IT WAS the most confronting place GEORGIA WESTGARTH had ever conducted an interview – a Dandenong brothel. A nervous young reporter knocked on the brothel door, set in an immaculate garden. But it was the pristine carpet that would make her feel at home among the G-strings walking by and the erotic images on the wall. The cleanliness of the carpet almost shocked her – but then again she thought, why would a brothel’s carpet be dirty?
DIRTY isn’t a word that is far removed from the sex industry. Dirty girls, dirty drugs and dirty corruption, are often the consensus among those far removed from the sex business.
But it’s a stereotype that’s hard to find at one thoroughly modern brothel.
“Christmas day we invite the ladies and sometimes the clients that don’t have families to the brothel,“ explained Tanya, owner of the Garden of Eden brothel in Dandenong.
“We have this one man we call Mr Smith and I invite him every year to share Christmas with us.“
Christmas seems 100 miles away from the red sheets, skimpy costumes and leather whips hanging downstairs in the dungeon, and the men seen walking out of bedrooms. But Christmas was the only way Tanya could explain just how much of a family her brothel is.
“We don’t have alcohol, it’s illegal to have on the premises, we have a barbecue and sit and eat as a family, all the girls get a small gift from me,” she says.
On average Tanya meets 1000 working girls a year through her brothel: “Whether they stay long-term or not is up to them.
“A lot of girls that come into the sex industry don’t have family or their family has shut them out, so we open on Christmas day – I make them feel like they are part of my family,” Tanya said.
The family extends to Gippsland, where Tanya lives on an acreage property with her husband Tony and her children, eight all up, ranging from six years old to 26.
The brothel is something she hides from her children until they turn a certain age. That age has dropped over the years as children are more exposed to sex than ever before, Tanya said.
“All of my children are aware of what we do at an age of understanding, that’s now 11 and 12.
“I would never want my kids in this industry; it is the easiest industry to get into and it is the hardest to get out of, because the money for the ladies is very hard to walk away from.
“A lot of these girls have been through hell.”
But Tanya hasn’t.
From Tanya’s world:
“Eighty per cent of the men that visit the Garden of Eden are married, taken or in a relationship.”“The number one excuse we find men use on their partners when they’re visiting a brothel is, ‘I’m going to play golf’, but some men genuinely are paying golf! I don’t want all women to think that.”
“The majority of men that want to be with a transsexual is phenomenal, they’d open their wallets and I’d see pictures of kids.”
“It took me a long time to get a brothel licence – it can take up to 12 years. Took me two years before consumer affairs approved me, and I have no criminal record, I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Having grown up a Christian Minister’s daughter in Anglesea, one of six kids, Tanya’s first job in the paid sex industry was washing towels – she’s never been a prostitute.
At 18 years old Tanya’s boyfriend, now husband, waited in the car park as she went for her job interview.
“Dad had set me up to stay with some church members in Melbourne and I saw an advertisement in the paper for a receptionist for the adult industry – I thought it would be like Kittens,” she said.
Instead, she had an audience with an old Italian man, sitting in a long dark room in Port Melbourne.
He was smoking a long cigar, “Al Pacino style” Tanya recalled.
“He asked me ‘What do you know about brothels?’. I said I know it’s dirty and girls take drugs and have needles in their arms, and he said no that’s not what it is.”
So the little born-again Christian from the beach scored the job. And at a time where transsexuals were all the rage, Tanya didn’t even know what a transsexual was. “I was so scared,” she said.
But her view now, a lifetime on, is a lot different.
“Men choose to be with transsexuals to fulfil a fantasy,” she said.
“Their wife can’t be that for them – brothels are about options, we have brothels to fulfil fantasies.
“Some men have sexual fetishes that a normal wife would say no to, they adore their wives but they are afraid to ask for something a little bit different in fear of being shut down.
“At the Garden of Eden we don’t lure men in, they come here of their own accord.
“We have ladies in their sixties and older who wait in the car park for their husbands because they know they can’t give what they used to and they’re not interested anymore.
“There’s levels of love and as you grow older companionship and friendship overpowers everything.”
Tanya puts her thriving business and reputation as the “cleanest brothel in the south-east for drugs and following procedure” down to her girls.
Even though she lays down the law stringently, she says it’s her working girls that have given her the life she has.
“Without these girls doing their job I wouldn’t have a roof over my head or educate my kids and I certainly wouldn’t have learnt what I have about men,” Tanya said.
From a family of born-again Christians, Tanya feels she has been born again, into her very own Garden of Eden.
“My business was made through hard work, long hours, love, acceptance, non-judgement and compassion as taught in the Bible,” she said.
“Being born into a born-again Christian household gave me the love I have put back into the ladies.
“I’m just a mum,” she says.
“I don’t want the title of ‘I own a brothel’.”
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