‘I thanked God for the axe’: Historic case shines light on women who kill

November 1, 2026 — 5:00am

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Michael Adams is the Australian writer and presenter behind the popular history podcast, Forgotten Australia. He has just begun a new show called Australian Murder.

Fitz: Michael, thank you for your time. Our crime reporter Perry Duffin penned an interesting article this week, reporting that in this state, “Women who kill their partners are almost always killing their abuser.”

MA: I read it, and it was very interesting.

Fitz: He was relying on data from the NSW Coroner’s Domestic Violence Death Dashboard, which tracks the 2234 homicides in this state between 2000 and 2026, and looked at the 336 intimate partner murders. It showed that 80 per cent of those killed were women, and in 99 per cent of the cases the murderer had been abusing them.

MA: Yes, and no surprises there.

Fitz: But it also showed that in 73 per cent of the cases when women killed their partners, they were killing the primary abuser in the relationship. (So much for Pauline Hanson’s domestic violence is “a two-way street”. It shows a superhighway going one way, and a tiny laneway coming the other way.) It just so happened that this was published at pretty much the same time you released a new true-crime podcast called Australian Murder, and the first episode, The Beast Must Die, is about a staggering axe murder in little ol’ Canberra in 1955. Before we get to that though, my first question: You’ve been studying and researching Australian murders committed since the earliest colonial times. Is the phenomenon Perry Duffin highlighted consistent with the way it has always been in this country?

Pauline, we’ve both been DV victims, so why do you describe it so differently?

MA: Absolutely. This is not a recent phenomenon, and there are a couple of significant aspects to it, historically. What has fascinated me is how the law itself, which was so brutal to women in allowing domestic violence to occur unfettered, could then flip, and acquit the abused woman if it was established that the abuse really was terrible, as occurred in the 1955 case. I mean, for most of Australian history, women most often couldn’t get a divorce on the basis of their husband’s “cruelty” or “ill-treatment” – because men had the legal right to use violence against their wives to keep them under control.

Fitz: Hang on, Australian men could physically hurt their wives within the law?

MA: Astounding and appalling, isn’t it? In the words of Dr Colin James’ essay A History of Cruelty in Australian Divorce, “The law deemed violence by the husband … to be necessary to control disruption in the family and to restrain a wife who threatened the marriage by irrational behaviour or by attempting to leave the home.” So, only in cases where the man “went too far” might the wife successfully complain to the police or to the divorce courts. And it was pretty much like that until 1975 when no-fault divorce came in. Before that, women were often trapped in marriages, brutalised, and there........

© The Age