Kalgoorlie’s Sex Trade and the Kalgoorlie Miner: 1896–1903

ABSTRACT

Kalgoorlie and the sex industry are synonymous. Around the time of Federation, significant attempts were made by the community to rid itself of prostitution. An important contributor to this endeavour was the local long-running daily newspaper, the Kalgoorlie Miner. To date, research has overlooked its significant role in building community and reinforcing hegemony. The Kalgoorlie Miner’s framing of prostitution as the “social evil”—antithetical to Christian living, morals and civility—was a successful position because it appealed to the buying public and maintained pressure on the problem. This article explores the place of newspapers in a given community, Federation Kalgoorlie, and its prostitution. It finds that gatekeeping and community Christianism, particularly the laity, played an essential role in challenging and opposing prostitution.

KEYWORDS:

• Kalgoorlie
• prostitution
• Federation
• Kalgoorlie Miner
• news framing
• community

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Andrew Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provisional Press in England, 1855–1900 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018), 367.

2 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1951).

3 Ralph H. Turner, “The Real Self: From Institution to Impulse,” American Journal of Sociology 81, no. 5 (1976): 989–1016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2777553.

4 Margaret Mooney Marini, “Social Values and Norms,” in Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. E. F. Borgatta and R. J. V. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 2828–40.

5 Steven Hitlin and Jane Allyn Piliavin. “Values: Reviving a Dormant Concept,” Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 359–93.

6 Edward Royle, “Introduction: Regions and Identities,” in Issues of Regional Identity in Honour of John Marshall, ed. Edward Royle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 2.

7 Cold winters and warm summers in a semi-arid location.

8 Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town, 269.

9 Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town, 271–73.

10 Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town, 221.

11 Robert Entman, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.

12 Hobbs defines local or provincial “in opposition to ‘metropolitan’” (i.e. the Sydney Morning Herald) to mean “published outside of London”, rather than “narrow and uncultured”. See Andrew Hobbs, “Provincial Periodicals,” chap. 16 in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton (London: Routledge, 2016), 8222.

13 Lael Morgan, Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush (Fairbanks, AK: Epicenter Press, 1999); Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851–1861 (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1977); Ian Breward, A History of the Churches in Australasia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).

14 Weston Bate, “The Urban Sprinkle: Country Towns and Australian Regional History,” in Urbanisation in Australia: The 19th Century, ed. C. B. Schedvin and J. W. McCarthy (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1970), 110–12.

15 Bate, “The Urban Sprinkle,” 108.

16 Meredith Lake, The Bible in Australia (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2018), 115.

17 Anglicanism and Catholicism. See Len Smith, Tim Rowse, and Stuart Hungerford, “Historical and Colonial Census Data Archive (HCCDA),” Australian Bureau of Statistics; Australian Data Archive, doi:10.26193/MP6WRS, ADA Dataverse, V5 (accessed 1 November 2022); Lake, The Bible in Australia, 115–16.

18 The data include New Zealand. The increase in percentage was an increase in Church of England adherents. See T. A Coghlan, A Statistical Account of the Seven Colonies of Australasia, 1901–1902 (Sydney: William Applegate Gullick, 1902), 838.

19 Smith, Rowse, and Hungerford, “Historical and Colonial Census Data Archive (HCCDA)”. Please note that these data exclude Indigenous peoples. Interestingly, despite the Western Australian population increasing by 3.7 times in 10 years, the Christian community percentage remained static.

20 Smith, Rowse, and Hungerford, “Historical and Colonial Census Data Archive (HCCDA)”.

21 Tom Frame, Losing my Religion: Unbelief in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 73.

22 For a greater discussion on this, see Michael Gladwin, “The Journalist in the Rectory: Anglican Clergymen and Australian Intellectual Life, 1788–1850,” History Australia 7, no. 3 (2010); Lake, The Bible in Australia.

23 For mayors, consider John Wilson (1895–1896), Anglican; Harold George Parsons (1896–1897), Anglican; Robert McKenzie (1897–1898), Anglican; John “Jack” William Fimister (1898–1900), Anglican; Miles Staniforth Smith (1900–1901), Anglican; Sir Norbert Michael Keenan (1901–1905), Catholic; and Jimmy (James) Hurtle Cummins (1905–1907), Catholic. For mining magnates, consider Captain Henry Richard Hancock, Moonta Mines, Methodist; R. D. Thompson, Hannan’s Gold Estate Company, Catholic; Charles L. Hunt, Hannan’s Propriety Development Company, Presbyterian; and George Arnell, Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines, Anglican.

