Author unearths madam’s tragic past
An author’s quest for the truth has revealed the secret past of one of Kalgoorlie’s most famous brothel madams, who immigrated to Australia after surviving the horrors of a World War II concentration camp.
After devoting more than a decade of her life to the project, Juliet Wills is expected to release her book, Dirty Girl — The State-Sanctioned Murder of Brothel Madam Shirley Finn, today.
Based on research conducted by Wills over 12 years, the book presents a series of allegations in relation to Finn’s unsolved murder.
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Although Wills’ book focuses largely on Finn and allegations of corruption surrounding her death, an entire chapter is devoted to former Kalgoorlie madam Stella Strong.
As many Goldfielders will know, Strong ran the Red House on Hay Street for years after arriving in Kalgoorlie-Boulder in 1972.
What nobody knew, was that Strong was imprisoned by the Nazis at 13 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a horror she endured for the next four years.
“It’s a bit of a sad indictment that a refugee suffering from so much trauma was sold off into a brothel and sold out for sex for a while,” Wills told the Kalgoorlie Miner.
“But at least she found some peace in Kalgoorlie.”
Wills met Strong during her research in the early 2000s and spoke to her on numerous occasions before her death in 2008.
She tracked the madam down in the hope of garnering more information about Finn, as the pair moved to Perth from NSW at a similar time in the late 1960s.
During their first encounter, Strong claimed to be the daughter of Perce Galea, a heavyweight of Sydney’s gambling scene in the 1960s and 1970s.
It was a claim Strong was never able to substantiate over the years and she side-stepped Wills’ requests for a birth certificate or photographs of the two together.
“It never really was quite forthcoming, there was always another little story, so I wasn’t able to establish that fact,” Wills said.
“I thought if I can’t establish that key fact, which is so much of what she told me, then I put her chapter away thinking … what else isn’t true in there?”
When Strong died in 2008, Wills discovered her real name was Zelda Strunc.
Digging through marriage and immigration records, she discovered the Czechoslovakian-born madam’s hidden past.
“I hadn’t anticipated in any way a story like that, it made everything fall into place,” Wills said.
“There were just little things in (the interview with Strong) that indicated the trauma, the unbelievable trauma that she must have suffered.”
