few weeks with a Miss Mary Reilly, a school friend and fellow teacher. This hardly equates to evidence of a social whirl. And, according to her neighbour, Mrs Guthrie, Norma “did not go about a great deal”.
No life should be summed up with one word –‘socialite’– especially if it didn’t ring true. And no life should be overshadowed or dismissed because tales of their death are more ‘exciting’. I wanted to know Norma the woman, not the stereotype, not the victim. Over time, I certainly developed a greater connection with this elusive woman. I would even discover that Norma had her secrets … but all this took time and a great deal of digging.
Despite the socialite label, some snippets in the newspapers did hint that Norma was considerably more earnest and deep-thinking than a frivolous party-goer. Neighbours had told the press that she was “highly intellectual – a girl with a very sane outlook on life”. She was also said to be “a quiet girl, almost reserved”. She’d attended the