I would like to begin this evening's lecture by introducing you to a sex worker. Her name is 'Joy'. For eighteen months in , her larger-than-life figure leant against a red door-frame on the corner of Yurong and Stanley Streets in East Sydney.
Of course, being a statue, she is not really a sex worker. Or is she? The story of Joy became something of sensation in the mids, not just because she was allegedly the only statue of a prostitute on display in public anywhere in the world, and not just because she personified the seedier side of Sydney.
Surrounding the creation of Joy was a quite extraordinary mystery. On the very day that sculptor Loui Fraser was shaping her striking facial features, a young woman whom she had never seen but whose face bore a remarkable similarity to these very features was dying in a hospital in a New South Wales country town.
After the funeral her mother, who had been at her daughter's bedside when she died, returned to her Darlinghurst home to find the newly-erected statue of Joy in the street outside her house. She immediately noticed the resemblance, and overcome with emotion, took a large hammer to the sculpture.
She did considerable damage before being carted off in a police wagon. When Loui later spoke to the mother about her actions, she discovered that the woman's daughter had been a Sydney sex worker for many years. In fact, she'd been introduced to the occupation by her mother, who was herself a brothel-keeper. Joy was too vivid a reminder of the young woman's life, her early death a result of ill-health following years of heroin addiction.
