Free Underbelly by John Silvester

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 herreinstatement 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 atrainee 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