Australian Dictionary of Biography

Lorraine Murray, Shanghai Studio Portrait, 1938

Courtesy of Louise Austin

Lorraine Murray (1910–2000), sex worker, counter-intelligence informant, and librarian, was born Laurinna Agnes Treweek on 22 January 1910 at St Joseph’s Refuge, Fullarton, South Australia, eldest daughter of New South Wales-born Laura Caroline Treweek, domestic worker. No father was recorded on Lorraine’s birth certificate—a missing piece of her identity that would later haunt her—though her mother subsequently had three children with the prominent pastoralist and racehorse owner Ben Chaffey. Already married, Chaffey established his illegitimate family in Melbourne, where Laura, fearful of being pilloried as an unwed mother, passed herself off as a widow, a ‘Mrs Murray.’ Growing anxious and dissatisfied with her position, she broke with Chaffey and moved to Sydney in 1918, though he continued to provide considerable support to the family until his own financial circumstances deteriorated in 1929.

After two years with foster parents in Adelaide, Murray grew up with her mother in Melbourne and Sydney, where she spent time as a boarder at Kincoppal, Elizabeth Bay (1918–19), before attending Abbotsleigh Church of England School for Girls (1923-24). Struggling to get along with her mother, she was then sent to New England Girls’ School at Armidale (1925–27), where she was confirmed in the Church of England and gained her Intermediate certificate (1926). Back in Sydney, she trained as a stenographer and typist, before accepting a position as a junior reporter for the Sun newspaper.

One night on social rounds at a city nightclub, Murray met the Japanese consul-general, Tokugawa Iemasa. In July 1931 she travelled to Ottawa, Canada, where he was working as the Japanese minister to canada, supposedly to join his household as a companion to his daughter. He and Murray were soon in a sexual relationship. Two years later, they were in Tokyo when the authorities, disapproving of their liaison, expelled Murray from Japan in September 1933.

For the next six years Murray resided in Shanghai, China, where she variously used the aliases ‘Lorraine Lee’ and ‘Johnny Jean.’ She spent time at the Weida Hotel with the wealthy Italian Vimercati Lionello Sanseverino, and worked at a brothel in the city’s International Settlement from 1934. Two years later, the Sephardic Jewish businessman Edmund Ellis Toeg, fourteen years her senior, supported her to leave the establishment. In 1937 she was an eyewitness to the Battle of Shanghai, during which she began an affair with the fascist Italian journalist Luigi Barzini. Over the course of this tumultuous relationship, she had an abortion and made a suicide attempt, which prompted Toeg to persuade his friend Emily Hahn, an American writer and long-time contributor to the New Yorker, to take Murray under her wing. In 1938 the two women shared Hahn’s house in Shanghai’s French Concession. This was a turning point in Murray’s life, and the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Hahn, five years her senior, helped her re-establish herself, all the while gathering material from her friend’s story for several books.

Murray travelled home to Australia in August 1939. She had planned to stay for a few months but was prevented from leaving by the outbreak of World War II. Though military authorities considered her a security risk because of her Japanese and Italian contacts, she was recruited as an informant by the Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB) in November 1940. Her most prominent target was Rupert Lockwood, a journalist and clandestine member of the Communist Party of Australia. Lockwood was flouting the ban on the CPA by giving speeches at public meetings that, while incendiary, often stopped short of statements that would have given the authorities grounds to silence him. By mid-1941 she had gained his confidence, but then, according to Lockwood, he won her over, leading her to sabotage attempts by the CIB to gather evidence against him.

Following the outbreak of the Pacific War, Murray worked as a secretary for the United States Army, first in Sydney and later in Brisbane, where she also worked for the government-in-exile of the Netherlands East Indies. She had remained in contact with Hahn, who in 1944 published her memoir China to Me, a bestseller in which Murray featured as ‘Jean.’ Murray, who admitted the book deflated her ‘somewhat inflated ego’ (15 November 1945, 1), was also concerned that it revealed her to be a former sex worker, a worry heightened by Hahn’s intention to publish a novel drawing on Murray’s life story, Miss Jill. She feared it would make her position in Australia untenable.

In July 1947 Hahn paid for Murray to join her in England. Miss Jill was published the following November. For a year, Murray worked for Hahn in various roles, including as a nanny and typist, an interlude later described in Hahn’s travelogue England to Me (1950). By now Edmund Toeg had also arrived in Britain. He and Murray married at the general register office at Westminster on 17 November 1948, and had an extended honeymoon on the French Riviera. Murray enjoyed the affection and independence she had with Toeg, who permitted her having other sexual partners. In late 1950 the couple moved into a house at Knightsbridge, London, which would remain her home until 1985.

The first years of Murray’s new London life were spent in the company of her husband’s elite circle. She also renewed contact with Tokugawa Iemasa and Luigi Barzini. In the mid-1950s, her name surfaced in Australia during the proceedings of the Royal Commission on Espionage, where she was described in a leaked memorandum by Lockwood as the ‘very beautiful’ but ‘remarkably stupid’ ‘Lorraine Murray’ (NAA A6202). Elswhere, Lockwood described her as a ‘shady lady … beautiful, irresponsible, vicious and slanderous’ (NAA BP242/1).

In the late 1950s Murray’s life took a new turn. She went back to work, initially as a stenographer but then as an administrator and event organiser. Her employers included learned societies and lobby groups such as the Royal Central Asian Society, the Army League, and the Pakistan Society. Between 1970 and 1980, she worked as an assistant librarian at the Royal Asiatic Society.

Politically, Murray was on the right. In the 1930s she had endorsed Japanese aggression in China and was attracted to Italian fascism. She revered the British royal family and supported the Conservative Party, rallying to the support of the disgraced John Profumo and hailing the election of Margret Thatcher as prime minister. Yet she could also espouse liberal causes, such as the anti-apartheid movement. During her decades in England, she kept in close touch with her family in Australia, and her home became a base for visiting nieces and nephews, who would recall fond memories of their adorable, exotic ‘Aunt Rainee.’

Vivacious and glamourous, with a passion for travel and gossip, Murray was a social chameleon. She had a talent for languages and had inherited both her mother’s beauty as well as ‘her ambiguous relationship with truth’ (Hordern 2023, 10). Respectability mattered deeply to her, and for much of her life she ‘enmeshed herself in a web of fiction’ to protect herself against ‘being … shamed and shunned’ (Hordern 2023, 10). In 1985, a decade after the death of her husband, she returned to Australia and lived with her brother and his wife at their home outside Wagga Wagga. Struggling with her health and memory, she later moved into a nursing home at Wagga Wagga, where she died on 7 January 2000. She was buried in the Wagga lawn cemetery.