Prostitution 'institution' in Australian mining town

By Joanne Meszoly

KALGOORLIE, Western Australia (JP): Like women in a college dorm getting ready for a Saturday night, Jilly, Paige and Jesse rush through their shared living room on their way to the bathroom, half dressed and makeup in hand.

Rock music blares from a nearby bedroom, while a softer melody drifts from the corner of a dining room decorated with mismatched furniture. An older, motherly figure relaxes in a wicker chair and chats with her young charges about their day.

The scene would be nothing special, were it not for the black- lettered poster on the wall:

1/2 hour -- $100.00

3/4 hour -- $120.00

1 hour -- $150.00

1 1/2 hours -- $250.00

2 hours -- $300.00

We accept all major credit cards and cheques plus 10 percent surcharge.

Welcome to 181 Hay Street, one of the last brothels in this gold-mining town. Kalgoorlie, set in Australia's remote Nullarbor ("No Trees") Desert, could hardly be more isolated from modern Australia. It's a good day's drive from the regional capital of Perth, with its cluster of high-rise buildings and tidy suburbs.

Little has changed in Kalgoorlie since the 1890s, when this town of 28,000 boasted the nickname of the "richest square mile of gold country in the world". Today, "Kal" is the only town in the area to survive the booms and busts. Its once-grand hotels -- now pubs -- still thrive, and so does a frontier ethic that blends tolerance with paternalism.

Kalgoorlie's red-light district lies just a few steps away from the police station, on a quiet side street in the town's commercial zone. The town once had 17 brothels, stretching over two blocks. The number has dwindled to three, thanks to open-cut mining, a method that needs fewer miners. Also, wives and other women are moving to Kal.

A one-story trailer-home complex, 181 Hay Street is divided into shoe-box rooms. Outside, there's a pool and spa. The women perch on stools, just inside their bedroom doorways. Pink and red scarves, thrown over lamps, cast rosy shadows in the bedrooms, backlighting the women's silhouettes and the occasional trail of smoke from a cigarette. Multicolored lights flash over the roofed verandah.

Leigh, the madam, relaxes in a wicker chair, making small talk with one of her girls.

"Wanna coffee, luv?" she asks, rising slowly. Leigh, known as a "sitter", also serves as housemother, manager and overall rule enforcer. She is fiftyish, and this night wears a white crochet vest and spandex floral pants.

She draws on a cigarette and, fueled by coffee and conversation, settles in for a long night of signing customers in and taking their money.

Several women wander into the common room, coffee in hand, and join the conversation. Paige, a 20 year old, sits down at the table. She has been working here for six weeks. Before, she worked in a bar in Perth as an "escort"; an ill-defined job that often amounts to a less protected form of prostitution. Paige says she wants to save up enough money to make a down payment on a house outside Perth and raise a family.

"It's all about making money in a little time," she says.

Jesse, a prostitute off-and-on for 18 years, disagrees with Paige. She says she made A$48,000 in three and a half months during school vacation in 1976. She used the money to buy a house. Since then, she's tried hotel management and other "straight" jobs.

"It's not all about money," she says. "I could make more money working for a hotel. But I needed an escape." This time, Jesse has been at 181 Hay Street for a year.

Another woman, at age 39, says she can't escape from the life. Once she was married and worked for a major insurance company as a sales manager, she says. She regrets taking the first step into prostitution three years ago.

"In four months I made $80,000," she recalls sadly. "My boyfriend thought I was working as a cook on a sheep station." When she returned for just one week, her boyfriend discovered the truth and broke up with her.

"After that, I felt I had lost all that I had. But that's the problem with prostitution," she says. "Once you've done it, it's really hard to get out."

"The worst about all this is that we can't have life insurance," says Jilly, a bit of a Scarlett O'Hara character with dark, curly hair, white skin and an hourglass figure. "We are considered high risk, because of HIV."

Still, many of the women say they feel safer practicing prostitution here than elsewhere. At least the "bushies" -- men who work out of town -- are "straight-up". They just want "simple sex," the women say. "But the businessmen want the kinky stuff -- the stuff they can't get at home." The prostitutes also complain that businessmen balk at the prices and do not treat them well. Miners, on the other hand, have been out of town for weeks and are happy to spend their pay in the pubs and brothels.

Social Isolation

Katie takes a visitor on a shopping trip one day. She hurries her errands, trying to avoid chance meetings with customers of the brothels. She keeps her visits downtown to a minimum.

That's exactly what the townspeople wanted when they came up with the "containment" system in the early 1970s. Then, the police department faced accusations of frequenting the brothels themselves and taking bribes. A court dropped charges against the police, citing insubstantial evidence. Realizing that it would be impossible to put an end to prostitution in a remote mining town, Kal's officials decided to tolerate the existing brothels -- then numbering five -- but allow no new ones. The magistrate and town council put in place strict written and verbal laws for prostitution that were only recently overturned.

