The shameful treatment of two young abuse victims, preyed on in Melbourne’s laneways

Two young abuse victims got longer sentences than their attacker in a callous and shameful moment from Melbourne’s past.

Edward Martin was jailed for three years for abusing the 11-year-old. Picture: Public Record Office Victoria

In 1904, Sarah Lawton, 11, and Gertie Bigwood, 12, were arrested in Bourke St, Melbourne and became witnesses in a horrifying carnal knowledge case.

While the paedophile served three years in Pentridge, the impoverished pair was also convicted – for being “neglected children” – and given harsh sentences of their own.

Sarah and Gertie are the subject of a new episode of the free In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters with historian Margaret Anderson, director of the Old Treasury Building, home to a recent exhibition called “Wayward Women?”

Sarah was begging in the city with Gertie when the two friends were offered a shilling by a man to go with him to his office.

The girls were then arrested for “acting suspiciously” and interviewed at the police station, where they revealed both had been approached and abused by strangers before.

“Both of the girls make it very plain they understood completely why it was the man had asked them to follow him,” Ms Anderson says.

“What they said was they knew what he wanted; they knew he would probably do ‘what Martin had done’, which was the way they put it.”

Sarah revealed she and her little sister Violet, 8, had recently been sent to Collingwood bootmaker Edward Martin, 35, to look for second-hand boots.

Girls doing callisthenics at the Murrumbeena Girls' Home where Sarah Lawton was sent. Picture: Salvation Army Heritage Centre Melbourne

Martin pointed Violet to a pile of old boots in the shop’s corner then offered Sarah a penny to follow him into the back room, where he “put her on the floor” and abused her.

While Martin was arrested and served three years in prison with hard labour, in many ways Sarah’s and Gertie’s sentences were longer and harsher.

With both mothers watching on, the two girls wept bitterly as a court was told they were “neglected children” caught up in a “terrible state of depravity”.

Sarah described other casual encounters, one in a wood yard and one in a laneway at night, saying: ‘I did this sort of thing for the money … I spent it on cakes and lollies.”

Ms Anderson says: “You have this really quite awful picture of little children who have absolutely nothing, but who are preyed upon by men in quite a casual way, just as they go about their normal business in the city.”

Both girls were removed from their families and sent to reformatories, with the “cause of commitment” recorded as “found wandering and leading a depraved life”.

Sarah spent at least seven years at the Salvation Army-run Murrumbeena Girls’ Home – more than twice as long as Martin’s prison sentence.

To learn more, listen to the interview in the In Black and White podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or web.

See In Black & White in the Herald Sun newspaper Monday to Friday for more stories and photos from Victoria’s past.