Free Underbelly by John Silvester Page A

the future, an escape to the outside world.
    At Wodonga West High in 1984, Kim Hollingsworth was one of the studious ones. She was never loud or vulgar, one of the so-called class ‘tarts’ with short skirts and long fingernails and cigarettes in her handbag. In fact, in all her time at Wodonga, no one would later recall her doing anything that made her stand out from the middle ground. She was quiet, like her brother Jason and sisters Melissa and Melanie. Quiet, in fact, like their mother Glenys, who lives in the same mission brown double-storey house and is so reserved she rarely speaks unless spoken to first if an acquaintance sees her in the street.
    What little that Kim Hollingsworth’s contemporaries and teachers recall of the quiet girl is what she didn’t do, rather than what she did.
    She didn’t smoke in the toilets, ‘pash’ boys behind the bus stop or pinch stuff from the shops down the street. She didn’t turn up late for school and didn’t disturb others in class when she got there. She did her homework not only on time but well. About the only thing that stood out was that she and her closest schoolfriend, JoAnne Wiltshire, were Boy George fans. Even then, Kim wasn’t the leader nor remotely outrageous. Teachers remember that it was JoAnne, who still lives in Wodonga, who wore the androgynous Boy George outfits and joked about going to England to see him sing.
    Nothing about Kim’s school days hinted at what was ahead: that she would not only become a stripper and a hooker but such a relentlessly extroverted cheerleader forher own cause – not addicted to drugs, like most sex workers, but to self-promotion, like many showbiz performers. When she left school – and the town – she left barely a ripple behind her. Ask people in Wodonga about her and they shake their heads and wonder what happened to change the girl they now realise they barely knew.
    Even the few who did know her are puzzled about what happened to the studious schoolgirl. Even in hindsight, none of them claims to have picked anything in her behaviour to indicate that she would end up in the sex industry – or wanting to be a police officer, for that matter.
    Kim’s embracing of causes – not just her own crusade to join the police service but that of animal liberation – bemuses one of her few close friends from school. The friend, who doesn’t want to be named, became close to Kim in Year 11.
    â€˜She was pretty straight but a bit of a loner,’ she says. ‘Neither of us made friends easily. She was definitely brighter than most of the others and always studying.’ She was good at English and German.
    She recalls the Hollingsworths having cats and a collie dog but little to indicate Kim’s later passion for animal rights. ‘That could have come when she went to Sydney and got in with a new group of people,’ she ponders. Nor can she recall Kim the devoted vegetarian, more that she was interested in music.
    Half a lifetime later, the details have faded but she recalls vaguely that something went wrong for the Hollingsworth family that she can’t quite identify. Kim’s father left the police force before the girls finished school, and soon after separated from his wife.
    â€˜It was a big house in the snobby bit of Wodonga. I think they (Kim’s parents) were still together when we met but they separated and he moved downstairs. He was always very friendly to me. I think he made stuff out of glass (for sale) in the garage. Kim’s mum didn’t like visitors but she didn’t mind me.’
    Whatever it was that went wrong for the Hollingsworths might well have derailed Kim’s final year at school. At least one teacher recalls that she didn’t see out the school year in 1984. Her former classmate’s memory is that she moved out of home and across the Murray to Albury, renting a flat and working in an ice cream shop,