Lydia’s life: Oamaru link to 1900s sex-trade trafficking

• Published date: 10 July 2021
• Date: 10 July 2021
• Publication title: Mix, The

‘‘THAT night it was back to the Casino, with Marie taking charge,’’ writes historian Julia Laite, telling the story of Oamaru 17-year-old Lydia Harvey’s second night as a prostitute in early-20th century Argentina.

‘‘She approached a ‘gentleman’ . . . saying, ‘This is my little friend, a very nice girl, quite young. Why not take my little friend?’

‘‘‘She is too young,’ the man replied. And she was — four years younger than the minimum registration age for prostitutes in Buenos Aires, which was 21.

‘‘‘Well, take both of us,’ Marie said with a laugh, and off they all went in a taxi to the apartment. Lydia was horrified: ‘the man was old, dirty and very repulsive to me,’ she later explained.’’

So began Harvey’s short-lived, traumatising sojourn in the international sex trade, news of which made brief waves at the time but would likely have remained an overlooked historical footnote if not for Laite’s tenacious research and engaging writing.

It is the story of one forgotten New Zealand woman caught in global machinations. But Laite’s new book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: One trial, six lives and the dawn of the twentieth century speaks volumes to forces and attitudes still in play 111 years later.

The book tells how Harvey, born in Dunedin and raised in Oamaru, ended up in South America and then Great Britain working as a prostitute. It documents how she became a useful pawn in an ineffectual attempt to bring one group of sex-trade traffickers and pimps to account. And then tracks her back across the globe to a new life and an untimely death.

Global inequality, blatant prejudice and pernicious hypocrisy flood Harvey’s story, presented by Laite from the perspective of six key characters: Harvey, a British detective, a New Zealand journalist, a London social worker, an Italian trafficker and his Australian prostitute-wife. But the story’s themes also spill into the present as some of today’s pressing issues.

Laite first came across Harvey’s story in century-old British Police files, the University of London historian says. She speaks in a Canadian accent still strong after 20 years in the United Kingdom.

When she first saw Harvey’s name, Laite was researching her first academic book, about the history of commercial sex in London.

‘‘I just couldn’t get Lydia out of my head, wondering what happened before and what happened after,’’ she says.

Five years ago, she went back to the police file, with plans to write a general academic book about the history of sex trafficking in Britain.

‘‘But Lydia had other plans for me.’’

Laite started trying to find any other historical record of this solitary, ordinary girl a long way from home. It was a search that would take her around the globe.

‘‘So, it’s such a pleasure to do this interview . . . because the Otago Daily...