In 2026, The Big Issue celebrates its 30th birthday – the perfect time to revisit our fave stories from the past three decades. This edition, we’re republishing a Fiction Edition favourite: Aidan Prewett’s short story about the 1986 theft of a Picasso from the NGV, now adapted into his debut novel.
The Weeping Woman
by Aidan Prewett
Illustrated by Alice Lindstrom
Melbourne, August 1986.
Phoebe tucked the painting under her arm and quietly slipped aboard a W-class tram outside the National Gallery. It was a Sunday morning, and the carriage was half-filled with people heading towards the city, perhaps on their way to St Paul’s Cathedral, a museum or the Yarra to take a stroll before the afternoon footy. Phoebe took a seat in a single row by the window. She rested the painting on her knee. It was wrapped in a student’s cardboard art folio.
Around her, passengers slouched on scuffed brown seats or clutched at leather straps to stand in the aisle. Bubble skirts mingled with shoulder pads and acid wash jeans. A few people wore yellow-and-black knitted scarves. One man stood by a door in a long-sleeved Fitzroy jumper. There were teenagers with stupid haircuts, adults with stupid haircuts. There was a Dipper moustache. A couple of punks at the back had green and pink spiked hair, their ears safety-pinned.
The doors slid shut and the tram jerked away. Phoebe let out a long breath. No attendant had come running after her. No uniformed guard had accosted the driver, demanding the arrest of one of the passengers. She was getting away. Phoebe stared out at the monolithic bluestone gallery, at the gushing waterfall streaming down its glass opening. The gallery appeared to be weeping.
A tram conductor ambled up the aisle, brown satchel swinging, eager to punch Phoebe’s yellow Travelcard. She thanked him and turned back to the window, absorbing the rhythmic clatter, wondering about jail terms for thefts of invaluable paintings. She thought back to an old episode of Prisoner, an inmate whinging that cops only had to be lucky once. Criminals had to be lucky every step of the way.
Then she remembered this was supposed to be a dry run.
Phoebe was meant to have spent the night in the museum to take notes on the number of watchmen, timing their movements and noting their security measures. But Phoebe was easily bored. She’d hidden in a toilet cubicle, hoping she could slide between stalls when the guards came snooping. If she’d been caught, she’d have claimed cramps, even if it were hours after closing. Even if she’d been caught with a painting.
In any case, the guards had hardly checked the bathrooms. She’d heard the door open, a male voice calling, “Anyone in here? Nah, thought not.” Then the fluoro lights clicked off, the door swung closed again. Phoebe waited around in the dark stall for what felt like an eternity. Eventually she got antsy and snuck out into the corridor.
Morning light filtered through Phoebe’s getaway tram. A passenger in a camel wool coat stared out toward the Botanic Gardens. The city seemed peaceful, normal, blessed with a Sunday morning ease. But Phoebe’s heart raced, her hands jittered. She gripped the folio tighter. Through thick cardboard she could feel the edge of the canvas that had been stretched over rough wood half a century before. This was no dry run. She felt an electric charge in her blood.
Phoebe recognised this feeling. Her first theft had been at age seven – a Polly Waffle nicked from the corner milk bar. She’d immediately torn the chocolate bar from its purple wrapper and savoured the marshmallowy sweetness. There was no investigation, no repercussions. The next day she’d walked out with the whole box.
But Phoebe wasn’t prepared for the guilt and terror that would seep through her veins day and night after that. The Polly Waffle box had sat under her bed, burning a hole through the mattress and into her perspiring heart. She couldn’t bring herself to eat any of them, and eventually dumped the entire box in the bin, covering it with an old Women’s Weekly. Seven-year-old Phoebe promised herself she’d never steal again.
Promise forgotten, Phoebe had volunteered for this mission.
There were three of them, each a misfit in their own world. Bronte was the mastermind. Phoebe was the orchestrator. Dave was their typist. The trio had found each other in the first week of art school. Painters, half drunk on the perpetual smell of turpentine and mineral spirits, they’d been struck with visions of cat burglary during a behind-the-scenes tour of the gallery in those first weeks of study. They’d noted the specialised two-pronged screwdrivers necessary to install or remove a painting from its wall mounting brackets. They’d noted which backroom workshop housed the necessary equipment.
Bronte came up with the idea of the ransom as a protest against major funding cuts to the arts. She was a strikingly attractive abstract expressionist. Phoebe, meanwhile, considered herself a pop artist. She wanted immediacy, adrenaline. Dave, the modern romantic of the group, just wanted to get into Bronte’s pants. Dave had kicked off his first year at art school by insisting everyone call him Davidé. It didn’t stick.
