Sex in the town
Prostitution is often called ‘the oldest profession’, suggesting that it has always existed in human society. In Maitland it featured early: in about 1830, when the place was barely a town, W. Allan Wood in Dawn in the Valley refers to travellers on High St being greeted by a ‘tumult of assorted shrill whistles, shrieks, raucous laughter, jeers . . . suggestive invitations and lewd insults’. It’s not hard to decipher what the suggestive invitations were about.
The infant Maitland was a rough and raw frontier town with drunkenness, violence and riotous behaviour highly evident. A large majority of the adult population was male and lacking prospects of female companionship in the form of marriage. Women had few work opportunities outside domestic service, and to some of them prostitution would have made economic sense. For some, indeed, it would have been virtually the only means by which they could purchase the necessities for life.
The unbalanced gender ratio guaranteed a demand for ‘negotiated affections’ from those who offered them, often in the streets. The premises used for prostitution would not have been difficult to identify, something that must have aided the police in their efforts to keep some sort of a limit on the practice. This, rather than eradication, was probably the objective of law and order. Crimes of violence and crimes against property would have had higher priorities and prostitution was probably targeted only when there were complaints about its being practised too openly and with associated nuisances like noise and fighting.
Two court cases
Prostitution was illegal and looked down upon by society at large. The Maitland Mercury routinely reported court cases prosecuting prostitution. Terms like ‘bawdy house’ and ‘house of ill-fame’ were aired, but the activities conducted in them were described obliquely and discreetly, only ‘as fully as their nature would allow’. Community sensitivity required women and children to leave the court when hearings involved prostitution.
In October 1854 the Mercury reported that a John Fleming was charged with keeping a ‘disorderly house’ at Campbell’s Hill. Two women ‘constantly resorted there’, their prostitution allegedly Fleming’s only means of support: it was for his ‘lucre and gain’. Fleming called the charge a ‘made up plot’, but he was found guilty and sentenced to six months’ hard labour in Parramatta Gaol.
Three years later William and Ellen Lamb of Swan St, Morpeth, were similarly prosecuted. Evidence was provided that women of ‘known bad character’ were seen entering the Lambs’ house at night, with ‘strange men’ leaving in the morning. A neighbour complained that the Lambs were nearly always drunk and that the noise from their house kept him awake. The couple were found guilty of keeping a disorderly house and both were sentenced to hard labour: William Lamb in Darlinghurst Gaol and Ellen Lamb in Maitland Gaol.
Responses from society
‘Respectable’ opinion was outraged by prostitution, but it was much less outraged by the appallingly difficult life circumstances which some women had to endure. Women who sold sex were seen as bad, not unfortunate or forced to risk disease and violence merely to survive. The frontier, as Maitland was in its early years, was a man’s world. Women lacked independence or choices in life and their existence tended to be hard unless they had husbands with a degree of wealth.
For some women, prostitution must have been an economic necessity. It would have paid better than most of the available alternatives.
Sometimes the Mercury moralised on the topic. In December 1861, for example, it noted that attempts to combat the ‘social evil’ in Sydney and Melbourne were about to be replicated in Maitland. Some ‘benevolent and philanthropic ladies’ were seeking to rescue their ‘fallen sisters’. The paper voiced its approval of this: ‘We may . . . . hope to see, before many months, good effects flowing from their efforts.’
Whether any Maitland women were ‘saved’ by this initiative is unknown, but prostitution never disappeared. It gradually moved from the streets into brothels and eventually some brothels were made legal. They exist now in industrial estates, and some women advertise in newspapers and online and work from their homes.
Prostitution in today’s Maitland mostly takes place within the law and out of sight. Public opinion is not scandalised by it.
References
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: the oldest profession was right at home in colonial Maitland’, Maitland Mercury, 6 December 2020.
Maitland Mercury.
Wood, W. Allan, Dawn in the Valley: the story of settlement in the Hunter Valley to 1833, Wentworth Books, Sydney, 1972.
