The Petticoat Parade: Madam Monnier and the Roe Street Brothels

Description

The Petticoat Parade, a social history of Josie de Bray and the madams of the Perth red light district from award-winning author, Leigh Straw. Josie de Bray, aka Madam Monnier, aka Marie Louise Monnier, was a brothel madam who owned most of Roe Street, Perth from WWI up to the 1940s. A returned soldier tried to shoot her dead in her brothel in 1917 and her 'bungalow' was at the centre of underworld violence in the 1920s. She returned to France before WWII to visit family and was bombed repeatedly out of homes there and captured by the Germans. She was a prisoner of war and one story has her in a concentration camp. She survived, returned to Perth in 1947, and took up business again in Roe Street, until her death in 1953, having made a fortune.

Leigh Straw is an academic, historian and writer. She is the author of true crime biographies of Australian crime figures Kate Leigh and Dulcie Markham, and Australia's first female detective, Lillian Armfield. Leigh was the joint winner of the 2018 Margaret Medcalf Award for her book, After the War- The Mental and Physical Scars of World War 1. Leigh is Senior Lecturer in History at The University of Notre Dame Australia.