Free Underbelly by John Silvester Page B

first of a series of casual jobs that would lead her to the sex industry.
    It sounds like the start of the independent, sexually adventurous life but the friend says not. ‘She didn’t have a boyfriend. She was never into boys then – apart from Boy George. It wasn’t until later that she became more of a show pony.’
    The friend claims to share Kim’s philosophy: ‘I do what I like as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.’ But she concedes that Kim changed after she left the district and joined ‘the scene’.
    A lot can happen in three years. When Kim returned to Wodonga for her classmate’s 21st birthday in 1988, she had changed – in more ways than one.
    â€˜She was a “dancer” then. And I think she’d had her boob job done by then, and I reckon a nose job.’ But what she remembers most is Kim giving ‘my Dad a real big kiss – almost a pash. No inhibitions at all.’
    After that, they kept in touch intermittently but rarely saw each other. The friend had married young and theywere taking different paths. Interestingly, she says, Kim’s sister Melissa also joined ‘the scene’ in Sin City, whereas brother Jason stayed back in Wodonga with his mother, working steadily and not having much to do with his father or his well-known sister in Sydney.
    KATRINA Francis was – and is – a friend of the Boy George fan JoAnne Wiltshire more than she ever was of Kim Hollingsworth. She recalls Kim wanting ‘to be a vet’ and loving animals.
    â€˜I don’t think Kim had many friends,’ she says. ‘She was one of those students who would sit and study. Always had her head in a book. She wasn’t out to make friends – was what you’d call a nerd.
    â€˜She wasn’t a very attractive girl when she was younger. She looked anorexic to me – like a stick figure.’
    Katrina was living in Sydney in the late 1990s and was surprised that Kim contacted her and arranged to meet her. ‘We met at the train station and she gave me flowers,’ she recalls. She had been a little bemused by the unexpected gesture – wondered if there were a motive – because they had not really been friends at school.
    Like other Wodonga West teachers, Brian Rock recalls the high school fondly. ‘We had some of the most magical teaching ever, there,’ he recalls. ‘The school was built in a paddock and grew form by form each year. It was more a country style school then – friendly and part of the community. Relationships between staff and students were strong.’ The sort of place, he says, where ‘if the circus came to town we’d close the school for the day and go to the circus.’
    The school had its success stories: two of the best from battling families not as well off as the Hollingsworths. One former student, Mark McDonald, became a senior researcher at the British Museum. Another, Michael Clifford, is a surgeon who has distinguished himself overseas.
    But Kim from Castle Heights, the ‘dress circle’ middle-class enclave where the principal lived, didn’t kick on the way Brian Rock and his fellow teachers thought she would.
    â€˜She was the last kid you’d pick to end up as a stripper or in prostitution,’ says Rock. ‘My first reaction was that she must have been affected by drugs or mental illness – but that wasn’t it. She was quiet, studious, shy, not outspoken.’
    He thinks she didn’t finish the year’s study (in 1984) because of some domestic upset but can’t recall the details. ‘I’ve got a niggling suspicion that something went wrong at home.’
    One thing is clear: by the time Kim reached VCE in 1984, her police sergeant father was on extended sick leave for reasons that time has partly obscured. Fellow police recall unproven suspicions that some members had been ‘milking’ petrol from police