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Book Review
| Elaine McKewon, The Scarlet Mile: A Social History of Prostitution in Kalgoorlie, 1894–2004, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, WA, 2005. pp. xii + 188. $38.95 paper.
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| Historians of shameful occupations like prostitution have to work hard. Rarely can the authentic voices of the workers be heard except in the courtroom or the police file, and then they are but scraps that betoken defiance or self-defence. Usually the historical record captures the words of their prosecutors and persecutors, their more articulate customers and their would-be rescuers. Few of the ordinary working girls or boys leave much behind for posterity. Elaine McKewon has sought to remedy this by writing a history of prostitution from within and in some respects this enterprising work induces some of the claustrophobia that envelopes this tiny enclave of sin in Kalgoorlie (a town block and no mile). She brilliantly brings to life that inner world of controlled or contained sex work; she is less sure of the wider context that helps explain it. To some extent, her editors and supervisors must take responsibility, for they failed to correct her WA myopia that omits the Victorian gold rushes in the great history of nineteenth century gold rushes, or the management of prostitution in Brisbane, or panics over the Red Plague between the 1890s and the 1920s. If you are interested only in Kalgoorlie and its girls, then this may not matter much; if you are a student looking for the history of Australian prostitution, it does. |
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That said, this history is well written and entertaining. Inevitably, the story is not so much that of the sex workers, but of their employers – the brothel owners – simply because they stay around to be interviewed while the girls, for most of the period, locked up in the stifling heat of their work places, came and went, unable to mix in the wider community. (There is a good account of the policy of containment, whereby the police controlled the sex business by social quarantine.) The brothel owners are fascinating characters and one suspects not quite as 'motherly' and 'good to their girls' as they claim. The greatest criticism, however, emerges of the transgender 'madam' who despite expensive surgery and hormone treatment, proved a harsh taskmistress because, her girls said, she was not really a woman, conducted business like a man and didn't really understand the 'time of the month'. |
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| For students of sex work, this is a valuable book that recreates a strange world and the even stranger tourist fascination with visible sin. Like with Kings Cross, the respectable world crawls past from the safety of a tourist bus, thrilling at the misery and squalor of others as did the 'slummers' of the nineteenth century city. Prostitution, it could be said, has clients of the imagination as well as of the flesh, and that also is part of any history of an oddity like Kalgoorlie. |
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| University of Melbourne |
JANET MCCALMAN | |
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