Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Work in Colonial Australia

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

From the first fleet of convict ships arriving in Australia in 1788, sex work was a central part of the new society British colonialists were building.What was the reality for women when they arrived? What records are there of sex workers from this time? And how has sex work shaped modern Australia?Today, Kate's joined by the fantastic Rae Frances, author of Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution, to find out more about sex work in early Australia.This episode is edited by Tom Delargy. The producer is Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely of loveliest betwixters, it's me, K. Lister. I am here once more, as I hope to be for the foreseeable future. But before we can get going, I have to make sure you're okay. Actually, the lawyers have to make sure that you're okay. So here we go. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults,

about adulty things, an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. I think that should keep everyone happy. Right? On with the show! Well, I hope you've got your sea legs betwixters. The year is 1788 and we are on board one of the first fleet of ships carrying convicts towards Botany Bay, and we're at the end of a grueling eight-month journey.

11 ships set out from Portsmouth carrying just under 2,000 people on board. And within that number, there was some 193 female convicts. Life on board has been crap to. say the least. There's rats, lice, cockroaches, there's not enough food, you have to shit in a bucket, it's just a nightmare. And it's especially been awful for the women who are completely outnumbered and have no idea what awaits them once they get off the boat. What was in store for these women in this foreign land? And how does sex work play an essential part in many of their stories? Let's get aboard and find out.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the money. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel so damn. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society. With me, Kate Lister.

One of the things I love so much about the history of sex work is that it can tell us so much about how a society treats its women. What's especially interesting about the history of Australia is that women selling sex were there right from the beginning of Britain's establishment of Australia as a convict colony. How did they adapt to life so far from home in the 18th century? Is there any evidence of sex work existing in Aboriginal communities before the Brits ever turned up? And what became of these women? Today's guest is the wonderful Raylene Francis, author of Selling Sex, a Hidden History of Prostitution to help us find out more. I am ready if you are.

Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Raylene Francis. How are you doing? I'm fantastic, Kate, and it's such a pleasure to be here with you. And only my mother calls me Raylene, so you can call me Ray. Ray, okay, yes, we don't want Sunday names, do we all that, the full name that kind of freaks you out. My full name's Catherine, and if anyone calls me that,

that it really does send like a bolt of electricity through me. I haven't been naughty. I haven't been naughty. No, okay. Ray, it is. Thank you so much for being here. I am so excited to talk to you because the history of sex work and Australia is absolutely fascinating. It's such a rich and often misunderstood history. I suppose my first question to you is, how did you come to this research? What was it that made you think, I know, need to learn more about this? Yeah, well, I was a history student at the University of Western Australia in Perth when I was a young woman many years ago, and I started doing a master's thesis on politics on the gold fields of Western Australia, which if people know about it, it's like 600 kilometres inland from Perth towards the eastern states. And I started doing all this

research, and then I found all this information about a particular street, in Calgoorlie Hay Street, which was a red light district, and no one talked about it, and no one had ever written about it in the history. And I thought, actually, that sounded a lot more interesting than labor politicians. That's not always the way. Although the two are not unrelated. So that was kind of your first introduction to the history of sex work in Australia. Yeah, I mean, I was always interested in women's work and how women survived. I grew up in a coal mining town in Western Australia as well. And at the time, there was a lot of women who'd been moved into the state housing in the town,

a lot of single women, deserted wives and so on. So there was actually a bit of a sex industry going in very quietly there. And it fascinated me, you know, how women actually got by when there were few avenues for work, where they had children to support and so on. So I had that intrinsic interest anyway. and then when this conundrum, I mean, how did this happen, presented itself? It was too much of a challenge. My supervisor was not thrilled, I have to say.

I went and said, actually, I'm changing my topic. And he looked at me with some puzzlement and said, hmm, a history thesis is about change over time. And I can't see that anything would have changed over time with prostitution. Oh, really? Yeah. So I said, well, let me see. And so I went away and wrote the thesis, came back and gave it to him, and he read it and he said, well, I was wrong. You were right. So that was nice.

