Bounded roughly by modern-day Lonsdale, Spring, and Exhibition Streets, Little Lon in the mid to late nineteenth century was ‘Melbourne’s premier sex-work precinct’, hosting three broad categories of sex workers: streetwalkers, women operating from rented rooms in ‘boarding houses’, and those working in ‘flash brothels’ (high-end establishments that offered ‘lavish dining and entertainment services’). Minchinton’s research suggests that only women operated the brothels, a rare example of female-run business and financial autonomy at the time, one that stirred a heady brew of contempt, tolerance, and grudging respect.

Prostitution wasn’t illegal, but being ‘disorderly’ was, with women facing the prospect, and frequent reality, of prison and hard labour if convicted. That the brothels ensured a roaring trade for hotels, wine shops, money lenders, and pawnbrokers goes some way to explaining why legislators at the nearby Victorian parliament offered tacit support for the precinct, as does the fact that many of Little Lon’s landlords were ‘reputedly elected officials’. In effect, this meant that those condemning and profiting from prostitution were sometimes ‘the same people’.

Minchinton regularly underscores the point that sex work (then and now) was a financial and not moral choice. More radically within the broader discussion about sex work, she posits that Little Lon – with its ‘exuberant young women dancing in the street, talking loudly, flirting openly, dressing outrageously and thumbing their noses at the buttoned-up men and women around them’ – would have been, over and above matters of survival, an appealing prospect for many young women. Certainly, they would have found role models in businesswomen such as Sarah Fraser, the owner of multiple flash brothels, whose furniture, following her death in 1880, was described in The Argus as the ‘most Exquisite and Interesting Collection of Household Furniture and Effects ever Catalogued in these Colonies’.

That nearly one hundred women are named, with several rendered in considerable detail, is no mean feat given that women, and especially sex workers, tended to be mentioned, if at all, in court and prison paperwork, and that ‘the “facts” recorded on official documents were decidedly elastic’. Because of this, and the candour with which Minchinton reveals her process, the search for stories becomes an enticing part of the package. There are no fictionalised accounts, any conjecture is clearly signposted, and yet she succeeds in resuscitating these women as living, breathing beings.

As such, they are subject to the same harsh realities as others trying to hang on to the lower rungs at a time when Melbourne was laddering up from a settlement to a town to a city, its gold rush-boosted population growing from 600 people in 1841 to roughly half a million by 1900, a period during which, with no sewerage system, toilets were at best holes in the ground. With the invention of antibiotics still decades away, gonorrhoea and syphilis were also a death sentence, although less likely a cause of death than tuberculosis.

The book is enriched by newspaper cuttings and advertisements that, ‘like everything sex-related in the nineteenth century’, trade in euphemisms of the sort that makes things difficult for a historian (and gruesomely fascinating for a modern reader). Supposed contraceptive measures of the era included mercuric chloride, which killed ‘both bacteria and people’, while abortion medication was obliquely marketed as treatment for ‘irregularities in the female system’ – a popular if not particularly effective option in an age when the most widely practised forms of contraception were ‘abstinence, withdrawal and abortion, and the first two were obviously of little use to sex workers’. Friends often had to play the role of midwives and medics for the women of Little Lon, who – alternately revered and reviled – remained ‘both part of the community and a community unto themselves’.

Nowhere are those Victorian-era double standards clearer than in the story of the duke of Edinburgh (Queen Victoria’s second son), who had an ongoing affair with the sex worker Sarah Saqui during his ‘tour of the colonies’ in the 1870s. The ‘open secret’ of their relationship stands in stark contrast to what was becoming an increasingly negative portrayal of sex workers in the writing of journalists such as Marcus Clarke, the ‘Peripatetic Philosopher’, who, in his mission to ‘paint a gripping picture of lower-class filth and irresponsibility’, would enter Little Lon properties uninvited, or peer through the windows to ‘observe’ the inhabitants. Women, in Clarke’s misogynistic rants, were contemptible a priori, and men ‘merely flies caught in their wily webs’.

Though weakened towards the end of the century, Little Lon persisted through such finger-wagging opprobrium, its flash brothels, if not venerated, at least tolerated. A case brought against modern-day tourist favourite Caroline Hodgson (Madam Brussels) in 1907 changed that, with the resulting amendments to the Police Offences Act sounding the death knell for Little Lon, if not (as is clear more than a century later) for sex work per se. Minchinton draws a compellingly direct line from those amendments to the rise of pimps and the ‘ugly moralism’ that continues to inform legislation at the expense of present-day sex workers’ health and safety. That she does so while holding true to her aim of increasing our understanding and respect for sex workers then and now is testament to this remarkable book.