Tax Dept Interest In Mrs Mellish

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31730, 13 July 1968, Page 13

Tax Dept Interest In Mrs Mellish

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright)

SYDNEY, July 12.

The Australian Taxation Department is investigating the alleged large income earned by 18-year-old Mrs Beryl Mellish as a self-confessed prostitute. Mrs Mellish recently made the headlines when she married Wallace Mellish at Glenfield near Sydney and later claimed that she was her husband’s hostage in the siege which made Australian history. For eight days Mellish held police at bay in a fibrolite cottage at suburban Glenfield before surrendering. The taxation inquiry will also cover payments made to Mrs Mellish for newspaper articles and a television appearance. The Deputy Taxation Commissioner (Mr R. R. Gray) said Mrs Mellish’s income had become subject of inquiry after her public disclosure that she had earned up to $l6O a night as a prostitute. Mrs Mellish’s attitude to her marriage was being discussed widely in Sydney, according

to the N.Z.P.A. staff correspondent. “At no time did she indicate in the slightest way that the wedding was against her wish,” said the police commissioner, Mr Norman Allan, who staked his job on the unusual tactics he used to end the siege. “It is not true to say that Beryl was an unwilling partner to the marriage,” said the Rev. Clyde Paton, the gaol chaplain who married the pair. “I didn’t fancy him, said Mrs Mellish, telling her own story in the “Daily Telegraph.” “He put his pistol on my face and said: ‘We're going to get married.’ “He said if 1 didn’t marry him he would kill me and my baby.” After the first chapter of Mrs Mellish’s story was published on Thursday, Mr Allen, who made special arrangements for the normal seven days notice to be waived and himself witnessed the wedding ceremony, said: “To suggest that she was married against her will and under duress is a shocking imputation against Mr Paton. “I want to say emphatically that Mr Paton was meticulous in his determination to make sure that she was marrying Mellish because she genuinely wanted to marry him.”