Valda Joan Callahan, nee Hall, had led a tough life from the very beginning. Born in 1889, not fifty yards from a row of brothels and sly grog shops in Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Surry Hills, her mother had been a prostitute and her father unknown. Val herself had entered the game, taking up her mother’s trade as soon as she left the Bourke Street Public School at the tender age of thirteen. Five years, two abortions and a miscarriage later had seen her marry James Patrick Callahan, a miner from Broken Hill.

Theirs was a whirlwind courtship over one brief week, James sexually obsessed with the eighteen-year-old prostitute he’d discovered in a Riley Street brothel, and Val attracted to the idea of marriage as an alternative lifestyle. She gave up prostitution and accompanied her husband to Broken Hill, where in 1910 their daughter, Daisy, was born.

Daisy seemed to make a loveless marriage worthwhile, and Val would have been prepared to remain a faithful wife to a man who gambled his money away and who, in the drink, occasionally gave her a backhander. But in 1913, following a severe bout of diphtheria, little Daisy died, and something in Val died too. Marriage without Daisy was no longer worthwhile and she stopped even pretending it was.

James soon tired of his listless, depressed wife, and when war broke out a year later, he joined the Australian Army to seek adventure further afield. He didn’t tell Val at the time. One moment he was there and the next he was gone, leaving her to fend for herself.

She had no alternative but to return to the only trade she knew well, so she bought a camper trailer from an English couple who intended to settle in Broken Hill and were no longer in need of a mobile home. Camper trailers were becoming quite popular among travellers, particularly in England and the United States. They were known to many as ‘caravans’. Towing the vehicle behind her husband’s second-hand jalopy, Val set off on her travels, trekking the mining towns and recruiting two other working girls along the way.

Word spread quickly, and ‘Caravan Callahan’ became a well-known identity, not only among the miners, but also the coppers, some accepting her bribe of money and turning a blind eye, others giving her half an hour to get her van and her girls out of town.

When she finally learned that her husband had been killed in Gallipoli at the Battle of Lone Pine, Val said to her girls, ‘Luckiest thing that could have happened to the bastard – now instead of being remembered as a useless prick, everyone’ll call him a bloody hero.’

By the end of World War I, having accrued considerable funds, Val decided to quit prostitution. She bade farewell to her girls and took her caravan north to Brisbane, this time not as a mobile brothel, but rather a mobile home.