That's good. It's good to be able to admit when you're a bit wrong about something. Can I ask you quite a controversial question just as a starter and we'll get going from what the actual history is? Is there any evidence that Indigenous people to Australia sold sex or that there was any kind of sexual commerce or industry amongst Aboriginal cultures before the Europeans turned up in their ships? It's a really good question, and there is no evidence that within Aboriginal societies before contact with outside people, there was any kind of sexual, commercial sexual exchange. I mean, you've got to remember that Aboriginal society wasn't actually a society based on a commercial economy in any sense. There was no money, for example. There was centuries-long contact on the northern coast of Australia before the Europeans landed in

in Sydney with the Macassans, people from Macassar in now Indonesia, in Sulawesi. And those people had been coming to Australia for possibly 300 years every monsoon season. And they would come with the monsoon. They would spread out across the north coast of Australia. And they would fish for tri-pang or Besdemeir, which was considered an aphrodisiac in China. I don't know if it was. I've never tried it. I've never heard this before.

That's amazing. And they depended on relationships with the local Aboriginal people because they had to fish for the Trepong and then they had to boil them down and dry them on the beach because they couldn't obviously transport them fresh back to China, which is where they sold them. So they would set up these relationships mostly harmoniously with Aboriginal people,

which often involved them being assigned an Aboriginal woman for the duration of their stay. and it was more a form of diplomacy than any kind of sexual exchange in the sense that we would understand. So that was well before the Europeans came. When the Europeans came, of course, they had a very different understanding of sexual exchange and in the early days of colonisation, it quickly deteriorated into a situation of sexual exploitation of women, rape, capture, kidnapping, I mean, some terrible stories, particularly along the southern coast of Australia where the whalers and the sealers, they would routinely capture Aboriginal women and take them to the islands and treat them as sexual and domestic slaves and also workers in the processing of their fishing.

But even on the edges of colonisation, wherever the Europeans went in, you found very quickly people being dispossessed, their traditional ways of survival, their lifestyles, their economies, were completely disrupted. And often it was only through the sexual barter and sale of services from the women that communities could survive. So it was something that came in with the Europeans. So created a system where the Europeans have now placed value on a sexual exchange and stripped the value of pretty much everything else? Yeah.

Most of them made absolutely no effort to understand what the systems of organisation were, in Aboriginal societies when they arose. And they were not inclined to make accommodations or understand. They were interested in colonising and dispossessing, you know, and it was not done in a nice way. What time period are we talking about here? When were the first ships from Europe arriving in Australia? The first settlements occurred from 1788 when Governor Philip came in with the first fleet.

And from then the convict ships, kept arriving for the next 60 years, and also immigrant ships were coming later on. So you had free settlers arriving as well as convex. But that initial period was the period where the people on the area around Sydney, New South Wales were most impacted. But the colonisation was going on well into the 20th century. You know, there was still, in the 1930s, there were still massacres of Aboriginal people occurring in Central Australia. Wow. There's a one. wonderful new book, actually, by a journalist in Australia. It's called Killing for Country. So if any of your listeners are interested in understanding more about how Australia

was settled, it's a wonderful book. It's grueling to read, but it's very well written and it's very well researched, and I would thoroughly recommend it. I will definitely be reading that one. This is a history that I really don't know very much about at all. So when Captain Cook and his mates turn up, is the first missions to Australia, is it an effort at colonisation? And who gets the idea of, oh, let's send prisoners over there? It's such a strange policy to just ship convicts and sometimes not even convicts off to Australia. How did that start to happen? It had been going on for hundreds of years before then. I mean, they were sending them to the Americas. And it was only because Britain lost the American War of Independence, that suddenly

they've got all these convicts, you know, sitting in ships and nowhere for the ships to go. And the people who went with Cook on the expeditions that supposedly discovered Australia in 1770, people like Banks and Mafra, they were ones who said, you know, it would be a really good idea to send them there because they had an exaggerated idea. actually of how easy the country would be to live in, how productive it was, and how few Aboriginal people were there. Ah. So they gave the impression that it was very few people there.

They weren't attached to the local areas. They weren't particularly hostile. And that the land was a lot more productive than, in fact, it turned out to be for the Europeans. So for all those reasons. There were also other ideas they thought this might be useful as a, against the French and other people who might have designs in the Pacific Ocean. So it was kind of a preemptive claim on the southern part of the world. Right.

Okay. And they also thought that there might be opportunities to get resources. You know, we didn't have oil for your fleet in those days, but you did need a lot of timber for spars, for example. You needed flax to make sales. And they believed, based on the reports largely from Cook's journeys, that there were opportunities, say, in Norfolk Island, to get the spars for the ships and flax from New Zealand.