Sometime later, between drinking games, the trio had idealised the fusion of grand larceny and performance art. They sat around on the bedroom floor in Dave’s tiny share house to compose the ransom note on his typewriter. He fancied himself a lyricist, maybe the next Paul Kelly if his painting career didn’t take off.
The three of them weren’t perfect, but they cared about each other and they cared about art. They cared about their future as Australian artists. The demands were simple: a ten per cent increase to state funding for the arts, and five new annual competitions for young artists, with significant government prize money.
Dave banged out the letter in two-finger fashion. “Let’s call the Arts Minister a pompous fathead,” he said, typing the words before the other two could stop him.
Phoebe’s tram rattled over Princes Bridge. The Yarra River might have been winking at her, or blinking back tears. Emotions lapped at the back of Phoebe’s mind but she brushed them off. She was well-practised.
She had always known a certain sadness. Sadness and anger. Ever since she was little, she’d felt somehow insignificant, somehow unwanted. Like nothing she did ever seemed to matter at all, to anyone. She lamented that even her stolen Polly Waffles went unnoticed, her parents too caught up in their own drama, her teachers too enamoured with the academic kids, her friends too busy trying to be everything they weren’t.
But Phoebe’s sadness never showed. She built walls. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d let herself cry. It was better to focus on her anger, which she saw as productive. It helped motivate her. It helped extract the art from her mind. It helped her steal a bloody Picasso.
Churchgoers disembarked for St Paul’s under the shadow of the Gas & Fuel towers. Phoebe clutched the painting, resolute, and followed them off the tram a few steps across
Swanston Street, then through the crowd under the Flinders Street clocks towards the trams heading west. She felt eyes on her. The cardboard folio stuck out, too large, like it was swelling. Shallow breaths, tight throat. Phoebe pushed the feelings away. She focussed instead on the City Hatters signage with its art nouveau lettering, the same vintage as the Picasso.
This particular Picasso fascinated Phoebe. She’d stared into the swollen eyes of The Weeping Woman for a drawn-out moment before she unscrewed the frame from its mounting. She felt a kind of kinship. The woman, painted in acid green, was distraught, misshapen, clutching a tissue towards distended eyeballs, powerless and trapped in a windowless grey room that shrunk behind her. Her face was exaggerated with a thick black outline. To Phoebe, The Weeping Woman was pop art before pop art was invented.
Phoebe clutched the painting to her chest and climbed aboard another tram, a newer one this time. Concertina doors swept closed on her heels. She settled into a rough fabric‑covered seat at the back and stared out at the crowd of people crossing at Young and Jackson. The tram wheels squealed over a patch of uneven track.
The overhead fluorescent lights went dark for a moment.
The gallery corridor was dark.
Phoebe saw a torch beam at the far end of the hall. She followed it. The night watchman led her down a long passage, straight past the “Staff Only” door of the workshop room. It was too easy, the door was unlocked. Even in the darkness, Phoebe found the steel cabinet of tools and, feeling around, was able to locate the twin-pronged screwdriver. She then sourced a tattered cardboard folio and a pair of latex gloves.
Phoebe stared down the aisle of the tram.
These passengers were the weekend morning residue – the bleary-eyed partygoers, the drunks, the young, the people of the night returning home. Around them, Flinders Street was a series of old and new hotels, pubs, smaller shopfronts – some nefarious. The south side of the street was all columns and pillars and brickwork and bluestone walls clashing endlessly through more than a century of railway maintenance. Overlapping graffiti surrounded the words “Goondiwindi Now!” sprayed on a vulnerable patch of stucco.
Rain began to spatter against the glass. People outside scrambled under awnings. Headlights turned on. The street glistened like a wet cheek. A car ahead swerved off-kilter for a moment, caught in the now-invisible tram track. Horns sounded. The tram jerked to a halt. A couple of standing
passengers took awkward steps to right themselves, lunging for the dangling straps.
A man with a wet umbrella took the seat next to Phoebe. She shuffled herself closer to the window and pulled the painting away from him, having to stop herself from saying, “Don’t you know I’m protecting a priceless artwork?” Again, Phoebe felt the anger and sadness rising inside her, but she bit down and thought about the night before.
She’d counted only two gallery watchmen.
