Sex and the sisterhood: How prostitution worked in 19th-century Melbourne. Sex work was one of the major ways poor women could earn a reasonable income in the 19th century. Especially unmarried women with babies. But we don't hear people say "my great-great-grandmother was a sex worker". Nor do we often meet these women in our history books. Social stigma belies the importance of prostitution in providing an independent living, and even property ownership, for numerous women in this period.
Prostitution is often lumped together with crime and slums in the historical imagination, but it wasn't illegal in gold rush Victoria. Nevertheless neighbours in the "respectable" suburbs complained if women danced in the streets or appeared without a bonnet or showed their petticoats, so the police tried to confine sex workers to particular areas.
Perhaps the most famous inhabitant of this patch was Madame Brussels and her Bellevue-Villa , still commemorated today with a bar of the same name on Bourke Street. Clientele came from everywhere and every class, but proximity to the all-male enclave of Parliament and treasury was a distinct advantage for these fancy brothels.
Despite being legal, though, women had to keep quiet or risk arrest and imprisonment under laws against "disorderly behaviour" and "vagrancy".
The area has been extensively excavated by a series of archaeological projects over the last 30 years, and our recent intensive research on the artefacts recovered held at Museum Victoria and Heritage Victoria is revealing much more about the brothels and the women who owned them that had disappeared from memory.
