From what I’ve uncovered, my first cousin three times removed, Amy Jane Vaughan, had a difficult life. Never more so than when at fifteen years of age her life took an unexpected turn, and was splashed all over the newspapers in late 1901.

Amy’s parents married in 1876, when her mother Sarah Atkins was just 14 and her father, my 2x great-granduncle, Thomas Vaughan was 31. The marriage seems to have lasted about ten years, and Amy was the youngest of their six children.

Sarah then began a defacto relationship with John Lowe, her half-nephew by marriage, and they had five children together between 1890 and 1901. Sarah’s children with Thomas Vaughan, including Amy, sometimes went by the surname Vaughan and sometimes by Lowe.

Warning: This post includes details that may be distressing, including a fifteen-year-old girl being lured into prostitution.

When a job offer is too good to be true

In June 1901 Amy travelled from where she was living in Gundagai to Sydney. She went on the understanding from an acquaintance she’d known just a week, Charlotte (Lottie) Smith, that there was a job described as “the chance of a lifetime” waiting for her at a boarding house.

Amy reported cleaning—sweeping and dusting—during the first week after her arrival at the house in Francis Street near Hyde Park. However, she also observed certain comings and goings of men at all hours, and was soon forced to “have improper relations with them”.

Amy had unwittingly found herself living and working in a brothel where it was alleged she was held, letters to and from her mother were checked and censored, and she was only able to go out in the company of the boarding house keeper.

Court case

Two women, Myra Halkett alias Emily Jackson alias JJ Tobin, and Charlotte (Lottie) Smith, were charged with fraudulently detaining Amy, who was underage, and doing so against the will of her mother, for a “certain purpose”. They both pleaded not guilty.

The court case made headlines from October to December 1901, with various allegations and evidence reported in detail. The prosecution’s case was that Amy was lured to Sydney on the promise of a “good situation”, but instead introduced to “a house of a questionable character”.

Charlotte Smith was eventually found not guilty. Myra Halkett was found guilty and sentenced to five years imprisonment.

Amy’s future

Amy returned to Gundagai, but her life didn’t improve greatly.

In October 1902, Amy was charged with “having no lawful visible means of support”, although she said she was living with her sister, Alice. Reports of the case raised her recent legal trouble, and said she’d been seen “in the company of a reputed prostitute … [and she had admitted] she suffered from a certain disease ever since she was in Sydney”.

The magistrate said if Amy had been younger she would have been sent to a reformatory, but because she was sixteen he had to convict. He noted that “it was evident she had been more sinned against than sinning, and no doubt [the Sydney] case was the cause of her being in her present condition. The best thing he could do was … send her to Goulburn gaol [for four months], and then if there was anything the matter with her the time would allow her going out of the gaol in proper health.”

The next record I could find of Amy was in 1904 when she gave birth to a daughter named Violet, with no father for the child recorded. Four years after that, in October 1908, she married Cecil Higgin. Then in 1926, Amy died of syncope heart disease at the age of 39.

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Select references

‘Two Women Charged with Procuring a Girl’, The Daily Telegraph, 9 October 1901, page 10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article237374401, accessed 1 March 2026.

‘A Serious Charge. Against Two Women. Policy Court Proceedings. Sensational Evidence’, Evening News, 9 October 1901, page 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article112574809, accessed 1 March 2026.

‘Charge of Procuring. Against Two Women. The Accused Committed’, The Australian Star, 11 October 1901, page 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article112574809, accessed 1 March 2026.

‘Central Criminal Court. A Charge of Abduction.’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 December 1901, page 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article14429337, accessed 1 March 2026.

‘Alleged Abduction. A Gundagai Case. Halkett Gets Five Years. Smith is Acquitted.’, The Gundagai Independent and Pastoral, 18 December 1901, page 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article120256516, accessed 1 March 2026.

‘A Serious Charge. Alleged Incitement to False Swearing. Arising Out of the Abduction Case.’, The Australian Star, 18 December 1901, page 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article228287848, accessed 1 March 2026.

‘Police Court. Vagrancy.’, Cootamundra Herald, 11 October 1902, page 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article144046637, accessed 1 March 2026.

‘An Unhappy Young Woman’, The Gundagai Times, 14 October 1902, page 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article123542972, accessed 1 March 2026.