24 “Kalgoorlie Pioneer Hurling Club,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 13 April 1899, 8; John Collins Bailie died 20 June 1941, aged 70, Roman Catholic, Kalgoorlie Cemetery (see https://www.kalgoorliebouldercemetery.com.au/search/browse.php?s=500&np=44#store-top); “Football,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 22 April 1898, 42; “Bailie Bros, Kalgoorlie,” Weekly Times, (Melbourne), 10 August 1989, 54; “Items of News,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 14 July 1900, 4; “Local,” Kalgoorlie Western Argus, 13 August 1901, 16.

25 John Cowdell, “The Anglican Church in Western Australia during the Great Depression,” Studies in Western Australian History 9 (1987): 83.

26 Jeanne MacKenzie, Australian Paradox (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1962), 125.

27 Nicholas Fyfe, Jon Bannister, and Ade Kearns, “(Incivility) and the City,” Urban Studies 43, no. 5/6 (2006): 854–55.

28 Robert Pascoe and Frances Thomson, In Old Kalgoorlie: The Photographs of J.J. Dwyer (Welshpool, WA: Western Australian Museum, 2012), 13.

29 Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victorian 1834–1890 (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1967), 111–13; Susan Priestly, Echuca: A Centenary History (Brisbane: The Jacaranda Press, 1965), 57–59.

30 Elaine McKeown, The Scarlet Mile: A Social History of Prostitution in Kalgoorlie, 1984–2004 (Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press, 2005), 2.

31 Raelene Davidson (formerly Frances), “Prostitution in Perth, Fremantle and the Eastern Goldfields, 1898–1939” (MA thesis, University of Western Australia, 1980); Davidson R. Crawley, “As Good a Bloody Woman as any other Bloody Woman: Prostitutes in Western Australia, 1895–1939,” in Exploring Women’s Past: Essays in Social History, ed. Patricia M. Crawford (Carlton, VIC: Sisters Publishing, 2007); Raelene Frances, Selling Sex: A Hidden History of Prostitution (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 1983); Simon Adams and Raelene Frances, “Lifting the Veil: The Sex Industry, Museums and Galleries,” Labour History 85 (2003): 47–64; Raelene Frances, “‘White Slaves’ and White Australia: Prostitution and Australian Society,” Australian Feminist Studies 19, no. 44 (2004): 185–200; and Raelene Frances, “Australian Prostitution in International Context,” Australian Historical Studies 27, no. 106 (1996): 127–41.

32 Norma King, “Ladies of the Night,” chap. 6 in Daughters of Midas: Pioneer Women of the Eastern Goldfields, ed. Norma King (Carlisle, WA: Hesperian Press, 1988), 71–86; Sheryl Milentis and Peter Bridge, eds., The Scarlet Stain: Harlots, Harridans and Hellholes of Old Kalgoorlie (Carlisle, WA: Hesperian Press, 2004).

33 For example, Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality; The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Phillipa Levine, Prostitution, Race & Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003).

34 Hyam, Empire and Sexuality; Levine, Prostitution, Race & Politics.

35 Frances, “Australian Prostitution in International Context,” 127–41.

36 King, “Ladies of the Night,” 76.

37 Compare “Population of Municipalities,” Western Mail, 22 March 1898, 23 with data from “1903. Western Australia,” Seventh Census of Western Australia, https://hccda.ada.edu.au/Collated_Census_Tables/WA-1901-census_02.html (accessed 1 May 2023).

38 McKeown, The Scarlet Mile, 18.

39 Frances, “‘White Slaves’,” 189.

40 “Municipal Elections,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 13 January 1900, 8.

41 Blake Ashforth and Glen Kreiner, “‘How can you do it?’: Dirty Work and the Challenge of Constructing a Positive Identity,” Academy of Management Review 24, no. 3 (1999): 413–34. The term “dirty work” was first coined by Everett Hughes in 1962. See Everett Hughes, “Good People and Dirty Work,” Social Problems 10, no. 1 (1962): 3–11

42 “Japanese in Kalgoorlie,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 29 July 1896, 2.

