Razor gangs and axe-wielding angels: squalid Sydney on show

Few women have fascinated the Australian media more than Dulcie Markham, who during the 1940s and '50s ran up a long criminal record that included convictions for consorting with gangsters, vagrancy, drunkenness and assault.

In one notorious case, she was arrested in her underwear, wielding an axe as she chased a client down a city street. "The bastard insulted me about the price [for sex]," she said.

The squalid life and times of Markham - one of several aliases she took from the 1930 Alfred Hitchcock film Murder - are featured in the exhibition Femme Fatale: the Female Criminal, which opens at the Justice & Police Museum tomorrow.

Most of the female criminals featured are represented by police mugshots. Not Dulcie. "We think her picture must have been taken in a studio, or possibly by a newspaper photographer," said curator Nerida Campbell.

"It seems she was a stylish dresser, with blonde hair,

blue eyes and a spectacular figure that ensured she was highly prized by the gangsters of that era."

After extensive investigations, it appears Markham - who might also have been Sydney's most peripatetic prostitute, working regularly in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth - was really Mary Eugene, from inner-city Newtown. She died in 1976.

Other female criminals from the so-called razor-gang era appearing in the exhibition, which also examines the internal and external forces that drive women to violence, include Iris Webber.

Ms Campbell said: "She was a blatant lesbian who was into sado-masochism. She was described by the police as 'the most violent woman in the country', and ran a sly-grog shop in Surry Hills."

Webber shot four men - all "bludgers" or pimps - killing one and disabling two others for flirting with a young prostitute for whom she had conceived a great passion and sense of protectiveness.