About me
I'm B. This is me with my mum. To entertain Mama when she was in hospital some years back, I started trawling Trove for references to my maternal family.
​
I knew we had a murdered aunt, Bridget Mary Hopgood (nee O'Callaghan). She was Mum's mother's aunt and was known whimsically by our family as "Wild Bridgie". She'd married a man my great-great grandparents disapproved of. She ended up dead at his hands.
​
When results started coming back from newspapers across Australia, I realised Bridget's death was more than a tragic family legend. One of my maternal family - good, Irish Catholic farming stock who seldom made the local paper - had briefly been a national news story.
​
I felt a growing sense of outrage as I read Bridget's news clippings. Her killer received reams of sympathetic coverage. The manner of Bridget's death was rehashed in grisly detail. Scant attention was paid to who Bridget might have been. She was mostly referred to in the context of the male relationships in her life: her husband, her dad, her brother.
​
This blog is my attempt to get to know Bridget, maybe find the girl behind the lurid headlines. I'm relying on the following sources:
-
oral family history
-
family documents
-
contemporaneous news coverage
-
offical documents from Queensland's State Archives and the State Library of Queenslan.
​
I can't change what happened to Bridget. I can ensure her legacy isn't to be a footnote to her own murder.
​
#WildBridgie