Female crews: sex workers in nineteenth-century Melbourne

Abstract

In his work on settler societies, James Belich theorised the importance of a group of men he called ‘crews’, but largely ignored the sex workers whose lives paralleled theirs. The sex work industry has been found in all nineteenth-century colonial cities, and in Melbourne sex workers were arguably both numerous and economically significant. This article examines their lives in the context of Belich’s concept of ‘crew’, concluding that if the men were an important and formative element in this settler society, then so too were these women, but their contribution to its social and material culture has yet to be fully explored.