Mad or Bad?
The Life and Exploits of Amy Bock 1859–1943
Jenny Coleman
Otago University Press
RRP $49.95

This is the first full-length biography of New Zealand’s most notorious female criminal and con artist and it is being published next week.

Amy Bock’s life has been the inspiration for plays, books, a television programme, a photographic exhibition, a musical composition and in 2009 the re-enactment of her wedding as Percy Redwood at Kaka Point 100 years ago. While Amy gained notoriety for her impersonation of a man and marriage with an unsuspecting woman, in Mad or Bad? the author shows how her whole life was not a straightforward case of fraud and misrepresentation.

Born in Hobart, Tasmania, Amy had a convict heritage on both sides of her family and a talent for acting.
After teaching for six years in Victorian schools until she was asked to resign, she migrated to New Zealand in 1884. Assuming a variety of personae, remaining conveniently itinerant, and demonstrating great skill in writing convincing letters, she pursued a consistent course of petty crime for the next twenty-fi ve years, becoming well known to the New Zealand police and serving several sentences in the process.
However, Amy’s story is not that of a typical con artist. While she exploited both strangers and those close to her – to the extent that her family kept their distance – she frequently gifted the proceeds to others and consistently pleaded guilty. And she eventually found a community in New Zealand who were happy to have her as a local personality.
Biographer Jenny Coleman encountered an intriguing problem in researching this account of her subject’s life – when to believe the evidence before her and when not, when so much of Amy’s life was fabricated?
In presenting her colourful and chequered life, this book allows the reader to judge whether Amy Bock was essentially mad or just bad.
I think she was probably a combination of both.

About the author:
Jenny Coleman is currently Programme Coordinator for the Women’s Studies Programme at Massey University and was Coordinating Editor for the Women’s Studies Journal, 2004 to 2009. Her research interests are in nineteenth-century women’s history, feminist biography and media representations of feminism.