So all of these multiple reasons why they sent them there. So it's not just about, we've claimed it now, we've got a flag, this is ours. They're shipping the convicts over because they are an easy resource of labour. Is that it? It's to help them build the new cities and the new living arrangements. And that's what they thought that they were doing? Absolutely. I mean, it wasn't just a matter.

of you've got to get rid of these evil, dangerous people. If that was the case, they could have hung them. A lot of them had actually been sentenced to death, but they had their sentences commuted because they could be sent to the colonies. And as you say, they were a source of cheap labour to build the infrastructure, the cities, you know, the buildings, the roads, the bridges, etc.

But also, once the settlers started moving into the interior, they were the ones who were the farm labourers, the people who mined the sheep and the cattle. and so on. A lot of that labour, and the majority of it was convict labour for a long time. So they've promised them this kind of land of milk and honey, and honestly, the people that already live there, they're fine, they think this is a great idea, and it's really nice and sunny. But what was the reality that greeted people on these ships when they first turned up? Look, I think it was a bit of a shock for people who came from England.

I mean, it's the other end of the world, you know, even you look at the night sky and it's a different sky. The seasons are all back to front. The animals, the flora. It's all just really weird and weird was a word they used really often to describe the vegetation and particularly the animals. They just couldn't get their head around how bizarre this was and they're really frustrated that the things that they could do in England, the way that they could cultivate plants didn't work in Australia because the conditions were different. The soil was different. The soil just didn't have the same levels, particularly of phosphate in them that you had. And it took them years to figure out how to work with the new environment.

And of course, you know, the seasons being upside down, you know, at Christmas time, they want to eat roast beef and pudding, you know, and it just doesn't make sense when the temperature's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So it was shocking. But also for the convicts, it was a very brutal place to be. that was, you know, they were there for punishment as much as anything else. So for many of them, it was a really hard, tough existence. Some fared better than others. Some people with skills fared much better, but their skills were in demand. So, you know, if you're a stonemason or

a draftsman or so on, you could probably negotiate a much better life for yourself than if you had nothing to offer except your muscle. See, that brings the very interesting question of women convicts. Because if you're a man, you can have a profession, you can be a stonemason or a sailmaker. And I guess you can be if you're a woman too, but probably not in the same way. But when they turn up in Australia, what skills do they have that they can offer to building the new world? Absolutely. Put your finger on it. That, according to the people who came were women. You know, the women are outnumbered.

It must have been terrifying. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, they were very vulnerable. And they had no housing for more than a decade. there was nowhere for women to live, no special accommodation for them. So they just had to, you know, scrounge and beg and borrow a roof over their head. And because of the nature of the colony, there weren't the kind of industries that employed women in Britain. There was no manufacturing, for example.

And the only skills that they had were domestic service and sexual services. There's no houses. Yeah, initially, at least. And even once, you know, the colony got more established, it was still. primarily domestic service. There was a little bit of serving in shops and pubs and that kind of stuff and a little bit of textile work going on. But by and large, you know, there was very limited opportunities for women to do anything where they could earn money independently. Apart from one thing, obviously. Apart from one thing. And, you know, there was a lot of demand

for that, as you can imagine. Yeah. So what are some of the earliest records that we've got of a sex work community industry that is now happening in Australia that women are now turning to sell sexual labour. It's apparent from even when they're on the ships that women, negotiating some kind of exchange on the way out. I'm trying to picture what it must have been like on these ships. Like what must have that been like as a young woman? You've been caught nick in a purse or something in London. And then you're sent on a ship. You've got no protection. You've got no nothing. It's a ship full of men. You're going to go to a country full of men. and I have no idea what's waiting for you.

I mean, for some women, it would have been less scary. I mean, one in five of the women sent out had already been engaged in sex industry in some form or other in Britain, at least according to the records. So for them, it would have been not so problematic to negotiate. This is a new opportunity they see, and they'd pretty much spot where the opportunity lay. But as you say, for someone who's been a seamstress who's just made off with some of the extra fabric, it would have been quite shocking.

