After 30 years away, Joy – believed to be the world’s first statue of a sex worker – has returned to Darlinghurst. Removed amid controversy in the late ’90s, she was rededicated on Saturday 8 November, with artist Loui May, Julie Bates AO – founding member of the Australian Prostitutes’ Collective – historian Catherine Freyne and a large community crowd celebrating her homecoming. Now bronze, shorter-haired and smokeless, Joy stands once more on Yurong and Stanley Streets as a symbol of sex workers’ history, humanity and fight for justice.
