Killing Juanita

By Peter Rees

The award-winning, definitive account of Australia's most notorious cold case, now fully updated with new information

Winner of the Ned Kelly Award for True Crime

On 4 July 1975, Juanita Nielsen set out on foot through the wintry streets of Sydney's red-light district. The chic heiress and newspaper publisher had a business meeting with a man called Eddie Trigg, a manager at the seedy Carousel Cabaret nightclub in Kings Cross.

The following day, Juanita was reported missing. She has not been seen since and her body has never been found.

Despite two police investigations, a coronial inquest and a federal parliament inquiry, the disappearance of Juanita Nielsen remains one of Australia's great unsolved murder mysteries. The most pressing question now is why?

Killing Juanita is an unflinching examination of this cold case and its chief protagonists, not least Juanita Nielsen. An ardent campaigner fighting the proposed demolition of historic houses in the Cross, she was a thorn in the side of a powerful property developer with links to notorious crime bosses.

Winner of the 2004 Ned Kelly Award for True Crime and now fully updated with new information, Killing Juanita is a compelling story of greed, corruption, dirty politics and cover-ups. It finally puts to rest decades of speculation, providing the definitive answer that authorities never could - or would.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781460714508

Peter Rees

Peter Rees has had a long career as a journalist covering federal politics and as an author specialising in Australian military history. His books include Anzac Girls; Desert Boys; Lancaster Men; Bearing Witness: The Remarkable Life of Charles Bean; and The Missing Man: From the Outback to Tarakan, the Powerful Story of Len Waters, Australia's First Aboriginal Fighter Pilot. Killing Juanita, about the still unsolved disappearance of heiress, newspaper publisher and anti-development campaigner, won the 2004 Ned Kelly Award for True crime.

Book preview

Part One

INFLAMING PASSIONS

1

CAREER CHANGE

Juanita Nielsen removed the hand that had wandered onto her knee. Sammy Lee, legendary showman of Kings Cross, was unfazed. With his chunky gold ring and flashy cuff links, Sammy thought he had a right to all the female flesh in the Cross—particularly one to whom he was paying money. Sammy had bought space for a half-page ad in Juanita’s fledgling local paper, NOW, to mark the opening of the new upstairs VIP cocktail lounge in his nightclub, Les Girls. The bar was a plush red velvet affair with studded lounges and a dropped bar where customers ordering drinks could gaze down the cleavages of the barmaids, who obligingly wore low-cut tops. Subtlety was never Sammy’s style.

The lights were soft, and Juanita sipped champagne as she talked with him about the new bar. The hand moved onto her bare knee once more. She was thirty-one and did not accept unwelcome advances, especially from someone old enough to be her father. Again she removed it, only to have it return. That was enough. Fed up, Juanita walked out, down the stairs that led onto Roslyn Street and the late winter night. Kings Cross was like that—people grasping at whatever they could, and knocked back once, they’d have another go. It was August 1968 and Juanita would not return to the club for another seven years. In that time there would be no more advertising for Les Girls. When she went up those stairs again on 4 July 1975 the club would still be the home of the Les Girls floorshow but it would be under different ownership and renamed the Carousel Cabaret. And that day would be the last day of her life.

Seven years. What a formative time in the story of Sydney. Soldiers on R&R from the Vietnam War came and went from Kings Cross, bringing money and a demand for women and hard drugs. Police corruption spread unimaginably. But there was more: a deadly battle would be fought over the future of the most beautiful promenade of the Cross—Victoria Street. It was the elegant, tree-arched street where Juanita lived, running roughly parallel to the seedy glitz of Darlinghurst Road. Juanita could not know it then, but the two worlds were about to collide. The impact would shake Victoria Street to its very foundations. And through her paper Juanita was to play a critical part in reawakening political action at the grassroots level in Sydney, which would provide impetus for the growth of the green ban movement across Australia.