And they had nine months to get used to the idea, I guess, because it was a long ship journey in those days. But from the outset, you know, from the moment they landed in Sydney Cove there, it was clear that this was a new world and they would have to learn to cope with it. And some didn't, some didn't, obviously. But it was part of the assumption that it was going to happen. And the authorities, you know, officially they didn't condone it. But in practice, they turned a blind.

die for the most part. I suppose if you're being really brutal, and they were brutal, they were brutal, if Britain's plan was to colonise this country, then one of the things that you need is children and so you need healthy men and women. Is there a sense that they were sending women over there in its most brutal form to breed? Absolutely. It's no coincidence that almost all the women who were sent were below the age of 45. There you go. So they were disproportionately of breeding age. Actually, a really interesting thing is that a lot of those women, when they were first arrested, were not menstruating because they had such poor diet. But the one thing they did get from being imprisoned was that they were fed government rations. And so a lot of

those women started menstruating on the ships on the way out. So you actually had very high rates of fertility amongst the convict women. Wow. There must have been some dark conversations going on. Because were they deliberately sending women that had been sex workers? Were they a high proportion of the people being sent over there? Or was it just anyone? I don't think they were deliberately targeting sex workers. I think it was just that that happened that there was a high proportion of women who fell, fail of the law who were involved in sex work.

And there were various ideas. I mean, the government was conscious that this was a problem. If you're sending thousands of men out to the far distances of the world, then that's going to be a problem. unless you find some kind of sexual outlet for them. And they were really worried that that was either going to result in rebellion or in homosexuality. Not homosexuality. Oh, I think they're more worried about that than rebellion, quite frankly.

That comes up all the time in the history. Is there genuinely terrified of this? Genuinely terrified of sodomy, you know. And so they toyed around with various schemes. Like they thought they might bring in Polynesian women from the islands. to fill that function. And they also thought that maybe Aboriginal women could fill that function too, but they quickly realized that that was not going to be viable.

And so they reconciled themselves to bringing in convict women for the short term, at least. Do we have any names left to us of who these women were? I mean, you know, it's very easy to kind of think of them as like, oh, God, it's absolutely, what a horrific thing to happen. But are there success stories, is that the word I want? But is there like stories of women that they came and they sold sex, but they found their feet and they did all right in the end? Yeah.

There's one case that I talk about in my book. And one of the cases I start off with is a woman called Jane Tor. As far as I know, she was not selling sex at all in England before she was transported for theft. But when she was transported to Hobart in what was then Van Diemen's land, now of course, Tasmania, She was assigned to a middle-class couple, or she was a domestic servant, but she used to slip out at night and visit the government surgeon. And we know about this because eventually she was found by the constables in the street

in a state of disarray, and it was a bit of a scandal. She was clearly earning quite a lot of money from selling sex to at least a surgeon, and we don't quite know who else, and she was always well-dressed and so on. and eventually she served out her time and formed a relationship with a man and she had a daughter and she was doing quite well by all accounts until a tragedy struck and her daughter was at home with the man that she was with and her clothing caught fire accidentally and the child died and so Jane went back to England but when I wrote about that I wrote that as a kind of success story but ended in tragedy.

And she went back to England and I could never find any record of her coming back. And after I published the book, I had an email from someone who said, actually she did come back and she's my great-great-grandmother and she got married in England and returned. So these stories,

I mean, I would regard Jane as a success story apart for the fact that a child burned to death, but apart from that, that's not that. But there were a lot of cases where women, you know, they would say, you know, it was actually good for me to come to Australia because I was able to get out of the cycle of poverty and offending that I'd been in England. And one woman said, you know, if it hadn't been for the fact that I was forced to leave my children behind, it would have been the best thing that ever befell me.

Wow. That just gives you such an insight into that world, doesn't it, of the choices these people are making, or not making, being forced upon them. But oh my goodness. I'll be back with Ray after the short break. So the 18th century is sort of like colonisation and very sort of rough and ready and dangerous. But by the time we get to the 19th century and more of modern Australia is the right word, but certainly the cities and the infrastructure we recognise today, they're in force. What does sex work look like in 19th century Australia? 19th century Australia was a really diverse place. You know, you had cities like Sydney and Melbourne, to a lesser extent, Adelaide and Perth, becoming quite civilised, if that's the right

word, quite developed. And you have concentrations of population in the cities. You have industries beginning to develop, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne in the later 19th century. And you also have slums developing. And you have prostitution, as it was generally called, very much an integral part of those societies, you've still got a big sex imbalance right until the end of the 19th century. You've got more men than women. And you've got, again, still not very many lucrative opportunities for women to earn money. So there's still strong demand and strong supply forces operating. So you have quite a large sex industry.

