She was involved in a wide range of activities, including sly-grog, razor gangs, and prostitution, and became a famous folk figure in Sydney during the interwar years.

[2] Both Tilly and Jim Devine rapidly became prominent illegal narcotics dealers, brothel owners and crime gangs members in the Sydney criminal milieu.

In five years she had accumulated a long list of convictions; the numerous offences ranged from common prostitution to indecent language, offensive behaviour and assault.

Elite "call girls" were available for politicians, businessmen and overseas guests of significance, while "tenement girls" were young working-class women who resorted to casual prostitution to supplement their drug spending, clothing and meagre earnings during times of Australian criminal and narcotic culture, absence of a comprehensive welfare state and unemployment.

She owned much real estate in Sydney, many luxury cars, looted gold and diamond jewellery and travelled by ship in first class staterooms.

James Edward Joseph (Jim) Devine was an WWI ex-serviceman and shearer,[7] who was a violent 'stand-over' man, a convicted thief, a pimp, drug dealer, vicious thug and gunman.

On 9 January 1931, Jim was charged at Central Police Court with the attempted murder of his wife after a heated argument at their Maroubra home.

[19][20] Devine married for the second time on 19 May 1945 to ex-seaman and returned serviceman Eric John Parsons (born Melbourne 1901, died Sydney 1958).

[27] Although Devine had been one of Sydney's wealthiest women, by 1955 the Taxation Department ordered her to pay more than £20,000 in unpaid income tax and fines sending her close to bankruptcy.

[citation needed] Devine had suffered from chronic bronchitis for 20 years, and died of cancer, aged 70 at the Concord Repatriation Hospital in Sydney on 24 November 1970.

[1] She was cremated at Botany Crematorium, now known as Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park, on 26 November 1970 with Catholic rites by her married name, Matilda Mary Parsons.

"[31] Peter Kenna wrote a play called The Slaughter of St Teresa’s Day (1973 Currency Press),[32] where the lead character was based on Devine.

In August 2011, Australia's Channel Nine commenced screening Underbelly: Razor, a true crime television drama series that deals with the Leigh/Devine Sydney gangland wars in the 1930s.

Devine is a background character in Kerry Greenwood's Death Before Wicket, the tenth Phryne Fisher novel, which is set in Sydney in 1928.