SUGAR KATE

I first found Sugar Kate in old police records at the Public Record Office of Victoria. On the cover of a 1907 file was a confused statement from the Chief Commissioner of Police, who’d been visited by a woman wishing to make a claim on £30 that she’d left with police 10 years earlier. The woman was none other than Australia’s best pickpocket; Catherine Carruthers, alias McWilliams, alias Bessie Hamilton, best known as ‘Sugar Kate’.

In 1897, Sugar had been found with £30 after