Building a “respectable nation” from a penal colony meant prostitution created regulatory dilemmas in nineteenth-century Australia. This article traces regulations deployed in the state of Victoria since then to define and control women, buildings, and districts associated with prostitution. It argues that approaches of formal condemnation and tacit approval were adopted and increasingly framed around public health and land use zoning. Spatial planning now underpins prostitution control: efforts to legitimize and contain the sex industry have, however, failed to prevent the proliferation of euphemistic “massage parlors.” We argue that despite shifts in rationales, zoning and prostitution regulations maintain stereotypical binaries of “Damned Whores” and “God’s Police.”

从刑事殖民地建立一个“可敬的国家”意味着卖淫在19世纪的澳大利亚造成了监管困境。本文追溯了自此以来在维多利亚州部署的法规，以定义和控制与卖淫有关的妇女，建筑物和地区。它认为，正式谴责和默许的方法已被采用，并且越来越围绕公共卫生和土地使用分区而框架化。现在，空间规划是卖淫控制的基础：使合法行业合法化并遏制性行业的努力未能阻止委婉的“按摩院”的泛滥。我们认为，尽管理论上发生了变化，但区划和卖淫法规仍保留了“破烂的妓女”和“上帝的警察”的陈规定型二进制文件。