Prostitution is a difficult concept to define. Its most simple form involves direct payment for sex although historians acknowledge that the process and meaning of these transactions is messy; they are historically and culturally contingent, governed by a complex mix of power relations. In turn-of-the-century Queensland, prostitution was viewed predominantly through imported British lenses of gender, class, and race; often they were tinted with exaggeration and hyperbole. This was especially true when it came to street-walkers, working-class women, and Asian immigrants.
Imperial models constructed a spatial order which identified immoral women and the spaces they inhabited. The authorities marked out certain locations for surveillance and created facilities to remove and segregate deviant individuals for punishment, treatment, and potential reform. Brothels themselves were simultaneously cast as illicit, morally corrupt and undesirable, but accepted as a necessary outlet that might contain and confine working-class and ethnic sexualities and prevent depravity from spilling onto the streets.
Arguably, this feature was so heavily embedded in the landscape that any public woman might have been cast as a prostitute or considered dangerously close to becoming one. In this environment, respectable women were always private; they displayed restraint and stifled any overt or explicit sexuality, ideas inherently associated with middle-class values. Asian immigrants also came in for special concern, allegedly importing immorality and vice as part of their cultural baggage.
This nexus was not lost on the press who were quick to point out the lurking dangers posed by Asian establishments. Setting aside any misrepresentation by the newspapers, North Queensland, in particular, was a racially heterogeneous world and estimates suggest that non-Europeans here accounted for almost forty percent of the population in Thursday Island and coastal townships such as Innisfail and Cairns, and to the south, Mackay and Bundaberg, housed populations of Japanese prostitutes in the late s.
These women may have engaged in prostitution to help bankroll other business interests and finance capital accumulation. Northern settlements were also home to Chinatowns where brothels, opium dens, and sly grog shops sat alongside temples and trade stores. Numerous locations in the capital, Brisbane, were also reputed hubs of female deviance. In the early s, two adjacent houses of ill-fame in this precinct accommodated six girls and one madam.
