The Scarlet Mile: A Social History of Prostitution in Kalgoorlie, 1894-2004

By Elaine McKewon, Nedlands: UWA Press, 2005, 188 pages, paperback, $38.95. Reviewed by Michelle Kelly in the August 2005 issue.

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'A code of ethics is like a compass'. It is a rare wry madam indeed who could allow such an exhortation to be chalked outside her brothel. But there it is in big bold letters -- on a sign between display stalls from which prostitutes will beckon -- captured by a photograph published in The Scarlet Mile. The maxim conveys a complex message of potential liberalism underscored by prim morality, a sentiment surprisingly in accord with local reception of the sex industry in Kalgoorlie. The city was a place willing to receive the spoils of substantial tourist interest in its Hay Street red-light district, whilst operating a policy that restricted prostitutes' freedom of movement outside of Hay Street until 1995. This disparity is the target of Elaine McKewon's monograph, and her compass is firmly set on highlighting the historical marginalisation of sex workers.

The Scarlet Mile is primarily concerned with this discrimination as it is enacted by legal institutions, such as the police and local government. Prostitution in the region burgeoned as a trade following the discovery of gold in 1893. McKewon finds the principles of the unofficial local Containment Policy -- which governed the lives of all sex workers for nearly a century in exchange for police 'tolerance' of their trade -- as early as 1902. As it evolved, this policy's rules included the stipulation that the location of the town's brothels must be limited to a specific precinct; that workers had to be registered with the local police; and, most restrictively, that workers had to reside on brothel premises and were banned from visiting the town's centre. The first official report which challenged the Containment Policy as infringing upon human rights was commissioned in 1984. In 1995, the Containment Policy was wound back as police abandoned several of its tenets, including lifting the restriction on workers residing and socialising outside of brothels. The Scarlet Mile's final chapter explores the continued unworkability of the contemporary state law governing prostitution.

McKewon has succeeded in crafting a coherent thesis. However, her wide range of material (and occasionally unclear motivation for grouping somewhat disparate stories together in chapters which masquerade as self-contained units) gives rise to several sections in which the book's direction is unclear. Moreover, The Scarlet Mile's ambit of social history means that potentially evocative moments are merely hinted at by McKewon's explication, which is unfailingly candid and even-toned. The book's colour comes instead from the primary sources which the author quotes at length. Her interviewees -- ranging from prostitutes, madams, brothel cleaners, policemen and taxi drivers -- are generous and entertaining.

It is through these clear, first-person voices that the complicated affection residents and industry insiders feel for Hay Street becomes apparent. One local recollects how her children would ask to drive through the area. 'It was mainly the three older ones. Their ages were 2, 4 and 6...in the evenings they used to say, Mum, can you take us down past...to see the ladies and all the pretty lights? I think it became as Australian for them as taking the kids into town to see the Christmas lights'. (p 56) A sex worker recollects how one customer would ask for her help in choosing a birthday present for his mother, and how several of her clients' mothers knew her by name.

It is first person accounts too which most persuasively convey the quotidian aspects of sex work, and its perils. Prostitutes compare working conditions at various brothels; managers recount police stings; and a madam recollects the tragic murder of a young prostitute by her former boyfriend. Although resulting in a plurality of voices which are sometimes hard to individuate, McKewon's extensive quotation of those on the front lines of the sex industry lends the book a compelling authenticity.

The isolation of Kalgoorlie gave rise to an idiosyncratic sex industry, with a particularly grassroots flavour. McKewon's identification of a 'distinctive pioneering spirit among Hay Street women' (p 2) strongly resonates to unsettle a patriarchal association of intrepidity with Kalgoorlie's male prospectors (albeit that a possibly stronger case may be made for the pioneering spirit of the Hay Street madams, whose stories dominate The Scarlet Mile). The phrase 'tour of duty' (p 143) -- which McKewon uses to indicate a woman who lives elsewhere but resides in Kalgoorlie for a short period of time to make money on Hay Street -- bestows these workers with a resilience and a nobility in short supply elsewhere.

The Scarlet Mile is resolutely a case study, and this is its strength. It deals with the particularity of Kalgoorlie and its problematic Containment Policy. Issues relating to the specificities of prostitution work have been more extensively evoked by Alexa Albert's 2001 book, Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women, which recounts the author's stay at a Nevada brothel in the course of undertaking a public-health study. Albert's intimacy with the Ranch's operations and women resulted in a work which explored prostitution in terms of more practice-orientated issues such as relationships between prostitutes, pride in service and interactions between prostitutes and their clients. The Scarlet Mile, with its regulatory concern, is less available to such far-reaching conclusions about brothel prostitution. However, the societal observations McKewon makes -- about the marginalisation of sex workers compared to their customers' relative impunity, and about the cycle of poverty which all too often forces women into sex work -- are well worth the reminder.

Citation

• Michelle Kelly. 'Review: The Scarlet Mile: A Social History of Prostitution in Kalgoorlie, 1894-2004 by Elaine McKewon' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), August 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Then it happened that so great a noise was spread abroad by the lucrative traffic in vice in the Cities of the Desert, that whole hordes of immoral women descended upon our shores ... And they use all their vicious beauty and accursed arts to cause men to gaze upon them, and to stir up evil passions within their breasts.
  
  These are not the words of an Old Testament prophet but those of a Western Australian newspaper in 1897.
  
  Yet while the 'scarlet women' - the 'harlots' of the goldfields - were vilified and demonised in print, they were welcomed with open arms by lonely men living in the tent cities of the desert during the gold rush.
  
  That welcome continues to this day, and Kalgoorlie's red-light precinct has become one of its most famous trourist attractions.
  
  The Scarlet Mile is a compelling and fascinating social history of prostitution in Kalgoorlie, where the local brothels and the police station have shared the same street for more than a century.

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