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It’s just another average Friday night in Canberra. Outside a fine mist of drizzle is sheeting down. Inside, Burke’s Backyard is on in the lounge.

I’m standing in a brightly lit black-walled room with a bunch of people I don’t know. A redhead’s drain-like laugh is bouncing around it. Other young women are giggling too. Most of the men are cross-armed and ill at ease.

I’ve been thinking about sex all evening.

At the centre of the room a Rubenesque woman is holding court, the light catching a twist of green at the front of her coal black hair.

“As you can see,” Martine Chaytow is saying, “we’ve got very, very, very liberated ways of thought here.” As she speaks she is indicating a variety of studded collars, whips and strap-ons which adorn the black leather table beside which she is standing. “I’d like you to congratulate everybody who is from Canberra,” continues Martine, “for having the liberal sex laws that we have today.”

You can see her point. The table Martine is standing beside is a working wrack and the room we’re all standing in is a dungeon, one of six rooms at Club Goldfingers brothel. Other features of the dungeon - available for $50 per hour - include stocks, a chair with the bottom built out of it and a metal-barred cage.

In case you’re wondering what we’re all doing here I should explain that this is one of the more eye-opening moments of Canberra’s “Love Bus” tour. Launched in 1995 by the Eros Foundation with the aim of demystifying the sex industry, the “Love Bus” runs most weekends and takes in a brothel, several adult shops, a strip-show and the largest video duplication centre in the Southern Hemisphere.

Already vying for a place on Canberra’s tourist map with established icons such as Parliament House - “we’re always busier when Parliament’s sitting” admits guide Martine, “or lying” quips her offsider Lesley - the “Love Bus” is increasingly threatening to blow away the federal capital’s crusty image.

What comes as something of a surprise, at least to one who spent most of his 1980s uni life avoiding blows to the head from enraged feminists wielding Andrea Dworkin’s anti-pornography theories, is that the five hour tour goes down particularly well with women. They continue to make up 75% of its customers, though it’s also rapidly gaining favour with couples looking to add an X to their sex life. We unenlightened (or could that be already acquainted) men make up less than 5% of the takers, with an all-male tour virtually a non-event. “Women are a lot more open about sex” asserts the tour’s instigator Fiona Patten, of the Eros Foundation, “they like the idea of sex served with champagne”.

Although the evening is yet young, the tone of tonight’s mixed tour is strangely flat, with guides Martine and Lesley - like a sort of sex industry Laurel and Hardy - struggling to inject some levity into proceedings. The one exception to the muted response is that wild-eyed redhead, whose reaction to almost anything, to the embarrassment of her sober-suited boyfriend,is a wicked, not unsexy, cackle. She looks like she could have fun tied alone to some mulga scrub in the desert. Come to think of it...

In the dungeon Martine is coming to the end of an A-Z of brothel etiquette: “The going rate is $180 per hour, for that they get a shower, a free health inspection, a massage...it’s standard: it’s hand, head and straight sex basically. Anything else on top of that - kinky - will add extra. Kinky incurs charge.”

Kinky? “One of the mistresses that used to work here,” explains Martine, “ had a client that wanted to be locked in this cage and her role was to make him believe that she was never going to let him out. So she’d go off and have a coffee, read the newspaper and he’d sit there thinking ‘she’s never coming back, she’s never coming back’ and paid an extraordinary amount of money to do that.”

As the evening progresses, and the champagne flows freely, so the mood of the tour inevitably warms up. We crowd first into a table-dancing establishment - Sinderellas - to watch around 150 men of all shapes, ethnic backgrounds, ages and classes, ogling three toned, tanned young women on podiums convolving to the sound of “Knock, knock, knock on wood”. The sign on the wall, above the image of two skulls, emphasises: “NO TOUCHING THE DANCERS”. Next, the economics of the industry - sex is one of the ACT’s biggest, bringing in around $34 million per year - are roundly brought home to us as we shift around the warehouse of Axis Video. With 390 videos recorders duplicating X-rated videos 24 hours a day, it’s more Stock Exchange than Sex Exchange.

The tour’s mirth factor lifts again with a succession of visits to adult shops. In one, prizes are awarded for finding the largest dildo and the video with the funniest title. In another we are invited to sample the video booths and play “Squeal of Fortune” for some of the stock. Finally, as the early hours of Saturday morning emerge, we arrive at the Mustang Ranch Strip Joint, where a young man and woman disrobe and cavort together on a catwalk.

By now, the barometer on the “Love Bus” tour is pushing through warm to hot. Some of the men have even unfolded their arms. And the redhead? She’s on stage giving a fairly convincing demonstration of how to roll a condom over a vibrator with your mouth.

In truth, if you’re a devotee, as I am, of Channel 10’s “Sex Life”, there’s little on the “Love Bus” tour which is exactly revelatory. Which isn’t to say it isn’t an excellent idea. After all, 80% of its customers have never been inside a brothel and 50% have never visited an adult shop.

However, what it tells us about Canberra is a different story. With a legalised sex industry employing up to 600 people and 14 adult shops and 14 brothels in this comparatively small city, it seems there may be more life in the old sheep paddock than at first meets the eye. Like I say, just another average Friday night in Canberra.

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