LIFE LAID BARE Sascha Ettinger Epstein’s The Pink House and the Sex Industry
Welcome to Questa Casa. I’m Carmel; I’m the madam here. My story is that I fell into a deep pit of depression when I was widowed. Went to see my lady doctor;
I said, ‘I think my hormones need adjusting.’
She said, ‘There’s nothing the matter with your hormones – you go out and do something with your life.’
So I went home and I looked at all the businesses for sale […]
I [later] went to see my lady doctor; she said, ‘You’re looking much better, what have you done?’
I said, ‘I’ve bought a brothel in Kalgoorlie.’
She said, ‘Oh god, I meant for you to do charity work.’
Questa Casa provides director/co-writer Sascha Ettinger Epstein and producer/co-writer Claire Haywood with a portal into the strange vertex of the mining and sex industries in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Though Kalgoorlie’s gold stores were almost exhausted by the end of the 1890s during the first gold rush, the mining industry has continued to find ways to keep the town’s output flowing by accessing deeper reserves, with the Fimiston Open Pit established by magnate Alan Bond in 1989. Shaded in soft, bright pinks, Questa Casa is a galvanised-iron building and Kalgoorlie’s last
