Nellie Cameron

Nellie Cameron (1910–1953), known as "The Kiss of Death Girl", was a notorious Sydney prostitute in the 1920s and 1930s, who was featured extensively in the 2011 Australian television mini-series Underbelly: Razor. Cameron was associated with the cocaine-fuelled ravages of the razor gang violence of that era, commonly associated with her contemporaries, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, both criminal entrepreneurs who controlled much of Sydney's illegal sex industry and Sly-grog distribution during that period. Nellie Cameron received 73 criminal convictions during her life of crime, mainly for soliciting and vagrancy, and had the distinction of becoming the first woman in Australia to be convicted of consorting with criminals.

Ellen (Nellie) Katherine Kelly was born in the inner city Sydney suburb of Waterloo in 1910, the youngest child of Colin Kelly, who later served in the AIF in World War I, and Lillian Kelly (née Ruddock), and the sister of Lionel, who was born in 1907, but died soon after, and William Colin, who was born in 1908, but who died of cerebral meningitis on 5 December 1910 in Bulli Cottage Hospital, NSW. Colin Kelly was later divorced by his wife, Lillian Kelly, on the grounds of desertion.

After Nellie's mother married Robert George Cameron in 1922, Nellie took her stepfather's surname for most of her adult life. Cameron was a Roman Catholic and was educated at an exclusive girls' school on the North Shore.

In 1926 Cameron ran away from home, caught a train to the city, seduced a married tram driver, and began living with him in Woolloomooloo.

When Cameron began her career in prostitution in 1926 in Sydney's Surry Hills and Woolloomooloo districts at the age of fifteen, she was a blue-eyed blonde. Soon Cameron became Sydney's most popular and most expensive prostitute and was known as Sydney's Underworld Beauty Queen and also as the "Kiss Of Death Girl" or "The Angel Of Death", as most of her boyfriends or husbands were subsequently murdered. During her years in crime, Cameron was kidnapped, beaten, stabbed, razor slashed, and shot on numerous occasions.

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