But it's very diversified. You have women who are high class, if you like to use that terminology, who catered for the upper echelons of society, including the Prince of Wales when he visited. Well, that sounds about right. Dirty Bertie. Well, and he was actually shown around and introduced to the high-class haws, as they were called, by the chief of police. So it was all very cozy. And below them, you had, you know, decreasing levels of kind of affluence and comfort right down to the women who were. worked out of the lanes and the slums and, you know, lived in pretty rough accommodation and solicited

on the streets. So you've got a whole kind of spectrum of the industry that's going on in, particularly in both Sydney and Melbourne, and to a lesser extent, in the other cities. You know, Australia is a huge place and it's developing at very different rates. You've got a lot of sex work going on on the frontiers, on the mining industries and in the purling sites of, you know, places like Broome and Darwin. Day Island, you've got big demands for sex work there amongst most of those industries are very, very heavily male-dominated. And you have really interesting phenomenon happening in the late 19th century with the influx of women coming from places other than Britain to Australia.

So on the eastern gold fields of Western Australia, you know, around Calguli, Kugardi, those kind of places, you've got a lot of women coming in from France and Italy. particularly a whole big international network that's travelling around looking for these opportunities and they'll go to South America, South Africa, Australia and they don't think twice about, you know, hopping on a steamship and, you know, zooming around to the next gold rush. And you've also got an influx of women coming from Japan from the 1880s. Oh, of course, yes. What was happening there?

Yeah, I mean, this is a really, in some ways, a really heart-wrenching story that you've got parts of Japan that are really very depressed, particularly the rural parts. And parents are actually advised by the government to sell or hire out their children in order to pay their taxes. Fuck. Isn't that awful? So you've got these people called Ziggins who go around buying up little girls, you know, at the age of seven or eight. and they ship them out of the country in the coal holds often of steamers where some of them perish because the coal shifts or catches fire or whatever. And then they're sent to places like Hong Kong and Singapore where they're put in brothels

and they're raised in the brothels and taught how to be sex workers. And then they're shipped off to places like Australia but also as far west as Mauritius but also into the Pacific Islands, the Southeast Asia, as far as the western coast of the USA. And there were hundreds of them sent to Australia, to the mining camps and to the purling ports of the north of Australia. Wow. It sounds a lot like what was going on in America with the expansion west, because when you get those gold mining industries, those mining industries, those frontier towns, pretty quickly

sex work is there. Probably for the reason that you said earlier is just there aren't demands for traditionally female jobs at this point. No one needs you to do needlework when they're trying to blow the land up to get gold out of it. But sex was something you could sell and that's why they were there. Yeah, and they made a lot of money. And there were women who came from the American goldfields. So there was a famous notorious woman on the Kalgoorlie Goldfields called Pansy Arlington. And I think she picked her name from a famous,

Madame in New Orleans, Josie Arlington. She styled her establishment Pansy Arlington's Palace of Pleasure. In fact, it was just a Hessian tent on the gold fields. But she carried six guns and she was a Wild West kind of woman. So they did make their way, not just to the west coast of the USA. Do we have any sense of what the really high-class establishments would be? It's just wherever dirty Bertie goes, he tends to find. Like in France it was Les Chabinay, where he had his own private room.

he was hanging around in Australia, is there a venue that he would have patronised? Yeah, look, there were some pretty high-class brothels in Melbourne in particular. Famously, Madame Brussels at the top of Collins Street near Parliament House, convenient to Parliament. And again, there's a story that the Speaker's mace, you know, that big thing that they carry in at the beginning of Parliament, it went missing and allegedly turned up in Madam Brussels brothel. Places like that were, I mean, they were very luxuriously appointed.

They had beautiful furnishings and the women were dressed in, you know, the finest silks and they had champagne and oysters and, you know, caviar and they were fancy places. He certainly wouldn't have been going to a Hessian tent, although I don't think that Dirty Bertie would have turned that down, to be completely honest. So at this point in the 19th century, Australia is still under Britain's rule, along with several other countries. Did Australia try and use British law to regulate sex work? I'm thinking of something like the Contagious Diseases Act. Was that in Australia as well? Yeah, well, the Contagious Diseases Act has a particular spin in Australia because even after it was

repealed in Britain, because of the agitation from women and religious groups, the British empire decided to try and impose it on any ports where the British were garrisoned. So they actually made it a condition that you introduce the Contagious Diseases Acts or we would find somewhere else to take our ships. And of course, places like Hobart depended on the visits of the Royal Navy for the economy. So they agreed. So anyone listening who's not sure what the Contagious Diseases Act are, could you just explain what that policy, Yeah, the initial idea was that soldiers needed to have access to prostitutes for sex. Or they might go gay.

