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TALL ORDER TO
Reach Dream Fifty-five years after she applied to join Victoria Police, Sadie ‘Lassie’ Mahoney has finally experienced a taste of life as an officer. In 1964, a then 27-year-old Lassie had applied to join Victoria’s policing ranks, something she said had been a long-time dream. “I don’t exactly know why it was always a dream; I think it was a sense of authority and maybe the uniform,” Lassie said. But having had her initial application knocked back as she did not meet the height requirement of 5 feet 4 inches (162.5cm), the ever-tenacious Lassie made the trip from Warrnambool to Melbourne to challenge the decision, eventually taking her case all the way to the Chief Commissioner.
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POLICE LIFE | WINTER 2019
“I applied and I first got a letter straight back saying ‘We can’t consider your application because you’re only 5 feet 3 inches (160cm)’,” Lassie said. “But I was talking to another girl who was a policewoman and she said ‘We’ll see about that’. So we went down to the barracks on St Kilda Road and went in and saw the guy at the desk. “But he just wouldn’t even consider me because I wasn’t 5 feet 4 inches.” Undeterred, Lassie returned home and penned a letter to the Chief Commissioner – but it was to no avail.
“I got the same sort of letter back saying even though there was only a small number of policewomen and they needed more, they couldn’t take me because of the standards set by the government,” Lassie recalled. In a last-ditch bid to reach the required height, Lassie sent away for a stretching device she saw advertised in a magazine. “You hung it over the door and you did these stretching exercises with these rope things, but unfortunately it didn’t help, I didn’t gain any height.”