43 Phillipa Levine, Prostitution, Race & Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 151–54.

44 Brian H. Fletcher, “Christianity and Free Society in New South Wales 1788–1840,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 86, no. 2 (2000): 99.

45 Fletcher, “Christianity and Free Society,” 98–102.

46 Later known as Sir John Kirwan.

47 Lucy Salmon, The Newspaper and the Historian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923), 93.

48 Salmon, The Newspaper and the Historian.

49 Rod Kirkpatrick, Country Conscience: A History of the New South Wales Provincial Press 1841–1995 (Canberra: Infinite Harvest Publishing, 2000), 115

50 Kirkpatrick, Country Conscience.

51 Salmon, The Newspaper and the Historian, 252.

52 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1922), 63.

53 David Manning White, “‘The ‘Gate Keeper’: A Case Study in the Selection of News,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1950): 390.

54 On becoming editor of the daily Kalgoorlie Miner, he was likewise responsible for the weekly Kalgoorlie newspaper Western Argus, as both newspapers were owned by Hocking & Co. I concentrate on the Kalgoorlie Miner because of its frequency and news dominance.

55 Partlon, “Mightier than the Sword,” 13.

56 Partlon, “Mightier than the Sword,” 3–7; Pat Simpson, “Kirwan, Sir John Waters (1869–1949),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography (National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2006), https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kirwan-sir-john-waters-6978/text12125 (published first in hardcopy 1983, accessed online 15 November 2022); Norma King, The Voice of the Goldfields: 100 Years of the Kalgoorlie Miner (Kalgoorlie, WA: Hocking & Co, 1995), 44–45. In addition, he supported, like most Australians at the time, a White Australia: where coloured and “undesirable” immigration would be excluded, where the nation would view Japan as potentially hostile, and where he “was a working man of limited financial means”. Evening Star,” Boulder (WA), 15 March 1901, 3.

57 McKeown, The Scarlet Mile, 34.

58 Rod Kirkpatrick, “Regional Press,” in A Companion to the Australian Media, ed. Bridget Griffen-Foley (Kew: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014), 408–11.

59 David Coupland, The Media’s Role in Defining the Nation: The Active Voice (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 104.

60 Rural newspapers selected information, including syndicated news, that could affect or be of interest to readers (for example, on the Boer War, Federation, Western Australian miner politics and the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme).

61 Coupland, The Media’s Role in Defining the Nation, 104.

62 Robert Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 52.

63 Robert Entman, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5–6.

64 See Shanto Iyengar, Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Dietram Scheufele and David Tewksbury, “Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models,” Journal of Communications 57, no. 1 (2007): 9–20; Pamela J. Shoemaker and Stephen D. Reese, Mediating the Message (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996); Daniela V. Dimitrova and Jesper Stromback, “Mission Accomplished? Framing of the Iraq War in the Elite Newspapers in Sweden and the United States,” International Communication Gazette 67, no. 5 (2005): 399–417; Holli A. Semetko and Patti M. Valkenburg, “Framing European Politics: A Content Analysis of Press and Television News,” Journal of Communication 50, no. 2 (2006): 93–109; Yu-Kang Lee and Chun-Tuan Chang, “Framing Public Policy: The Impacts of Political Sophistication and Nature of Public Policy,” The Social Science Journal 47, no. 1 (2010): 69–89.

65 Entman, Projections of Power, 5.

66 Defeated by the Labor candidate, C. E. Frazer.

67 Duplicate refers to an article that was counted under one or more search terms.

68 Editorial, “The Social Evil,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 13 November 1901, 4.

69 For instance, the West Kalgoorlie Progress Committee, neighbourhoods with brothels and the Kalgoorlie District Roads Board.

70 “The Social Evil—A Vigorous Protest,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 12 November 1901, 4.

71 Disgusted, “Letter to the Editor: Social Evil,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 11 November 1901, 3.

72 “Letter to the Editor: Social Evil”.

73 “Letter to the Editor: Social Evil”.

74 Christians dominated the profession at the time. See Lake, The Bible in Australia, 136–65.

75 Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town, 267.