Yeah, that's just what men need and that's part of fitting out an army. You know, you think about provisioning them with guns and food and clothes and you fit them out with women, you know. There were 40 women routinely allowed to the garrison in Sydney, for example. It's in the mustace, you know. And it says that. Wow. We were not allowed to the regiment. So it was just accepted amongst the military men that you had to supply the men's sexual needs.

The problem was, of course, venereal disease. So someone came up with the bright idea that if you rounded up all the known sex workers and registered them and examined them, and then you could lock them up if you found that they had disease until they were better. Of course, slight catch, there was no cure. So this started in Britain, and it was all women with. in a 10-mile radius of the garrison towns who were subject to this surveillance, registration and imprisonment. In Tasmania, it actually applied to the whole colony. The whole colony. And it was also introduced in Queensland. In Victoria, they passed the legislation,

but I don't think they ever intended to implement it. They certainly didn't implement it. So they were just kind of playing the game, is my guess. They're particularly brutal and awful piece of legislation, wasn't it? Bringing it a bit further forward. Tell me a bit further forward. Tell me a about sex work during the First World War or even the Second World War because that's fascinating because every single government that was fighting around the world had to deal with this issue of venereal disease amongst the troops and reactions ranged from America who thought they would just shout at people and tell them not to do it through to the Germans who issued everyone

with condoms and manual instructions about to put them on. What was happening in Australia? Well, in Australia, again, you had the concern. They discovered in Perth actually where there's a whole lot of new recruits at Black Boy Camp had venereal disease. So they just had this quiet little deal done between the government medical officer and the police where the women would agree to be inspected and they would pay a fee to the government medical officer. So it was just a little deal. It wasn't anything official, but that's what happened there.

And also at the same time, they moved more and more women into this street, Roe Street so that they could keep an eye on them and force them to be examined. Overseas, where the troops were initially in Egypt and then, of course, on the Western Front, very high rates amongst the Australian troops, the highest of all the Allied troops, partly because they never got to go home to their own women, so they were all over there and stuck there, and they were all, or almost all of them, visiting the brothels and not taking precautions initially. And the Australian military authorities were actually quite pragmatic and they, like the Germans, started issuing them with prophylactic kits so that if they'd been to a brothel, they could douse themselves

with chemicals and hopefully avoid infection. Do you know about Etty Rout? I was hoping you would tell me about her. Please do. I know she is, but I would love for you to tell everyone else who she is. Well, Etty Rout was Australian-born. She spent a lot of time in New Zealand and she was horrified at the rates of venereal infection and particularly concerned about what was going to happen when those blokes came home and infected their wives or girlfriends or whatever. So she thought, you know, you can give them as many lectures as you like. It's not going to have any effect. You've just got to be practical about this. So she was the one that came up with the kits and persuaded the authorities to issue them. And then she went to France and she actually identified brothels that she thought

had much better hygienic practices and would meet the blokes at the train station and steer them in the right direction. It's such a mad image. You weren't allowed to mention her name in New Zealand after the war. For many years, she was considered such a scandalous woman. Was it true that it was her idea to give the troops these Provalactic kits and to really try and do something? And then when the New Zealand government, I think it was, actually took that on and

issued it, they never acknowledged that she helped or that was her idea or anything. No, no. And they just said that she was just the most terrible. Terrible, terrible woman. Is she being recognised more now? I mean, you've got to admire the balls of that. Not only was she so concerned about, and write, right about the health, but to actually go to France and hang around directing soldiers to brothels.

It's completely bonkers. When the Australian government decided they were going to build a new memorial at Villis Bretna in France during the centenary celebrations, they're going to have this really, you know, expensive museum effectively or information centre. and they employed a bunch of historians, including myself, to advise them on this. And we wanted to have a series of case studies of individuals who had a connection with Villis Breitner, as she did. And one of them we wanted to have was Etty Rout. And they just said, no way, we're not having this.

