Madame Brussels made her reputation running a brothel in Melbourne. Today, she has a laneway and cocktail named in her honour.
There were several bold and canny businesswomen – “flash madams” as they were known – who during the late 19th century operated brothels on the east side of Melbourne’s CBD. Only one of these women, however, subsequently had a laneway named after her. The legendary Madame Brussels echoes today also in the name of a rooftop cocktail bar. It is a tribute to a woman entrepreneur who offered her clients entertainments that went beyond the units of time booked with the sex workers she employed.
Madame Brussels was born Caroline Lohmar in what was then Prussia. She married an Englishman named Studholme Hodgson, the minor scion of a well-to-do English family that produced a number of colonial officials. For his part, Hodgson became a policeman in rural Victoria, and seems to have lived apart from his wife for most of their marriage. Minchinton speculates that he was gay, and that his wife accepted this.
This book addresses two of the more persistent myths from this supposedly decadent era: that there was a tunnel connecting Parliament House with a nearby brothel, and the other that the silver-gilt parliamentary mace that went missing in 1891 was taken to a brothel for the amusement of revellers there.
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