Gwalia, you see, was a thriving centre from the mid 1890s until 1963 and blah, blah, blah…
The town – consisting mostly of tin-clad timber-framed houses – has since been designated a historical site, a large outdoor museum. Weeds have been pulled from front yards and plaques put up: “The butcher’s shop, est. 1898,” “Post Master’s House, built 1902.” That sort of thing.
All this industry occurred in the 1990s. We can’t possibly know how people thought back then. There is an epistemological disconnect between modern humans and those from the 1990s. They had a very different Weltanschauung, if you will. Among the few things we do know about the 1990s is that people thought Friends was cute. I think this proves my point.
It also helps explain the following.
In the 1990s, as they gussied up and promoted their ghost town, the good folk of the Gwalia Historical Progress Society made the monumental decision to acknowledge the seamier side of life in Olde Gwalia.
One of the houses on Gwalia’s main street is a large, many-roomed affair. It was obviously a brothel, back in the day, but admitting this was a step to far for the GHPS. Rather than stick up the required plaque saying something like, “House of Nasty, est. 1896,” it was decided that there would be a much more subtle allusion to the building’s former use.
They set up one tiny room, off the rear courtyard, with a very small sign indicating this room was used by a single sex-worker.
And then it gets messy.
In the spirit of outdoor, living museums, the GHPS wanted to show what life was like for the first settlers. In the case of Gwalia’s sex industry, they chose to represent a Goldrush ho’s life by placing a mannequin in the room’s wrought iron bed, on its back, with the covers pulled up to ‘her’ chest. When I say mannequin, it’s a blouse wrapped around straw stuffing, with a hessian bag head, also filled with straw, and buttons sewn on for eyes.
Truly, it’s ghastly, but perhaps it can still serve a useful purpose, by providing a modern-day lesson. Fathers could take their errant daughters to Gwalia, and show them the mannequin, and say, “Now look, Lotta, darling (it doesn’t matter if the daughter’s name isn’t Lotta – that just makes the lesson much more apposite)… Lotta, dearest, if you continue to freebase crack and pay for it by selling sexual favours, this is how history will remember you.”
Button eyes.