No. Because the French would be offended at the mention of prostitution. That the French would not. Of course they wouldn't. Of course they wouldn't. We decided that, you know, we really weren't on the same wavelength as them, so we left the project. So if you want to have a laugh, you can go to Villisbretano and look at the John Monash Memorial Centre. She's still considered too scandalous to this very day.

Oh, my God. Australians still have a lot of problem with the history of sex work that one of the other projects that's still going on now, you may have read about it in my book, the case of the Statue of Joy in Darlinghurst, which was one of the red light districts in Sydney. And that was originally commissioned in the 1990s, and it was this beautiful, larger-than-life statue of a sex worker. She's all white and she's standing in a red doorframe. And it was very popular amongst many of the local residents at the time,

but some of the more conservative people objected and said, this was not a suitable subject for a statue. You know, we should put up statues to worthwhile people, like veterans. And so it was removed to a university garden. And we've just been involved in a campaign in the last couple of years to try and bring her back to Darlinghurst. So there's a whole lot of us who are agitating and petitioning.

And we had taken it to the Sydney City Council who kind of approved it in principle, but you can tell they really don't want to do it. So they're going back from all community consultation. The consultation period is just closed now, unfortunately. Otherwise, I could have got your 8 million listeners to write in and say, they would as well. Yeah.

I mean, that brings me very nicely to my final question, although I could talk to you forever and ever, is do you think that sex work has been intrinsic in shaping modern Australia? And is that something that should be recognised rather than hidden away and shut up? Yeah, well, you can guess from my last answer. that I think, yes, you know, I think it's an important part of our history. And it's like if you're a person and you want to be a psychologically healthy person, you have to confront the good things and the bad things in your life, the things that you feel more comfortable with and

less comfortable with. And I think as a nation, you need to do the same. You need to have a warts and all look at your past. And Australians are still reckoning with that in terms of the whole colonisation project and dispossession. But there's still a lot of other areas. where we're just not necessarily prepared to be completely honest. I mean, some places, parts of Australia are more comfortable with it. So in Kalgoorlie, for example, you can go on tours of the brothels, and it's quite a tourist attraction. And they have a historical dimension to that,

and they've actually used my work in the way they present their tours. But as you see in Sydney, there's still a lot of people who are not comfortable with it. And, you know, I'm optimistic that over time this will change. but it was clearly a very important part of the economy, apart from anything else. It was very important to a lot of women. It was the way they survived. So, for example, the purling industry, a lot of those purling luggers were financed by the earnings of women in the brothels

who then invested into the purling industry. I didn't know that. That's just one example of the knock-on effects of the industry. And just even in a local community that, you know, they spend money. They spend a lot of money on clothes. and services, you know, hair, makeup and so on, you know, housework. So they've always been important. And the thing is, is if people aren't comfortable talking about it as a history,

that doesn't bould well, because the thing that we always need to remember about this is this isn't a dead history. Sex workers are still very much with us. Sex workers are still fighting for their rights and still fighting for respect. And if we've got a culture where people are embarrassed about the history, I appreciate it can be sensitive. That's not good, is it? because to my mind, the history is vital in fighting for rights to this very day.

Absolutely. And I think in Australia, the fact that we have written about the history of sex work and the different ways in which different laws impact on the actual workers has had an effect. You know, we're seeing legislative change. Even yesterday, Queensland is changing its rules to make it much more safe for women to work in the industry. It used to be that you could only work on your own or in a brothel. They still do that in the UK. Yeah, it's nuts.

So now they've changed that. So women can get together and work together as a cooperative. They don't have to be employed by a brothel keeper. And they can employ security if they want to. Imagine how vulnerable you are as a single woman in a business, in a house, you know, in flat, yeah. I hope things will change. Well, people doing the work like you're doing and telling the story and making, bringing it out

and showing that it's always been here. It's a part of who we are culturally and that people need to be safe. That's all for the good fight. Ray, you have been phenomenal to talk to today. I have loved talking to you. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I guess my book is the thing that's easiest accessible and it's just called selling sex, a hidden history of prostitution in Australia. If they want to contact me, I'm on the Australian National University website, so you can just look that up and you will find me under the researchers. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been wonderful. It's been absolutely delight, Kate.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Ray for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just fancied saying hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from our continuing series on The Real Bridgeton to incest in ancient Rome. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by. Stuart Beckworth. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music

from Epidemic Sound.