76 “Japanese in Kalgoorlie – Raid by the Police – Sentence of Two Months’ Imprisonment,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 5 August 1896, 2; “The French Section – A Successful Prosecution,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 4 June 1897, 2. For an extended discussion on this, see Catherine Ann Martin, “The Chinese Invasion: Settler Colonialism and the Metaphoric Construction of Race,” Journal of Australian Studies 45, no. 4 (2021): 543–59.

77 Catherine Dewhurst, “Collaborating on Whiteness: Representing Italians in Early White Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies 32, no. 1 (2008): 33–35.

78 Jean E. Farrant, “A Social History of Music in Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie and Boulder 1892 to 1908” (BA Hons thesis, University of Western Australia, 1991), 33–63, https://api.research-repository.uwa.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/39810807/Farrant_Jean_1992_compressed.pdf.

79 Job March, “Letter to the Editor ‘The Social Evil’,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 28 October 1897, 2.

80 Disgusted, “Social Evil,” 3.

81 Janet McCalman, “Class and Respectability in a Working-class Suburb: Richmond, Victoria, before the Great War,” Historical Studies 20, no. 78 (1982): 90–103.

82 McCalman, “Class and Respectability”.

83 “Old Resident, Letter to the Editor,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 29 July 1896, 2.

84 “Old Resident, Letter to the Editor”.

85 “Impressions of Kalgoorlie. By a Bunbury Resident,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 6 September 1898, 4. (Bunbury is 461 miles southwest of Kalgoorlie.)

86 For instance, the “social evil,” “evil”, “nuisance” and “stain”.

87 “A Judas Job,” Sun (Kalgoorlie), 2 June 1901, 1. Also see “Municipal Elections,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 17 November 1902, 4–5. Bibby’s ruined reputation cost him, in 1906, a Mount Monger hotel licence (“Goldfields Gossip: The Terror of Crooks,” Truth, 22 September 1906, 6); he was also accused of being a gold thief in the 1906 Royal Commission on Gold-Stealing (“Royal Commission on Gold-Stealing, Special Sittings,” Kalgoorlie Western Argus, 4 December 1906, 7).

88 Thos. Bibby, Public Notices, Advertising, Kalgoorlie Miner, 4 June 1901, 7.

89 C. E. Clark, Colonial Sec., W.C.T.U, “Letter to the Editor, ‘Social Evil’,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 8 June 1900, 7.

90 A. Sinnick, “Letter to the Editor, ‘Social Evil’,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 8 June 1900, 7.

91 In 1901, 4,039 men and 261 women resided in Kalgoorlie (“The 1901 Census,” Western Mail, 21 December 1901, 74).

92 “State Regulated Prostitution,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 16 November 1897, 5. Roe went on to become a judge in the WA Supreme Court. See “The Late Mr. Augustus S. Roe,” West Australian, 17 March 1921, 7.

93 Street solicitation is what defined a common prostitute, typically “proven” by the testimony of one or two policemen who told the magistrate that they had seen a woman “frequenting a certain area and soliciting men”: Julia A. Laite and Mary Gordon, “Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints: Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth-Century London,” History Workshop Journal 65 (2008): 99. See Police Act 1892 (WA), s59. Also see, s65 (8).

94 See Police Act 1892, s65 (7).

95 Kai Erikson defines deviant behaviour “as an alien element in society. Deviance is considered a vagrant form of human activity moving outside the more orderly currents of social life”. See “Notes on the Sociology of Deviance,” Social Problems 9, no. 4 (1962): 307.

96 “Adducing evidence” is the legal term for presenting or producing evidence in court for the purpose of establishing proof.

97 As a matter of interest, Kalgoorlie and surrounding areas maintained a healthy number of highly successful criminal defence solicitors. For example, Norbert Michael Keenan was mayor of Kalgoorlie between 1901 and 1905, vice-president of the Chamber of Mines, and Western Australia Senator for Kalgoorlie 1904–1911.

98 As evident in the number reported on in Police Court News.

99 A Mother, “The Social Evil,” letter to the editor, Kalgoorlie Miner, 1 October 1897, 2.

100 “The Japanese in Kalgoorlie—Open Air Meeting in Hanan-Street,” Kalgoorlie Miner, 18 August 1896, 3.