Leigh Straw on Madam Monnier and Perth's notorious Roe Street brothels in The Petticoat Parade

Good Reading Podcast

Josie de Bray was a brothel madam who owned most of Roe Street, Perth from WWI up to the 1940s. This immensely readable social history uses the life of Josie de Bray as conduit into the lives of her friends and competitors – the many women who paraded in their petticoats on the verandas of Roe Street, and who were kept from the public view and were secret keepers themselves in the seamier side of town. In this episode, author and researcher Leigh Straw chats to Heather Lewis about the stigma of sex work past and present, and the process of writing The Petticoat Parade.