The Carousel was in a two-storey building with a curved glass façade on the corner of Roslyn Street and Darlinghurst Road. In 2001 the building underwent extensive renovation that changed it forever. Architecturally it might have been nondescript but as the home of Les Girls since 1964, the club had been the venue for risqué floorshows featuring men dressed as women in lamé and sequins. Nightly, as Sydneysiders shed the austerity of the early post-war years, Les Girls crossed sexual boundaries. It became a mecca for drag queens; Carlotta, the most famous of them all, and lesser lights such as Laurence, who went by the name Loretta Crawford. Seven years after Juanita’s visit to Les Girls her path would cross Loretta’s at the Carousel Cabaret.

Where there were drag queens there were also criminals. Drag shows were a magnet for the thugs, thieves and standover men who drifted through the shadows of the Kings Cross underworld. Control of the clubs and gambling dens, massage parlours and strip joints in the Cross has fueled the dream of dirty riches for generations. Influence and power that was often the difference between life and death came with that control. It was an environment rich in potential not just for the bosses running the Cross but also for the police whose duty it was to oversee and control its excesses. Police and criminals intermingled daily, the line between them often indistinguishable. There were few secrets and no subtleties in clubland, only blunt force and corrupted men in blue.

Sammy Lee needed the VIP Lounge to run a profit. Another of his clubs, the Latin Quarter in Pitt Street in the city where he had first experimented with the drag show idea, was no longer the cash cow of old. From its opening in 1959, the Latin Quarter and its leggy line of dancing girls had been quite a scene. Short of chorus line girls one night, four young lads from the sewing room offered to take their places. Quite a hit, Sammy decided to reverse the format and stage all-male revues at a new club, Les Girls.

The Latin Quarter was a favourite among the Jewish ‘New York’ set from the eastern suburbs, among them Tim Theeman, the elder son of Osti lingerie manufacturer Frank Theeman. Tim was brash and had a taste for marijuana and the thrill of the clubs. He may have had the sandy-coloured hair of his father, but he was rebellious and lacked his father’s direction and vision. They had a love–hate relationship. Tim was often angry for no apparent reason. Frank was patient. When Tim reached sixteen in 1962 Frank decided his son should celebrate his birthday with a rite of passage at the Latin Quarter. He organised the occasion with Sammy Lee—and Sammy didn’t let him down. From the time Tim arrived at the club he was treated like a king. The heady atmosphere of beautiful and ‘available’ women, fast talk and booze enthralled him. The direction of Tim’s life was set.

Tim became a regular at the Latin Quarter. Through his frequent visits he befriended the assistant manager, James McCartney Anderson. Jim was a tough Scot who stood 1.8 metres tall and seemed almost as wide across the chest. With his wavy red hair and handlebar moustache, he had the intimidating presence of a man who was built to toss cabers. A former British Marine, he was a good choice to enforce discipline at the club. Sammy Lee took him on in 1966 with a brief ‘to stop the thieving and isolate as many rorts as I could’.

He also became a ‘sort of minder’ to Tim and his friends. ‘Young Timmy, he was a typical sixteen-, seventeen-year-old kid but he was always involved in strife,’ Jim would later say. ‘I was always pulling him out of it. I’d never met his parents, who were apparently very successful. As far as I knew they owned Osti, it was a big name in clothing. Then I was always kicking his arse and keeping him out of trouble and everything else.’ Jim also befriended Tim’s younger brother, Michael, and his fiancée, Hanni. When they married in 1971 they invited Jim and his sexy Latin Quarter waitress girlfriend, Neathia, to the wedding. It was here that Frank Theeman met Jim. They struck up a friendship. Frank was no doubt grateful to Jim for keeping an eye on his sons.

