AustLit

'Who was Iris Webber? For Fiona Kelly McGregor, the search began at an exhibition where Webber’s gaol mugshot first caught McGregor’s eye. In her 2017 creative writing exegesis, McGregor writes about becoming ‘vexed’ by ‘static, tabloid’ portraits of Webber—gun-slinging, sly-grogging, lesbian gangster of the author’s hometown—who earned the epithet ‘the most violent woman in Sydney’. The academic work examines the many biases that accompany representations of Webber, wrestling the historically contentious figure from the clichéd narratives and hackneyed tropes of contemporary reportage that have been repeated through the years. It throws open a window into McGregor’s motivations and ambitions for her novel Iris to ‘be read as both myth and document’. '  (Introduction)