Living in St Kilda opened my eyes to the world of prostitution. I'm lucky – I can leave
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Version 0 of 1. My old fridge is broken so I go to the charity shop across the road from where I live. I tell the shop assistant that I’ll only be needing a new fridge for a couple of months. “You moving? Bet you can’t wait to get out of here.” Here is my street – the epicentre of street prostitution in Melbourne and the associated things the trade brings in – cruising guys in cruising cars, drugs, pimps, and what feels like an ever-present thrum of misery day and night, night and day. “I’m not moving,” I lie. “I like it here.” I am moving. I don’t like it here. I lie because I don’t want to confirm what he already believes to be true: I am pampered, possibility prudish, or at least squeamish. But I – unlike many of the women on the street – have options, and can leave. I had been living in Bondi and relocated to Melbourne. I wanted to live by the beach. I should have done my homework on the area, but didn’t. Plus the flat was gorgeous, light and lovely. My street in St Kilda has been a popular area for street sex workers and their clients since the 1970s. According to a report in The Age, police say there are “about 40 regular street prostitutes in St Kilda, many with $500-a-day heroin habits. The police’s sights are now set on the women’s clients, some of whom pick up sex workers at 5am for illicit trysts before they start work.” I walk the street each morning at around 5:18am to catch a 5:33am tram to be at work in the CBD for my 6am news editing shift. It is winter, still dark and most mornings something happens that is worthy of reporting to my colleagues. Sometimes it is passive and miserable – a woman sleeping, defenceless, in a shuttered shop doorway. Other times it is aggressive – a drunk man walking towards me who stops, pulls down his pants and urinates in an arc towards my feet, like a sordid offering. The walk down Grey Street takes eight minutes. Something always happens – and it’s never good. Most mornings I pass several women on corners, just standing there as if waiting for the lights to change. The taxi drivers refer to the women as “girls” and although some of the them look older, maybe in their 40s or 50s, occasionally I pass some workers who look shockingly young – their faces still soft, but their eyes hardening. There are some good guys on the street, too – they work in the homeless men’s shelter across the road, or for St Kilda Gatehouse – a not for profit that assists sex workers, some of whom are battling addiction and working in dangerous situations each day. A lot of them greet me courteously as I pass by – a fellow woman walking alone at a vulnerable hour. As I approach the corners, I tie myself in knots with angst. How to be comfortable with this? How to respond? How to be community minded, inclusive, and not show fear? How to be supportive and feminist-minded but also respect the privacy of the workers who are working in this least private of setting, outside my house? How? “Good morning,” I’d say. “Good morning,” they’d reply. Behind the women – sometimes only visible in my peripheral vision as I pass by in my overcoat and scarf – are the men. These guys I assume are pimps or spotters of some kind. I see them scribble down license plates or murmuring into their mobiles but mostly they seem watchful. On the street they are half hidden, spectral figures – visible only when you pass them and catch the glow of their cigarettes or sense them as you brush past, hurrying in the dark to get beyond them. I feel intimidated, and maybe that is the point. Then there are the guys in cars. Some mornings the footpath is littered with broken eggs – a yolky trail running the length of the street – thrown from cars one presumes towards their targets, the girls working on the corners. Other times, walking home on weekend nights, I sometimes see carloads of guys driving up and down the streets, taunting them. This sometimes takes the form of general abuse shouted from moving cars but other times the car slows down, and the girl crosses the road and goes to open the door handle before the kicker: the car takes off with screams of laughter, with the words “you dirty cunt” echoing behind as they drive away. The idea I suppose behind this is to humiliate the woman, take some dignity away from her, display disgust and contempt for her. But whenever I see it happen, there’s a coolness to the women’s responses, a shrug as they turn around and return to the corner like it never happened. A woman was murdered on her way to work this winter, an early morning shift worker walking along St Kilda Road. I worry about the safety of the sex workers and my own safety; the street feels like a dark kingdom with its own foul weather system. People fight and wail at all hours. A man – maybe on ice – takes off his jacket in the rain and drops to the ground to do push ups. Another walks up and down the street all day and wears cardboard taped to his feet instead of shoes. It’s a place where suffering is in full bloom, always. I hate myself for wanting to escape it, for not being able to handle it. It feels like a dereliction of some sort of unnamed duty to turn away. But that’s what I do. Eventually, I start taking cabs. That too presents a problem. Waiting outside my flat for a cab at 5:30am cars slow down. I am being “checked out”. Some would stop and men would wind down their windows and proposition me, mistaking me for a sex worker. One day, Uber stops picking me up. There are never any drivers available to come to Grey Street at 5:30am. The last one that did was angry. He was looking for my address and an unmarked police car stopped him, and accused him of being a kerb crawler. The taxi drivers that do collect me keep telling me to move, saying it’s not safe. I think about the guy at the charity shop who tried to sell me the fridge – and how he saw the street. For him, it was divided in those who stay and those who go. Those who could go, and those that have nowhere else to go. Last week, I left. |