Introduction

In October 1888 Fred Coneybeer, an Adelaide horsecollar-maker, took his wife Maggie and infant daughter Olive for a holiday in Melbourne. The respectable artisan evidently considered it a concession for his wife to inspect Melbourne’s most notorious street even on a Sunday morning, and he carefully steered her away from its even murkier byways. All the great cities of the world had their underworlds and perhaps Melbourne, always keen to be seen in their company, was bound to follow suit. Discussions of slum life in Melbourne were always overshadowed by the appalling example of ‘Outcast London’. Melbourne’s mainly Anglo-Saxon immigrants had more homogeneous origins, but they were also more youthful and more isolated from the restraining influence of their kinsfolk. A city council committee claimed that many eating houses were ‘nothing better than brothels in disguise’ and a year later complaints were still being made about ‘the large number of depraved females who nightly throng the streets of Melbourne’.