Australian boy makes good ... as madam

By GREG ANSLEY

CANBERRA - Along Hay St in the West Australian gold town of Kalgoorlie, where for decades barely dressed women paraded in corrugated iron stalls, Leigh Varis has become madam of the outback's glitziest whorehouse.

Where asbestos walls once defied both health and law, Varis this week proudly escorted guests through a $A3 million ($3.7 million) themed extravaganza in which working rooms double as museums and tourist attractions.

Varis herself - immortalised now in two naked portraits in the Roman Orgy room - is as improbable as her establishment: a local boy from the tough town of the outback who made good in his hometown by changing sex, finding fame in Sydney with the Les Girls all-male revue, and returning as one of Kalgoorlie's more infamous prostitutes. Last year Varis was elected to the city council, now at loggerheads with local morals crusaders over its decision to change zoning requirements to allow the new Langtree's-181 super brothel to open.

"They are fascinated with me," Varis said of fellow councillors after her election. "We sit down and I'll tell a story or two, and they're just completely gobsmacked at my life."

Varis works for Mary Anne Kenworthy, a Perth entrepreneur who has been developing a sex empire in both cities for 12 years and who combines astute business acumen with a feel for history and a bawdy sense of humour. "I was talking to the guys one day and they said you'd never have had any gold if you hadn't have had working girls."

Kalgoorlie, surrounded by the spare red dirt of the interior, is the last real stop before land that can barely support sheep gives way to endless plains of the arid Nullabor.

"There's some opposition," says John Bowler, editor of the Kalgoorlie-Boulder Golden Mail, of attitudes to prostitution in a town that in the past two decades has smoothed off its rough edges. "There are certain church groups and individuals who have been opposed forever, but in general I'd say the majority would accept the brothels and want them retained."

But Robert Hicks, spokesman for the local branch of the Australian Family Association, is incensed not only at continued tolerance of prostitution but at the council's decision to change Langtrees-181's zoning from boarding house to motel to allow it to open.

Prostitutes and Kalgoorlie have been together since the beginning, developing a unique character that at once serviced a market of thousands of miners and defined outback sex through Hay St, a ramshackle collection of corrugated-iron and asbestos brothels that became as famous as the region's gold and nickel. Langtree's-181, named for the number it occupies in Hay St, has been in business since 1905. Before that, women worked out of tents and shanties.

On any night, even at the height of police intolerance to brothels elsewhere, Hay St was alive with both clients and gawkers strolling or driving past the corrugated iron starting stalls' in which near-naked women posed and preened, regardless of summer heat or the deep chill of a desert winter.

But the business of sex, even with a captive market in Kalgoorlie, is changing. Only three brothels remain in a street which once boasted 14.

"The sex industry is dying, worldwide," Kenworthy says. "Things have changed dramatically in the past 30 years that take away the need for the sex industry.

"We're so much more open about sexual things generally. Kids are brought up on it with honesty, so they don't have the same curiosity."

Special problems blight the industry in Kalgoorlie: a decline in exploration that has seen Kenworthy's main market - drillers - pack up and leave for Africa; automation that has cut the workforce; planes that fly miners directly to the mines from Perth; the transformation of Kalgoorlie itself into a family town.

Facing more of the same, Kenworthy decided to change tack. "I still make good money out of Kalgoorlie on the sex side, but I actually looked at the new venture more for tourism."

The key is a flow of about 500,000 people a year through the city. On business or pleasure, she calculated, who could resist a peek at an exotic working brothel. And just 10 per cent of visitor numbers would do nicely, plus whatever business decided to sleep over.

During the day full-time guides, starting from this week, will escort the tours. At night, for $A10 extra, one of the women will take you through.

You start at the Madam's Suite, all gold and purple in honour of Shirley Finn, murdered there 25 years ago in a scandal that led to a Royal Commission and a state-wide policy of containment under which brothels are strictly controlled.

Next door in the Langtree Room, a period piece in memory of French women lured to the goldfields as housemaids by syndicates between 1895 and 1910, then forced into prostitution.

The Asian Room, in Geisha style, remembers the similar fate of young Japanese women tricked into prostitution and run by men who operated laundries and tobacconist shops. They issued tokens with purchases so the pimps could skirt the law and keep the money from the women.

The Great Boulder Shaft is, Kenworthy says, already a winner with clients - a recreation of a mine-shaft using mirrors, fake gold veins up the walls, a bed made of railway sleepers and a mural of an underground driller, "to commemorate drillers and all the money we've had out of them."

Kenworthy has themed other rooms to history: a brightly coloured tent in the Afghan room to remember early camel trains; a recreation of early Coolgardie, where 70 tent brothels operated; the Sports Locker, with a boxing ring for a bed topped with a neon-ringed basketball hoop; the Holden On Room, with the EK Holdren linked to sound-activated windscreen wipers and lights; and the Roman Orgy Room, where Varis and friends are painted into graphic murals.

To relax, there are a massage room, two lounges - including one named after fallen tycoon Alan Bond - and a function room where restaurant theatre nights are already under way.

And if you cannot make Kalgoorlie, keep an eye on the Web: virtual tours of Langtree's-181 are coming your way soon.