And at the Latin Quarter, trouble was never far away. The club was a favourite haunt of police and the underworld, and it prospered. That is, until the shooting of Raymond Patrick ‘Ducky’ O’Connor, a standover man who was implicated in a series of gangland murders. The shooting was a curious affair. As the Latin Quarter was about to close early one Sunday morning in May 1967, O’Connor went to the club and in the dim light walked up to a table where notorious criminal and police informer Lennie McPherson was sitting with two heavies, one of whom was the equally notorious Jacky Clarke. ‘Here’s yours’, O’Connor said to McPherson. Someone shouted, ‘Look out, he’s got a gun.’ A shot followed.

A senior detective sergeant from the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) happened to be drinking at a nearby table and pushed through the crowd to McPherson’s table. Nearby, O’Connor lay dead, blood oozing from a bullet wound to the head. A .25-calibre revolver which had not been fired was next to the body, while a second pistol, a .32 automatic with a spent cartridge jammed in the breech, was lying several metres away. Both had been quickly wiped clean of any fingerprints by what the Daily Mirror described as ‘the city’s fastest hankie’. McPherson claimed O’Connor was trying to murder him and had pulled a gun from his coat. As he did so Clarke grabbed his arm and pushed it up, the gun firing, with O’Connor ‘sort of shooting himself’. The coroner found the shot from the .32 that killed O’Connor could have been fired by either the victim or someone else. No-one lamented Ducky’s death. He was, after all, regarded as a ‘mad dog’. Even though the murder occurred in the presence of police, no charges were laid. If there was a penalty paid it was by the Latin Quarter, because patrons drifted away. Even a change of name to the Cheetah Room didn’t help. Jim Anderson thought it was a ‘rather messy murder’ and began looking for another job.

A few months later in February 1968, Juanita Nielsen found herself engaged in a different kind of battle for survival. Juanita was a member of the retailing family that operated Mark Foy’s, an ‘old money’ dynasty that traced its roots back to flour millers in eighteenth century France before they moved to Ireland and later Sydney via the Victorian goldfields. In 1909 the family opened the famous Piazza Store between Liverpool, Castlereagh and Elizabeth streets in the city that set the standard for retailing for years to come. Juanita stood to inherit a sizable part of the Mark Foy’s fortune. Her battle began when the Mark Foy’s board announced takeover talks for the company. Nominally, the bid was from competing retailer McDowells Ltd, which would be taken over by Grace Bros. The bidders offered $4.4 million for a company that was increasingly marked by family disagreements over management and direction. Juanita immediately opposed the bid and started a shareholders’ resistance movement, maintaining that the store should stay in the family’s hands and that the bid grossly undervalued the real estate assets, which included stores in chic Double Bay and several other Sydney suburbs as well as property in London.

The fortunes of Mark Foy’s had begun to decline in the immediate post-war years. For decades the distance between Circular Quay and Central railway station had been regarded as one bus or tram section. Suddenly this changed. Now, the section from the Quay ended at Market Street where the uptown retailers such as David Jones, Farmers, McDowells and Waltons were. For people wanting to travel to the southern end of the city to Mark Foy’s, Anthony Horderns, Marcus Clarke’s and even Grace Bros, the change meant an extra fare. It was a setback from which the Haymarket department stores never recovered. There was much muttering within the Foy clan about the state government’s transport decision and how it had been made. They knew that Mark Foy’s retailing competitors uptown had outmanoeuvred them.

Juanita’s father Neil Smith and her aunts Tibby and Joan held a combined 14 per cent shareholding that was crucial to the success of the bid for Mark Foy’s. They wanted to accept, and Neil was angry with Juanita. He threatened to disinherit her for opposing the takeover. But Juanita was exasperated by what she saw as her father’s equivocation. Her cousin, Francis Foy, thought he should talk to her. Juanita didn’t blink as she fixed him with a riveting but friendly look. Softly spoken and with a slight lisp, she said to him, ‘Francis, I couldn’t give a damn what Daddy does with his money. There are many people in this store who have worked for thirty, forty and in one case fifty years for us as a family. If McDowells are successful in taking over this business, within the first month those people are going to be sacked and replaced by girls in miniskirts. I’m not prepared to see that happen.’ Juanita may have worn one herself, but she also knew that in an era when a job at Mark Foy’s was generally regarded as a job for life, the takeover proposal had devastated the three hundred and fifty staff. But Neil continued to vacillate. At month’s end he voted in favour of acceptance only to announce six days later that he and his sisters were opposed to the sale because it was ‘far below the actual worth of the property’ alone.

