BIOGRAPHY
Bee Miles: Australia’s Famous Bohemian Rebel, And The Untold Story Behind The Legend
Rose Ellis
Allen & Unwin, $34.99

Among Sydneysiders of a certain era, Bee Miles was a name everybody knew, and many people could remember seeing her in the streets of the inner city. For almost half a century beginning in the 1920s, Bee was celebrated as the best-known Sydney “character”. Long before phone cameras and social media, Bee attracted sustained media attention like no one else before.

Members of my family recalled seeing Bee (for Beatrice) standing on the running boards of trams loudly refusing to pay the fare, or jumping into taxis or private cars stopped at the lights and demanding a free ride. She was renowned for her ability to quote passages from Shakespeare for a busker’s fee and for her defiant speeches from the dock.

In an otherwise mostly staid post-war period, Miles stood out as a genuine free spirit, darting around Sydney unconcerned about what the world might think of her. Bourgeois bohemians usually turn out to be poseurs, but Bee was authentic, questioning society’s norms and maintaining a fierce individualism while sleeping in drains and church porticos.

Apart from Shakespeare, her literary heroes included Swift and H.L. Mencken. “I am not antisocial,” she declared during one of her many court appearances. “I am only anti the existing social order”.

Miles’ authenticity, as Rose Ellis describes in this fascinating biography, came at considerable personal cost. “By the time of her death in 1973 she had been arrested more than 300 times, had been in prisons and lockups in most parts of the country and had been a patient in at least seven psychiatric hospitals.“

While there were people who tolerated and even indulged her antics, there were some in authority, including certain members of the police, who abused her verbally and physically. She would receive rough treatment in a foreign place such as Melbourne, where she was relatively unknown and regarded by the authorities as just another public nuisance.

Miles’ independence precluded subsuming herself in human relationships. “While, by her own admission, she had been sexually active in her twenties, by her thirties she had adopted a life of ‘simplicity and virtue’,” writes Ellis. “She found most men sexually repulsive, and the ones she desired she placed deliberately out of reach.” A militant atheist, some of the strongest bonds in Miles’ life were formed with clergymen and nuns.