Daniel Andrews MP. So much history! Staff outing, Royal Melbourne Hospital. I want to thank you for your time and insight today giving us that fantastic historical walk. We thoroughly enjoyed the experience and I certainly gained a richer understanding of Madame Brussels and who she might have been. I felt an incredible appreciation for people like you who are passionate and actively working to tell these stories that have shaped the deeply interesting character of our city. Emily and friends.
A BIG thank you for today. Staff excursion, Dept Human Services. Celestial Lane. Chinese boarding houses and prostitutes. Caroline was a contemporary of Saint Mary Mackillop who was born nearby and set up her missions and ragged schools metres away. These two very different lives make fascinating comparison. Both were responses to the extreme desperation of many women and both fell foul of outraged males in the church hierarchy. The slums of Little Lon and Little Bourke were an intensive hotbed of social justice agitators: anarchists, communists, gays, feminists, slum sisters, church leaders, Chinese civil rights activists and others see below whose groundbreaking programs powerfully influenced our welfare safety net of today.
It was associated with prostitution, petty crime and larrikinism. The truth was very different. Many of the working women were victimised by prejudicial harassment and imprisonment leading to laws criminalising of sex-workers for over years and only repealed in Writing in , C. Tobacconists, confectionery, cigar and fruit shops in the area also sometimes acted as fronts for prostitution. In the small houses of the laneways, single or small groups of prostitutes also ran the most primitive cottage brothels.
Madam Brussels was far from the only elite brothel in the area. In October , the mace of the Victorian parliament was stolen. This also seems to have been born out by the major archaeological studies conducted in the area in and , which discovered a wide variety of objects from abandoned cesspits and rubbish dumps. Many were typical of domestic use in the nineteenth century, but a number gave indications of a flourishing community and occasionally, prosperity.
Nor were its inhabitants passive victims to poverty. Changes in the early twentieth century Leanne Robinson comments that in the early twentieth century the Little Lon district began to change significantly. However, people continued to live in the area until the s, when much of the district was compulsorily acquired for redevelopment by the Federal Government.
