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Rebecca Jennings Rebecca Jennings i(A154006 works by)
Gender: Female
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1 3 y separately published work icon Between Me and Myself : A Memoir of Murder, Desire and the Struggle to Be Free Sandra Willson , Rebecca Jennings , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2021 20081813 2021 single work autobiography

'On 29 April 1959, Sandra Willson, a twenty-year-old trainee psychiatric nurse from Paddington, devastated by the break-up of her relationship with her female lover, left her home and hailed a taxi. Asking the driver to take her to a remote location on the coast near Cronulla, she waited until he had stopped to consult a map and then shot him in the back of the head.

'Found not guilty of murder on the grounds of insanity and sentenced to detention at the ‘Governor’s Pleasure’, Willson spent the next seventeen years in prison and psychiatric hospitals, becoming the longest-serving woman prisoner in NSW.

'Her memoir, largely written in prison and now published for the first time, describes the events leading up to the shooting, the day itself and the years of incarceration that followed. Raw, compelling, Between Me and Myself is a fascinating insight into life on the social margins of post-war Sydney, an indictment of the justice system’s treatment of gay women, and a tragic story of abuse, mental illness, desire and repression.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
1 “A Fully Formed Blast from Abroad”? Australasian Lesbian Circuits of Mobility and the Transnational Exchange of Ideas in the 1960s and 1970s Rebecca Jennings , Liz Millward , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the History of Sexuality , September vol. 25 no. 3 2016; (p. 463-488) 'In 1973 three Australian women—Kerryn Higgs, Robina Courtin, and Jenny Pausacker—returned to Melbourne, having spent two years in London. Later the same year, New Zealander Alison Laurie arrived home after a nine-year stint overseas, which included periods of time living in England, Scandinavia, and the United States. The return of all four had a catalytic effect on lesbian politics in their home communities. Pausacker, Higgs, and Courtin were credited with precipitating a physical and ideological shift away from mixed gay politics toward a feminist perspective on lesbianism. As Laurie herself put it, her arrival made it appear that “lesbian feminism hit Aotearoa New Zealand as a fully formed blast from abroad, but fell on fertile ground, among many of the lesbians from gay liberation for starters.' (Introduction)
1 Sandra Willson : A Case Study in Lesbian Identities in 1950s and 1970s Australia Rebecca Jennings , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: History Australia , April vol. 10 no. 1 2013; (p. 99-124) 'In 1959, a young Sydney lesbian, Sandra Willson, shot and killed a taxi driver as a form of protest against social attitudes toward lesbianism. She spent 18 years in prisons and psychiatric hospitals before her release in 1977. Taking Sandra Willson as a case study, this article will explore the ways in which social disapproval of lesbianism was expressed in 1950s Sydney and the impact this had on women's lives, relationships and identities. By the time of Willson's release in the late 1970s, Sydney represented a very different place in which to articulate a lesbian identity; a place in which same-sex desire was beginning to be acknowledged in the press and in cultural media, and where feminist and gay activists were challenging long-standing negative attitudes toward homosexuality. Sandra Willson's experience offers an opportunity to trace shifting notions of lesbianism between the 1950s and the 1970s in Sydney and to consider how these broader patterns of cultural change might have impacted on individual women.' (Author's abstract)
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