Juanita’s vocal resistance thrust her name into the public eye. The story of an attractive young woman holding just one 50-cent share, fighting a multimillion-dollar takeover bid attracted the media’s attention. The Sun-Herald on 10 March snapped her posing coquettishly on the phone, drumming up support. ‘The business has been in the family for three generations,’ she told the paper. ‘I wouldn’t like to see Mark Foy’s sold at any price. I certainly wouldn’t like to see it sold at half price.’ As the battle to save the company intensified Juanita quit her job at Mark Foy’s to concentrate on leading the resistance movement. But by May the fight had been lost. Neil changed his mind yet again, saying that if 51 per cent of shareholders accepted, he too would accept.

Incensed at what she saw as her father’s weakness, Juanita moved a no-confidence motion against the board. But it was to no avail. She and several family members thought they had been sold out—the truth of which was underlined when less than a year later, McDowells announced a capital profit of nearly $1.8 million from the sale of several Mark Foy’s properties. Juanita was devastated by the loss of the family company, finding her father’s capitulation unforgivable. She had lost not only her fight to protect the careers of long-serving staff, but also her blossoming career in the company’s affairs. For some time after the sale, she refused to talk to Neil, retreating to the flat she had taken at 139 Brougham Street, Potts Point, parallel to Victoria Street.

At Mark Foy’s Juanita helped establish a house newspaper, foy’s-a-fairs, and showed a flair for writing, developing a personal style where she often capitalised words mid-paragraph. She had also begun a column, ‘In Gear with Juanita’, in a small give-away paper, Kings Cross NOW, set up by the Reverend Ted Noffs of the Wayside Chapel, just around the corner from her flat. The Noffs paper lasted only a few months before Ted asked Juanita if she would like to take over and edit the publication. She agreed on the condition that he form a company and sell her 51 per cent of the shares. The name changed from Kings Cross NOW to Sydney NOW, first appearing in early July 1968. However, the partnership with Noffs did not last long. As Juanita explained it later to the Sydney Morning Herald, there was ‘a complete and utter clash of personalities . . . so I bought him out and acquired complete control of the company’. On 13 September 1968 Juanita paid Noffs $500 for the paper, plus the advertising revenue for the next two editions. Owning a paper, she said, was the last thing in the world she wanted to do. ‘I just sort of found myself lumbered with one.’

Several months after the Mark Foy’s takeover Neil attempted to heal the breach with Juanita with a gift of $50,000. Juanita thought long and hard about the offer, but eventually accepted as it meant she could buy her own home. She heard that a nineteenth century worker’s terrace house at 202 Victoria Street, not far from the present Kings Cross railway station, was on the market. The house cost her $16,000 in October 1968. It was a modest dwelling just 3.5 metres wide and 18 metres long. But the thought of moving to the Cross thrilled her, as did the colonial history of the building. She commissioned an architect to extensively renovate the house, utilising every scrap of space.

For the times, Juanita was avant-garde. She believed in doing things in her own style, regardless of cost or prevailing fashion. There were three bedrooms upstairs, and in the front one she later installed a bizarre waterbed designed especially for her by sculptor Eberhard Franke that featured chains, a metal canopy and a bedhead with stylised black cats and breasts. Black satin sheets covered the bed and the canopy was mirrored. The small third bedroom was later converted into a darkroom.

