The accordion, or squeezebox, takes its name from the German Akkordeon, meaning a ‘musical chorus’ or ‘chorus of sounds’. This box-shaped aerophonic instrument makes music when keys on its sides are pressed, one side mostly melody, the other chords. Squeezing the instrument and playing with both hands, the musician dexterously produces polyphonous music.

Iris Webber, the protagonist of Fiona Kelly McGregor’s eighth book and fourth novel, Iris, plays the accordion. Living in Sydney’s inner-city Surry Hills in the 1930s, Iris wrests independence and joy from this, as an alternative to being a ‘prossie’ and as respite from pervasive brutality. Though busking – ‘begging alms’ – is illegal, it’s a simpler way to make a living for Iris, enmeshed and dependent on a net of underworld unlawful activity.

McGregor’s Iris is a fictional version of Iris Eileen Mary Webber, née Shingles. More is known about Tilly Devine (‘Queen of Woolloomooloo’) and Kate Leigh, women who battled for control of inner Sydney, running razor gangs, brothels, and ‘sly grog’ shops, and circulating stolen goods and drugs. While it was illegal in New South Wales for men to run brothels or to profit from sex work, these laws did not extend to women, creating the opportunity that Devine and Leigh seized. Both were formidable, but also ruthless, attacking women and men, something their legacy blurs. There is now a wine bar in Darlinghurst called Love, Tilly Devine; it proffers fine wine (legally) and ‘Italian nibbles’, and snaffles its distractingly twee name from someone who was probably a criminal sociopath. Iris, poor, savagely assaulted from a young age, with no one to protect her but herself and a shiv or knuckleduster, tends to be remembered less affectionately.