'Sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne were judged morally corrupt by the respectable world around them. But theirs was a thriving trade, with links to the police and political leaders of the day, and the leading brothels were usually managed by women.
'While today a popular bar and a city lane are famously named after Madame Brussels, the identities of the other ‘flash madams’, the ‘dressed girls’ who worked for them and the hundreds of women who solicited on the streets of the Little Lon district of Melbourne are not remembered.
'Who were they? What did their daily lives look like? What became of them? Drawing on the findings of recent archaeological excavations, rare archival material and family records, historian Barbara Minchinton brings the fascinating world of Little Lon to life.''
Source : publisher's blurb
'This is a book with an axe to grind. Specifically, the author is very aggrieved at the way in which Melbourne’s colonial sex work and sex workers are represented in what she calls ‘tabloid histories’, especially historical tours and websites relating to Little Lonsdale Street’s brothels. She characterises this tabloid history as history that ‘prefers titillation to truth, and values sales above respect for its subjects, breathing sensationalism and the colourful language of denigration’ (2). Curiously, though, she provides few specific examples of the target of her annoyance – in the case of offending websites she states that she ‘refuses to dignify any of these efforts with references’ (279). As a result, the argument has a very ‘straw man’ feel. This reader was irritated by the approach, and the frequent chastising meted out to ‘historians’ (without the earlier qualification of ‘tabloid’) throughout the book, again with few specific examples. Although Minchinton’s published work in refereed journals indicates that she is aware of the broader academic historiography of sex work in Australia as a subject that has attracted solid research and subtle analysis, very little of this historical scholarship is referred to, leaving the reader with the impression that she is the only writer with valid historical skills. And her claims to focus on the ‘facts’ rather than the sensational are belied by the very cover of the book, which features a raunchy photo of a sex worker in Vienna, not Melbourne or even Australia.'(Introduction)
'Victoria’s sex industry is about to undergo a major transformation with the state government vowing to introduce legislation to decriminalise sex work by the end of 2021. Sex worker activists have welcomed the move towards decriminalisation – as is the case in New South Wales (since 1995), Aotearoa New Zealand (2003) and the Northern Territory (2019) – as a crucial step in removing the stigma attached to sex work, and ensuring workers have the same human rights as people in other industries. It is a long-awaited departure from the current status of legalisation, which has created a two-tiered system whereby a select few brothels are regulated and licensed, while the majority of workers are forced to operate outside the law and without legal protection.' (Introduction)
'We routinely think of the past as a subtext of the present, but in The Women of Little Lon Barbara Minchinton flips this around. She aims not only to ‘dismantle the myths and counter misinformation and deliberate distortions’ about sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne, but – in an explicitly #MeToo context – to ‘reduce the stigma attached to the work today’ while heightening our ‘understanding of and respect for the lives of all sex workers’.' (Introduction)
'We routinely think of the past as a subtext of the present, but in The Women of Little Lon Barbara Minchinton flips this around. She aims not only to ‘dismantle the myths and counter misinformation and deliberate distortions’ about sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne, but – in an explicitly #MeToo context – to ‘reduce the stigma attached to the work today’ while heightening our ‘understanding of and respect for the lives of all sex workers’.' (Introduction)
'Victoria’s sex industry is about to undergo a major transformation with the state government vowing to introduce legislation to decriminalise sex work by the end of 2021. Sex worker activists have welcomed the move towards decriminalisation – as is the case in New South Wales (since 1995), Aotearoa New Zealand (2003) and the Northern Territory (2019) – as a crucial step in removing the stigma attached to sex work, and ensuring workers have the same human rights as people in other industries. It is a long-awaited departure from the current status of legalisation, which has created a two-tiered system whereby a select few brothels are regulated and licensed, while the majority of workers are forced to operate outside the law and without legal protection.' (Introduction)
'This is a book with an axe to grind. Specifically, the author is very aggrieved at the way in which Melbourne’s colonial sex work and sex workers are represented in what she calls ‘tabloid histories’, especially historical tours and websites relating to Little Lonsdale Street’s brothels. She characterises this tabloid history as history that ‘prefers titillation to truth, and values sales above respect for its subjects, breathing sensationalism and the colourful language of denigration’ (2). Curiously, though, she provides few specific examples of the target of her annoyance – in the case of offending websites she states that she ‘refuses to dignify any of these efforts with references’ (279). As a result, the argument has a very ‘straw man’ feel. This reader was irritated by the approach, and the frequent chastising meted out to ‘historians’ (without the earlier qualification of ‘tabloid’) throughout the book, again with few specific examples. Although Minchinton’s published work in refereed journals indicates that she is aware of the broader academic historiography of sex work in Australia as a subject that has attracted solid research and subtle analysis, very little of this historical scholarship is referred to, leaving the reader with the impression that she is the only writer with valid historical skills. And her claims to focus on the ‘facts’ rather than the sensational are belied by the very cover of the book, which features a raunchy photo of a sex worker in Vienna, not Melbourne or even Australia.'(Introduction)
