Leigh Straw

The Petticoat Parade is a social history of Josie de Bray and the madams of the Perth red light district, written by award-winning author, Leigh Straw. Josie de Bray, also known as Madam Monnier or Marie Louise Monnier, was a brothel madam who owned most of Roe Street, Perth from World War I up to the 1940s. A returned soldier...

The Kennedys considered their home in Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, ‘The big white house’, to be a haven from their busy lives. Yet in the summer of 1944, against the backdrop of WWII, the events that unfolded for them there changed the family forever. Beginning in the May of that year, The Kennedys at Cape Cod, 1944 paints an intimate...

The Ballroom Murder is a true crime story that gripped Perth nearly 100 years ago, demonstrating the power of the press and privilege in an extraordinary judicial outcome. In August 1925, Audrey Jacob shot dead her former fiancé, Cyril Gidley, in full view of hundreds of guests at a charity ball in Perth's Government House. When she was arrested, she...

Matriarch of the criminal underworld ... or the Robin Hood of inner Sydney? The legend of Kate Leigh, Sydney's famed brothel madam, sly grog seller, and drug dealer, has loomed large in TV's Underbelly and every other account of Sydney's criminal history from the 1920s to the 1960s. However, she has never had a biography of her own. Despite having...