South Australia colony founders fail to stop prostitution ‘out of all proportion' on the early streets of Adelaide
Hindley Street, Adelaide, viewed from King William Street, in about 1846. It quickly became a focus for prostitution.
Image by the George French Angas, courtesy State Library of South Australia
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in London’s Newgate Prison for abducting 15-year-old Ellen Turner to Gretna Green, wrote in A letter from Sydney (1829) that “transportation of at least ten males for one female, maintains a great disproportion between the sexes. This is the greatest evil of all.”
Wakefield’s argument for equality of the sexes was acknowledged in the British government 1834 Act “to empower His Majesty to erect South Australia into a British Province or Provinces, and to provide for the colonization and Government thereof". 'The Act provided that “poor persons who shall by means of the said 'Emigration Fund' be conveyed to the said Province or Provinces shall, as far as possible, be adult persons of the two sexes in equal proportions”.
Despite the South Australian founders’ intention, Adelaide's west end quickly developed a visible sex industry, commonly called the “social evil” in the 19th Century. Some blamed the South Australian colonisation commissioners for “sending us the scum of the English and Irish workhouses”.
In April 1843, a colonist’s letter to the South Australian Register asked: "Can you inform me how long the neighbourhood of Waymouth Street and Light Square are to be infested with brothels, and when the inhabitants are to be rid of the music, dancing, revelry and the mob of drunken blacklegs who idle about there all day and live on plunder and prostitution at night?”
In response to such concerns, the Legislative Council passed on ordinance for regulating the police in South Australia, in 1844. Its Section XX warned “every common prostitute wandering in the public streets or highways, or in any place of public resort, and behaving in a riotous or indecent manner ... shall be deemed an idle and disorderly person.” The penalty was not more than one month in the “House of Correction” with hard labour. For a next offence, the offender was deemed a "rogue and a vagabond", with the penalty being not more than three months with hard labour.
This, with some changes, was the law used to convict most women working as prostitutes in 19th Century South Australia.
