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Flies in their wily webs

Melbourne’s buoyant colonial red district
by
December 2021, no. 438

The Women of Little Lon: Sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne by Barbara Minchinton

La Trobe University Press, $32.99 pb, 294 pp

Flies in their wily webs

Melbourne’s buoyant colonial red district
by
December 2021, no. 438

We routinely think of the past as a subtext of the present, but in The Women of Little Lon Barbara Minchinton flips this around. She aims not only to ‘dismantle the myths and counter misinformation and deliberate distortions’ about sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne, but – in an explicitly #MeToo context – to ‘reduce the stigma attached to the work today’ while heightening our ‘understanding of and respect for the lives of all sex workers’.

Paul Dalgarno reviews 'The Women of Little Lon: Sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne' by Barbara Minchinton

The Women of Little Lon: Sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne

by Barbara Minchinton

La Trobe University Press, $32.99 pb, 294 pp

From the New Issue

Comment (1)

  • Young women? What of the age of these sex workers? It is probable that many were mere teenagers.
    Posted by Patrick Hockey
    27 January 2022