Kerry Isabelle Greenwood OAM was a greatly loved and wonderfully kind person. She was born in Footscray within hailing distance of the Footscray football ground, and discovered very early on that following Our Team was compulsory, even though she didn’t actually like football.
During home games, she would help her mother prepare refreshments for the muddied family members who would take refuge at half-time from the rigours of the Barkly Street end outer. On October 1, 2016, she found her home village bedecked in red, white and blue and celebrated with her football-mad Beloved.
Kerry met me at university, and she was the first person from her school ever to study law at the University of Melbourne. We moved into a precarious share house in Carlton, acquired our first cat and finished up in a weatherboard house in Seddon, where we stayed for the rest of Kerry’s long life.
Kerry Greenwood in her garden. Credit: David Greagg
The house is still standing, for obscure reasons. It is largely held up by books and spells, or possibly blind faith. It became a refuge for lost and stray animals, including cats, dogs, rabbits, ducks, possums, guinea-pigs, waifs and runaway – and in one case, a pregnant goat. Most were returned to their humans, but Quark accepted the position of watch-duck and lived out a long and happy life as warden of the back garden.
Despite her humble antecedents, and battling ill health since birth, Kerry had two burning ambitions in life: to be a Legal Aid solicitor and defend the poor and voiceless; and to be a famous author. When summoned to Government House to receive her Medal of the Order of Australia in 2020, it was made clear that this award was for writing books. More than 60 of them.
They have sold well over a million copies and have been translated into a dozen languages. Her detective Phryne Fisher is her best-known character, and the 23rd in the series, Murder in the Cathedral, will be published in November. Kerry also won renown for her series centred on baker–detective Corinna Chapman, as well as several YA books dealing with Australian history.
“The central core of her heart was her passion for justice.”
Kerry accepted an offer from Every Cloud Productions to dramatise Phryne for television, and several series and a feature movie, Crypt of Tears, resulted. Deb Cox and Fiona Eagger consulted her frequently and later described how helpful she was to deal with. It was a gloriously happy set, wherein everyone worked hard to make a period piece to remember.
But the central core of her heart was her passion for justice. The only time Kerry was ever at a loss for words was when an impertinent man accused her of waxing fat on the profits of crime. When she recovered from her outrage, she tartly informed him that these days, she appeared one day a week in Sunshine Magistrates’ Court for what was essentially petrol money.
The cost to the public purse for her brilliant advocacy was about six dollars per client. One of the best tributes to her is on her Facebook page, where one of the police prosecutors praised her work. She played hard but fair, and the clerks of courts, police officers and magistrates all came to trust and esteem her.
David Greagg and Kerry Greenwood in a cameo appearance on Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Credit:
What this meant in practice was that when she was faced with a genuinely deserving hard-luck story, and had given her client the Paddington-style Hard Stare to weed out the mendacious, she would push out the boat beyond the breakwater, and her client would be reprieved from prison.
Very few advocates are granted such an opportunity and it was only because Kerry’s given word was ironclad. Yes, we’ll plead guilty, with mitigation. Or no, it really wasn’t him. You’ll get him next time. Many a young law student watched her advocacy open-mouthed, realising that it was possible for a woman to succeed in this brutally hard profession.
In her novels, the police force is treated respectfully. The Victoria Police gave due recognition of this late in her life by awarding her an honorary police officer’s badge.
Kerry experienced tremendous difficulty articulating the word “no”; in consequence, she supported just about every charity going. She was also a singer, cook, embroiderer and seamstress who made most of her clothes.
The last word on her vocation may be left to her lifelong friend Mark, whose words at the funeral are a clarion-call to all of us:
“Jesus’ promise in the Sermon on the Mount can be hard to believe or hold to, as seekers after justice are all too often discounted, oppressed or crushed. In Kerry’s work, we can maybe see the counsel of the Rabbi Tarfon: ‘It is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but neither are you at liberty to abandon it.’”
Kerry is survived by me, her beloved sister Amanda, Francis, David, Steph, Ollie and Xavier, and loved friends too many to count.
Kerry Isabelle Greenwood OAM, June 17, 1954 – March 26, 2025