Up until January 1995, prostitutes' lives were restricted to the brothels. Under the containment policy, they had to live and work in the brothel, at all times. They were not allowed to frequent the pubs, and visiting the public swimming pool and racetrack was strongly discouraged. If a girl wanted a beer at a pub, she had to go to the nearest tavern in Broad Arrow, 35 kilometers away, or Coolgardie, a town 47 kilometers in the other direction.

The local council believed that by making it inconvenient and difficult on the women, prostitution would eventually die out of Kalgoorlie. Yet while some brothels closed in the 1980s, three houses survived, and conduct a thriving business today. In the goldfields, prostitution is here to stay.

Rules began to slip in the 1990s. The police realized that they had bigger concerns than the brothels, and they loosened their hold. In January 1995, police and local officials dropped the age of prostitution from 21 to 18. In addition, the women were given the right to work and live, outside their thin brothel walls. They could frequent the bars, and even run their business in pubs, as an escort service.

Living in private apartments and houses was the most important change. Concerned, however, that the prostitutes may work with a pimp, the police strictly enforce a women-only living situation. This rule goes back to early bylaws when town council decreed that only a woman may run a brothel; a rule designed to prevent pimping.

The prostitutes say this rule suits them fine -- a madam is more in tune to their needs and easier to approach about working conditions. The sex workers get to keep 50 percent from each job, with the rest going to the brothel. While this may sound like a hefty fee, those who live in the brothel pay only $100 per week for rent.

Some laws remain the same, such as mandatory medical checkups every two weeks and an HIV test every six weeks. And the women must use condoms. These rules may sound difficult to enforce, but each prostitute must register with Kal's vice squad, where they are photographed and undergo background checks.

Kalgoorlie's prostitutes have reached a comfort level, of sorts, with the police. Leigh, the madam, recalls the days of prostitution before containment. During the early 1970s, Leigh says, she paid off police officers in Sydney every Thursday.

Here, in Kalgoorlie, she says, "occasionally they do a bust, checking for drugs. We've got to stay clean, because if one girl is found with anything, they'll close us for good."

Gary Annetts, of the police department, says such raids will continue, as "drugs seem to go hand in hand with prostitution. Prostitution has always been a source for quick money. The madams try to keep the drugs out, but it is difficult to enforce."

Annetts, who has been working here a few years, says that "while the brothels are a thorn in my side, they do not concern me nearly as much as local disruptions, such as drunkenness, car thefts and robbery." Kalgoorlie's police say they are more concerned about racial conflicts involving Aborigines living in town.

Hay Street's brothels are not the only type of entertainment for men in Kalgoorlie. Pub owners hire "skimpies" to boost business. Skimpies are lingerie-clad barmaids who will gamble or accept tips to shed their lacy bras. Often a miner gives a skimpy a two-dollar coin to flip. If she calls the toss in her favor, she keeps the money. If the man wins, she shows her breasts. Skimpies get "two dollar toss" challenges often on most nights at the Exchange Hotel. Like prostitution, this bar game is illegal, but the police look the other way. One skimpy claims she takes home between $200 and $300 a night.

Skimpies travel an entertainment circuit from town to town. In Western Australia (W.A.), the country's biggest state (975,000 square miles), that's a large circuit. Yet W.A. has a population of only 1.5 million -- and 1.1 million of those people live in Perth.

Like the prostitutes and skimpies, the miners face isolation and a limited social life, in exchange for higher wages than they'd earn elsewhere. At a typical gold mine, the lowest paid miner earns $200 Australian a day. Most drillers make $400 a day, an amount that can run to $100,000 a year. They also get added payments for gold extracted per ton of ore. While most single miners plan only a brief stint in Kal, good wages and the "wild west" lifestyle entice many to stay.

All this makes women feel isolated too, says music student Suzanne Hicks, who compares living in Kalgoorlie to "being in the Twilight Zone." Hicks, who serves many miners and bushmen in her part-time bartending job, notes that "people say, 'The men here work hard and drink hard."' People think that because they are out in the bush or down in the mines, they are allowed to wise off to women and raise hell when they return to town."

Out of the 40-some licensed pubs in Kalgoorlie, only six do not employ skimpies. Only the priciest, with strict dress codes, are without them.

A more typical pub, The Foundry, opens at 6 a.m. for miners getting off the night shift. It's not unusual for patrons to be served breakfast by women in lingerie.

"The skimpies are far more offensive than the brothels," Hicks says. "On a Friday night, you can't walk into a pub without seeing a skimpy flashing a bunch of rowdy guys. I think it's more degrading than prostitution."

So perhaps it's not surprising that townspeople seem resigned to something they see as inevitable.

Two mothers, questioned in a Kalgoorlie pub, looked quizzical when asked about the town's tolerance of prostitution. One finally answered that Hay Street serves its purpose: To satisfy the needs of men lacking a girlfriend or wife.

Other townspeople speculated that the presence of brothels, with their medical checkups, lowered the risk of disease. Drillers from the mines said that prostitutes are a necessity in Kal.

"It's an institution that's been here as long as the town," one driller remarked. "It's like the post office."