An Interview with Amanda Curtin
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_12_015476.phpWhere did you first hear the story of Little Jock, and what drew you to begin researching it?
I've been fascinated by Little Jock for a long time. I first heard about the story in 1994, when I was editing the introduction to a dictionary called Convicts in Western Australia. One of the coeditors made a chance remark that I would never forget. She told me that of the nearly 10,000 convicts who were transported to the Swan River Colony in the middle of the nineteenth century -- all of whom were supposed to be male -- one might have been a woman.
She was referring to the remains that had been found at the Sinkings in 1882 -- a dismembered, decapitated, possibly disembowelled body that had initially been identified, at autopsy, as that of a woman. But later, when the head was found and the victim was identified by several Albany residents as Little Jock, a male sandalwood carter and former convict, the surgeon recanted, backpedalled furiously. He said he was mistaken, he'd used wrong measures. When I began to read the documents in the archives, however, it seemed to me that he never was truly convinced that this body was a male.
An early researcher in the 1990s put forward the proposition that perhaps a female convict had 'slipped through the system', but others speculated that the victim might have been intersexed -- a "hermaphrodite," to use the nineteenth-century term.
