Author Talk: The Women of Little Lon

Madame Brussels is Melbourne’s best-known ‘flash madam’ from the nineteenth century. She has a cocktail bar and a laneway in the CBD named after her, but who was she? If you read the newspapers of the time she was ‘the wickedest woman in Melbourne’, but today we constantly see outspoken women having their reputations dragged through the mud by the media. Can we expect the news outlets of the past to have treated women any better? In this talk, award-winning author Barbara Minchinton will explore the difference between history from the newspapers and history from the archives.