Australian Dictionary of Biography

Dulcie Noleine Scrimgeour (1915–1993), community worker and brothel madam, was born on 17 August 1915 at Blenheim, New Zealand, youngest of eleven children of English-born Richard Heyward, contractor, and his New Zealand-born wife Eliza Bernadina Carolina, née Lange. Little is known of Dulcie’s early life. After her mother died in 1935, she left for a trip to Europe, giving her occupation on the shipping register as waitress. She arrived in London en route to the Channel Islands in December 1935. Two years later she sailed to Western Australia to join one of her brothers, Barney, who owned an amusement park and side-show at Kalgoorlie.

There Dulcie was befriended by Albert Charles Paull who was working at the side-show as a magician. Her life then took a more public and dramatic turn. Paull was married with three children, although not living with his wife. In November 1939 Dulcie gave birth to a daughter, Lorriane Thelma, who Paull acknowledged as his child and who took his surname. Disputes over his payment of child maintenance culminated in a showdown in early January 1941 on South Beach, Fremantle. Dulcie slashed Paull’s face with a razor, apparently in frustration at his continued failure to support his child. The episode and subsequent court case received extensive coverage in the press. She was found guilty of unlawful wounding, but the jury made a strong recommendation for mercy ‘on account of extenuating circumstances’ (Daily News 1941, 9). The judge ordered her to be released on a bond.

According to the testimony Dulcie gave at the trial, the affair with Paull, the birth of her child, and Paull’s failure to provide financial support had led her into a life of prostitution. She had begun work as a cook and domestic in a Roe Street brothel in Perth in the weeks surrounding the birth of the baby. When she returned to Kalgoorlie, she started sex work in order to support herself and the child as well as pay her debts. She continued to work in the sex industry in Kalgoorlie and Perth for much of her life, graduating from sex worker to brothel madam. In 1941 or 1942 she formed a lifelong relationship with William Thomas (Tom) Scrimgeour, a truck driver, and thereafter was usually known as Dulcie or Mary Scrimgeour, or just Mary Scrim. The couple had one child, Roland John Charles Scrimgeour, born in 1951; he was killed in a car accident in 1956.

Dulcie’s life and career was representative of many women in Australia at the time who found that selling sex was a lucrative and readily available way to earn money. It was also easier to combine this work with family responsibilities than was the case for most other ‘female’ occupations. Only a small minority, however, were engaged in the sex industry for such a long period—over four decades in Dulcie’s case. One of the more successful of sex industry entrepreneurs, she survived major changes in policing regimes. She worked in and ran brothels on both Hay Street, Kalgoorlie, and Roe Street, Perth, at a time when these locations operated under unofficial police tolerance and oversight. When the Roe Street establishments were closed in 1958, the sex industry was driven into the suburbs, but selected operators were still tolerated under the so-called ‘containment policy.’ Dulcie adapted to this shift and opened two of the city’s best-known ‘massage parlours’—the Happy Haven and Paradise Chicks in Maylands. She administered her businesses out of her large, rambling house in Third Avenue, Mount Lawley, but employed women to do the onsite management. A plump woman with a motherly manner and a fondness for baking cakes and making homemade soap, she was well liked by her workers. She also avoided serious confrontation with police by carefully vetting her employees for criminal connections and drug use.

Although Dulcie’s parlours did well for several decades, by the 1980s business was flagging and she was declared bankrupt. She moved into a flat in The Avenue, Nedlands, with Tom, who died in 1990, and her extensive collection of antique porcelain dolls. In her later years she used her middle name, Noleine, and despite several heart by-pass operations and diabetes she was described as ‘a vibrant woman who enjoyed shocking people’ (Post 1993, 3). Still widely known in Perth, she devoted her time to charity and senior citizens’ groups. She also continued her support of disabled people, an interest she developed from meeting disabled clients during her time in the sex industry. On 8 November 1993 she died while visiting her daughter and three grandchildren in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Her body was repatriated to Western Australia and buried in the Fremantle cemetery beside Tom and Roland.