Downstairs, there was a bar and a church pew in the front room, while the rear of the house and the small courtyard were tiled in Spanish ceramics, with heavy timber doors leading to the outdoor area. When it was finished, only the plain, Georgian-style front wall of the terrace on Victoria Street was untouched, maintaining a façade that was part of a streetscape that had changed little over the decades. Juanita had a new home that reflected her personality. She also had a new paper that would come to represent her ideals. She had now embarked on a career change that would lead her to a new fight for a new underdog.

2

THE CARTER BROWN GIRL

No-one could miss Juanita Nielsen around Kings Cross. She was elegant and stylish and spoke with a cultured accent that was a sure sign of a privileged background. So fair was her complexion that her lovers described her as a delicate, brown-eyed Dresden china doll. She was a statuesque 1.74 metres tall and stood out in any crowd. She enhanced her long dark brown hair with towering beehive hairpieces. The expensive clothes she wore, often in highly distinctive colours and combinations, completed an image of lively individuality. What the heck? She liked herself that way and nobody owned her.

As proprietor and editor of NOW, Juanita soon became well known in the area—even if she was off Sammy Lee’s guest list. She liked dining out and reviewing the showbusiness and restaurant scene. Juanita felt at home in Victoria Street, whether she was entertaining or sitting on the steps of her terrace on Sunday mornings, sipping coffee and passing the time of day with sex workers on their way home from work. She became accustomed to dealing with the advances of men as she walked around the Cross, selling advertising, or while standing in her doorway. Her stock reply was always a gentle: ‘You’ve got the wrong girl, just go down the road and turn right. She’ll keep you happy.’

Writing and editing a paper required skills Juanita did not have. She wrote all her stories longhand, often scrawling hastily on scraps of paper, recycled envelopes and even jam tin labels. Over time, Juanita created a profile that caught the interest of the mainstream media. In October 1974 a Sydney Morning Herald journalist described meeting Juanita at 202 Victoria Street: ‘Wearing black baggies, a striped sweater and high cork sandals Mrs Nielsen greeted me at the front door and ushered me into a room which contained both a church pew and a bar. She works at a large, cluttered old Cutler desk. No, she can’t type or do shorthand or anything like that.’ Juanita explained, ‘I just write as I think. I don’t revise or change anything.’

With her lack of training, she had needed help to make the paper work, and that came in 1968 when she met a press photographer, David Farrell, who worked on the Mosman Daily group of newspapers. David had photographed Juanita during the Mark Foy’s battle, and their paths crossed again when they met at a fashion parade. He began taking photographs and laying out the paper. Before long he was handling the paper’s production. He took one share in the business and he and Juanita formed a partnership. Juanita did most of the selling and wrote the stories while David looked after photography, production and distribution. He ensured that everything went to the printers on time as well as handling the accounts for both the business and Juanita’s personal affairs.

Juanita and David focused on the local business community as their main revenue base. There were few news stories, the editorial content being mainly ‘advertorials’—paid advertisements written to look like stories—that promoted local restaurants and shops. It was a lifestyle that brought Juanita into contact with a range of people from politicians to flamboyant self-promoting artists, restaurateurs and shopkeepers. From the start, she attended functions like the first birthday party for the Crest Hotel in October 1968, at which she met New South Wales Premier Robert Askin. With drink in hand, the premier was clearly taken by the vivacious and miniskirted Juanita, spending more time talking to her than protocol prescribed. ‘You must come and see me in my office,’ he suggested. ‘Where’s that?’ she responded acidly. She did not take up the invitation. Juanita was a woman who judged people by how they behaved and not by their status, and the premier had failed the test.

