Little Lon district

Little Lon was the popular name for a slum and red-light district in Melbourne, Australia.

The area was roughly bounded by Lonsdale Street, Spring Street, Stephen Street (later Exhibition Street) and La Trobe Street. Little Lonsdale Street itself ran through the block, and the area was further divided by numerous narrow laneways. In the nineteenth century the area consisted of timber and brick cottages, shops and small factories and was home to an ethnically diverse and generally poor population. Today there are few reminders of the area's former notoriety.

Archaeologist Justin McCarthy suggests that by 1854, only twenty years after Melbourne was established as a city, the area was well established as a notorious "red light" and slum district. It was associated with prostitution, petty crime and larrikinism. The numerous narrow back alleys and small cottages of this area housed, by this time, a growing number of prostitutes, The Argus newspaper at the time complaining of "females of the lowest and most disreputable class, who pursued their calling with the lowest and most filthy language and conduct." Prostitution was linked with "larrikinism" in official reports, as in the following description of the corner of Little Lonsdale and Leichardt Street from 1882:

In 1891, Melbourne city's back slums were described by evangelist Henry Varley as "a loathsome centre in which crime, gambling hells, opium dens and degraded Chinese abound, and where hundred of licentious and horribly debased men and women are herded like swine". These places were "a disgrace to any civilized city on earth."Fergus Hume's immensely popular The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, written in 1887, described life in a slum in the nearby lanes behind Little Bourke Street, as exposed by its middle class heroes. Writing in 1915, C. J. Dennis's humorous novel The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke spoke of the "low, degraded broots" (brutes) of Little Lon.

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