their signatures. Saunders and Makepeace also compiled a report on the issue.
Lewis believed policewomen should be dressed in the traditional sense – skirts, for example – and said slacks were not common practice in overseas police forces.
Saunders immediately contacted several international police forces, including Japan and the United States, to seek clarification on women wearing slacks while on active duty. The petition and research dossier were presented to Lewis for consideration.
To his credit, Lewis relented and permitted slacks to be introduced as a part of the official wardrobe of Queensland policewomen. Lewis, by and large, did not share Whitrod’s more liberated view in relation to women and policing. And he would have taken umbrage at Saunders not only stirring the pot with the petition, but correcting him on the wearing of slacks in other forces overseas.
Within weeks, reports from senior police expressing their dissatisfaction with the quality of Lorelle Saunders’ work were being generated and added to her official police file.
Saunders’ odyssey had begun. She could not imagine in her wildest dreams how it would end.
A Small Target
They would have looked like any typical young family over on the Redcliffe peninsula, a suburban outpost of Brisbane, 18 kilometres north-east of the CBD.
To get to it, you had to traverse the rattly 2.68 kilometre Hornibrook Bridge. Once there, it was a great place for families, with Suttons Beach and the Redcliffe Jetty regularly swept with breezes off Moreton Bay. It was also the perfect place to live for someone who did not want to bump into anything or anyone from the past in Brisbane. Redcliffe, in the 1970s, could have been its own small town by the water. In Redcliffe you could disappear.
It was where Mary Anne Brifman settled with her husband ‘Graham’ after they had married just a few days after Mary Anne’s 16th birthday in December 1972, just nine months after her mother’s death.
It was Graham who was sleeping over in the apartment in Bonney Avenue the night that Shirley died. It was Graham who witnessed a visitor come to the door close to midnight and hand her a small amber jar of drugs. Later, in the early hours of the morning, he had also seen an anxious Shirley moving about the apartment before standing before him in the dark in her floral nightie with side pockets.
‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her quietly.
‘Nothing,’ she replied.
So Mary Anne and Graham had married, and in 1975 had their first child, Christiaan. The next year they had a daughter, Ingrid.
‘I was working as a waitress for a while but I was still haunted by all the things that I’d gone through,’ Mary Anne says. ‘I went back to doing what I hated and what they had trained me to do [in Sydney] when I was 13.
‘He [Graham] had been sheltered in a very religious household most of his life, he didn’t have much life experience. I couldn’t get my husband to do anything. So I had to go to work. It was a repeat of my mother and father’s marriage.’
She said she deliberately made herself a small target. ‘I tried to keep a very low profile,’ she says. ‘Nobody knew who I was. I never mentioned my mother. I didn’t want to get involved in anything too organised, where the girls were bullied by the men who ran the parlours.
‘I was scared stiff of being recognised. I decided I would work as an escort.’
Confidential
Just three months into his commissionership, Lewis wasted no time drafting a confidential memo to Inspector Basil Hicks, head of Whitrod’s cherished Crime Intelligence Unit. It was time to let Whitrod’s old faithful know who was boss. And to delineate what actual intelligence the unit had on corrupt serving officers. What did they know? How much?
Lewis’s memo – dated 10 February 1977 – not only requested details of the machinations of the unit, but accused it of being disruptive to police morale and operating as some sort of
Lewis believed policewomen should be dressed in the traditional sense – skirts, for example – and said slacks were not common practice in overseas police forces.
Saunders immediately contacted several international police forces, including Japan and the United States, to seek clarification on women wearing slacks while on active duty. The petition and research dossier were presented to Lewis for consideration.
To his credit, Lewis relented and permitted slacks to be introduced as a part of the official wardrobe of Queensland policewomen. Lewis, by and large, did not share Whitrod’s more liberated view in relation to women and policing. And he would have taken umbrage at Saunders not only stirring the pot with the petition, but correcting him on the wearing of slacks in other forces overseas.
Within weeks, reports from senior police expressing their dissatisfaction with the quality of Lorelle Saunders’ work were being generated and added to her official police file.
Saunders’ odyssey had begun. She could not imagine in her wildest dreams how it would end.
A Small Target
They would have looked like any typical young family over on the Redcliffe peninsula, a suburban outpost of Brisbane, 18 kilometres north-east of the CBD.
To get to it, you had to traverse the rattly 2.68 kilometre Hornibrook Bridge. Once there, it was a great place for families, with Suttons Beach and the Redcliffe Jetty regularly swept with breezes off Moreton Bay. It was also the perfect place to live for someone who did not want to bump into anything or anyone from the past in Brisbane. Redcliffe, in the 1970s, could have been its own small town by the water. In Redcliffe you could disappear.
It was where Mary Anne Brifman settled with her husband ‘Graham’ after they had married just a few days after Mary Anne’s 16th birthday in December 1972, just nine months after her mother’s death.
It was Graham who was sleeping over in the apartment in Bonney Avenue the night that Shirley died. It was Graham who witnessed a visitor come to the door close to midnight and hand her a small amber jar of drugs. Later, in the early hours of the morning, he had also seen an anxious Shirley moving about the apartment before standing before him in the dark in her floral nightie with side pockets.
‘What’s wrong?’ he had asked her quietly.
‘Nothing,’ she replied.
So Mary Anne and Graham had married, and in 1975 had their first child, Christiaan. The next year they had a daughter, Ingrid.
‘I was working as a waitress for a while but I was still haunted by all the things that I’d gone through,’ Mary Anne says. ‘I went back to doing what I hated and what they had trained me to do [in Sydney] when I was 13.
‘He [Graham] had been sheltered in a very religious household most of his life, he didn’t have much life experience. I couldn’t get my husband to do anything. So I had to go to work. It was a repeat of my mother and father’s marriage.’
She said she deliberately made herself a small target. ‘I tried to keep a very low profile,’ she says. ‘Nobody knew who I was. I never mentioned my mother. I didn’t want to get involved in anything too organised, where the girls were bullied by the men who ran the parlours.
‘I was scared stiff of being recognised. I decided I would work as an escort.’
Confidential
Just three months into his commissionership, Lewis wasted no time drafting a confidential memo to Inspector Basil Hicks, head of Whitrod’s cherished Crime Intelligence Unit. It was time to let Whitrod’s old faithful know who was boss. And to delineate what actual intelligence the unit had on corrupt serving officers. What did they know? How much?
Lewis’s memo – dated 10 February 1977 – not only requested details of the machinations of the unit, but accused it of being disruptive to police morale and operating as some sort of
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