As the end of 1968 neared David was invited to be best man at a wedding in Perth. Over dinner, he told Juanita he planned to drive across the continent. Juanita offered to accompany him. There was a pause before she added, ‘If we’re going across the Nullarbor together we’d better get to know each other.’ With that, she took him off to bed. David, twenty-four, and seven years younger than Juanita, thought it a very good idea. He soon moved in. They suspended publication and headed off to Perth in David’s new Mini Minor. On the way, they celebrated Christmas with a desert picnic of champagne and prawns. Love bloomed in the pink salt lakes of Fowlers Bay. Over the next year Juanita and David consolidated NOW, increasing circulation and building an advertising base. In March 1970 they closed the paper for six months and flew to Europe to study new techniques in printing, photography and publishing generally. In Paris they dined at the swank La Tour d’Argent restaurant, David presenting Juanita with long-stemmed red roses to mark the occasion. Indeed, he would often give her a single red rose, a flower she favoured and cultivated in miniature in her courtyard. In reality, the trip was a holiday, but Juanita also had unfinished business of a personal nature. She and David travelled to Denmark where he was introduced to her former husband, Jorgen Nielsen. They stayed with him in his thatched cottage. Any awkwardness was quickly dissipated by the bonhomie of a smorgasbord, schnapps and beer. At the end of 1973 Juanita would return to Denmark to finalise the divorce. It had been an ill-fated marriage. But then, Juanita was headstrong and came from a broken marriage herself.

Born Juanita Joan Smith on 22 April 1937, she was the only child of Neil and Wilma (or Billie, as she was known) Smith. Like the other branches of the Foy clan, the Smiths were Catholic, but Billie was a Protestant. The interdenominational marriage in 1929 was not well received by the Smiths, and Neil’s parents showed their disapproval in their choice of wedding present—secondhand furniture. For a family as rich as the Smiths this was quite a slight. As with the wider Foy clan, the Smiths enjoyed a lifestyle that was the envy of even the rich in Sydney. In effect, the Foys were the Great Gatsbys of the city, super rich and wealthier than the Fairfaxes and just about anyone else. They owned custom-built Rolls Royces which they would take to Europe every year. The stopover on both journeys was Colombo. They would off-load the Rolls and drive north to the port of Trincomalee to recuperate for a couple of weeks.

The families built mansions, the Foys living in Eumemmering Hall, set amid more than a hectare of park-like grounds in prestigious Victoria Road, Bellevue Hill, and the Smiths building Colbrook at Double Bay, which for years was a landmark. It had a private chapel and a tear-shaped ballroom, reputedly built to entice Dame Nellie Melba to sing there. Certainly, Dame Nellie sang at the fabulous Hydro Majestic Hotel, built by Mark Foy the younger at Medlow Bath in the Blue Mountains in 1904. After World War I Neil’s parents bought a weekend property near Church Point on Pittwater. It was accessible only by boat. At the time, the secluded mansion was known as the Red House and was reputed to have been the residence of novelist DH Lawrence during a stay in Sydney. The Smiths called it Trincomalee as it reminded them of the family’s retreat in what was then called Ceylon. In their 14-metre luxury motor cruiser, the family would sail around Pittwater for lazy weekends after driving to Church Point in their Rolls Royce Silver Ghost.

Neil and Billie moved to a new three-bedroom brick bungalow at Killara, which at the time was an outer suburb still with farms and dairies on Sydney’s upper North Shore. They separated in 1936 when Billie was pregnant with Juanita. Neil made his home at Trincomalee while Billie and Juanita remained in Killara. He saw war service in New Guinea and with the threat of a Japanese attack on Sydney, sent Billie and Juanita to live in Berrima, south of Sydney, for a year. By chance, the war brought Juanita briefly to Kings Cross for the first time. After returning from New Guinea, her father rented 101 Victoria Street. She would never forget the street, later writing that it was among her ‘happiest childhood homes’.

After the war Neil returned to the rambling Trincomalee, employing a series of resident ‘housekeepers’ and spending considerable time sailing his motor cruiser Moon Mist on Pittwater. His was an indolent existence tempered by a light workload that required him to travel to Sydney once a week for Mark Foy’s board meetings. On his way home from the board meetings Neil sometimes used to stay overnight at Killara with Billie and Juanita, but the occasions were frosty.