Both were close to retirement by the looks of it. As she stood in front of The Weeping Woman she calculated she’d have nearly a full hour before either came back through the International Collection. Bugger the dry run, she thought. If this is going to work, it’s going to work now.
The painting came down smoothly. Phoebe quietly removed the frame and concealed it by placing it on a high ledge. Then she turned back to the blank wall. In place of The Weeping Woman she positioned a piece of card, typed by Dave: THIS PAINTING HAS BEEN REMOVED FOR ROUTINE MAINTENANCE.
Phoebe had picked up the canvas and headed back through the dark hallways to the bathroom. There she sat, shivering on the cold seat, and slipped the most expensive painting ever purchased by an Australian gallery into a tattered cardboard folio.
Two cops in peaked caps and dark leather jackets stepped onto the tram at Elizabeth Street.
Phoebe avoided their gaze for a moment, then thought better of it and looked back with a kind of double take that made her go cross-eyed. The cops ignored her and made a quick lap of the carriage, sizing up the other passengers, then stepped off at Queen Street. Phoebe let out her breath in unison with the rest of the tram. She realised she’d been suffocating herself.
The gallery lights finally flickered on in the morning.
Five minutes past opening time, Phoebe slipped out of her bathroom hiding place and joined the excited mass buzzing around the foyer, probably off to see The Weeping Woman. At the exit she flashed a smile at a yawning attendant, who, noting her bulky student art folio, opened the door for her. Phoebe stepped through, past the glistening waterfall and out to the fountains on St Kilda Road. Her senses sharpened, she inhaled the sweet chlorine smell. She saw a little girl toss a coin into the water to make a wish. Phoebe made one herself. She felt the exhilaration of a first victory. She strode out across the street towards the waiting doorway of a W-class tram. Ding, ding.
Something cold tugged at Phoebe’s thoughts. She’d been up all night and was having trouble processing the gravity of the theft. It occurred to her that they used to hang people for lesser crimes, just a few blocks north. Way lesser crimes. And she’d implicated Bronte and Dave. They were accomplices, even though they’d only planned for the reconnaissance mission.
The tram passed William Street, the buildings larger, grander – Customs House and the old Port Authority. Above, the buildings were topped with massive billboards for tomato sauce and cigarettes, one saying “Life. Be in it”, and another, a margarine advertisement, announcing “You ought to be congratulated”.
Phoebe made a new promise to herself. If she was caught between here and Spencer Street Station, she’d never talk. She’d never talk, period. She’d take a vow of silence and go live on a hillside. Even if the hillside was within Pentridge H Division.
A buzzer. Somebody getting off at King Street.
Phoebe wanted to get off. But she couldn’t. She clenched her jaw. Bile rose in her stomach. Don’t vomit on the painting, she thought. That would be a major publicity failure. She imagined the headline: WANNABE ART THIEF SPEWS ON PICASSO. Humiliation, then serious jail time.
The tram made a sharp corner under the railway viaduct and into Spencer Street, with the rough vibration of steel scraping on steel. The inertia pulled passengers sideward. A train rattled overhead.
Only another minute now.
The tram continued down Spencer Street, past the immense old-world hotels towards the rail terminus. Phoebe could see it ahead: the red brick box, trimmed with white edging and a big V/Line logo. The regional hub of Victoria and beyond, with red-and-grey trains departing for Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat, Sydney, Adelaide…pick your fancy.
Phoebe had other ideas.
No cops in sight – she would head straight for the luggage lockers. If she got there, she would stash the painting for the time being. Its disappearance and eventual recovery would make a grand statement for the arts. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Phoebe pushed through the tram doors. Her feet hit bitumen, solid ground. She crossed Spencer Street, the Picasso firmly in her grasp, and entered the station.
Phoebe had made it. The Weeping Woman had made it.
A long row of steel lockers. Hands trembling, she pushed ten cents into a slot to release the key. Her heart pounded. Exhilaration returned, tinged with another familiar feeling. Here she was, making the artistic statement of her life. And, if everything went well, nobody would ever know it was hers.
Phoebe swung the locker door open and eased the painting inside. She felt a flood of emotion. This time she wouldn’t hold back. She’d held it all back for much too long.
Phoebe turned the key, took a step back, and wept.
Aidan Prewett teaches music at a high school in Melbourne. By night, he writes for Rolling Stone and Political Animal. Adapted from this story in The Big Issue’s 2024 Fiction Edition, his debut novel, The Picasso Ransom, is out now through Pan Macmillan Australia.
First published Ed#718