Childhood cousins and friends saw Juanita as precocious and fun loving and by the age of twelve she was wearing lipstick, painting her nails, wearing fur stoles and forever combing her glorious long dark hair. Her mother said Juanita had never had a broom in her hand and never would—why teach her to be a housewife? Billie was taken to task over the fact that Juanita was drinking cocktails.

Cousin Michael McGahey said he was sixteen when he first met Juanita at a family wedding at Bellevue Hill at which he was serving drinks. ‘During the evening, this gorgeous creature who looked like a French model and sounded like Tallulah Bankhead came up to me and said, Darling, could you get me a whisky, please? The head waiter told me she couldn’t have one. I asked why. He said, She’s only twelve.’

Conservative family members disapproved of the figure-hugging dresses she wore, let alone her habit of asking neighbours to zip her up in a favourite, very tight leopard-skin number.

Besides Billie’s encouragement, her schooling also nurtured an independent spirit. Juanita went to the exclusive Methodist Ladies College, Ravenswood, at Gordon, reflecting her mother’s Protestant influence. Students at the time recall the teachers as strong independent women who inspired self-confidence. They believed Ravenswood encouraged less conformity than did the Presbyterian Ladies College at nearby Pymble.

Juanita certainly had plenty of self-confidence. One of her school friends, Jenn Stevenson, recalled an occasion when a teacher scolded Juanita for wearing make-up and ordered her to wash it off. ‘Juanita refused, saying she had a delicate skin and it needed protection. She had beautiful skin.’ Another friend, Margaret Green, said that, at fourteen, Juanita had a sophistication about her that few women attained until much later in life. ‘She gave me the impression she would possibly go home from school and have a champagne or G&T—it would not surprise me. She was a very worldly lady before leaving school.’ Billie would pick Juanita up from school in a low-slung Hudson because ‘they were afraid of kidnapping.’

But Juanita also knew what it was like to be an outsider, for this was a time when the stifling conformity of WASP values that pervaded the leafy North Shore disapproved of broken marriages. It was all about keeping up appearances and as long as two people were together that was all that mattered. They were outsiders in the street but Billie refused to enact such charades.

After passing the Intermediate Certificate in 1952 Juanita decided against studying for the Leaving Certificate and left school. Over the next six years she worked at various jobs, including at Mark Foy’s. At one point she undertook a June Dally-Watkins deportment and modelling course that led to early notoriety. As a seventeen-year-old, she posed for the lowbrow Carter Brown detective magazine covers. The first was Floozie out of Focus, which featured Juanita’s half-clad body languishing in an absurdly oversized camera lens. She sported a ‘come hither’ look, no doubt intended to win more readers for a magazine that cost just eightpence. The second title shouted luridly: ‘With a million bucks to gain and nothing to lose why should she remember old friends? So it was lights out and . . . GOOD-KNIFE SWEETHEART.’

When they appeared on bookstands Juanita’s family was not amused—nor was she, for the publishers had superimposed her head on the body of a more buxom woman. She threatened court action. She did no more covers for Carter Brown but it showed a streak of independence that would become part of her signature. Juanita also studied acting under the renowned Doris Fitton at the Independent Theatre at Neutral Bay, relatives recalling Juanita mimicking voices on a tape recorder. She acted in plays at the Phillip Street Theatre, and despite having no formal training as a writer, wrote two plays for radio and stage before she reached the age of twenty. Neither was produced or published, but they were evidence of an emerging talent.

Juanita, however, was restless and wanted to see more of the world. In 1959, aged twenty-two, she boarded a passenger liner alone and sailed for America and England. In keeping with the family’s traditions, she travelled first class on luxury cruise liners. But tiring of the sameness of these floating hotels, she opted to try a less salubrious Danish Torm Lines