A Gay History of Australia

Paul Knobel

A gay history of Australia

Sydney: Burke Wills, 2020

Copyright Paul Knobel 2020. This work forms a chapter of the author’s A gay history of the world 2020. The text is from the second, corrected, edition of 2020. No person named here is to be considered homosexual or gay unless specifically stated to be.

Publisher and distribution

kamga379@gmailcom

Australia

Male homosexual acts are legal in Australia for males over the age of 16 in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and the federal territories of the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. In South Australia and Tasmania the legal age of sexual consent is 17; in Queensland it is 16 but 18 for anal sex. Gay marriage is legal after a referendum.

The Commonwealth of Australia is a federation of states and laws were reformed state by state starting with South Australia in 1972 and ending 25 years later with Tasmania in 1997. The ACT preceded in 1969. Strong censorship laws operated until the 1960s denying gays our culture: for example many gay novels which seem harmless now were banned and even in the 1970s the gay writer Denis Altman had gay material seized by customs officers and had to appeal to be allowed to have it. John Addington Symonds’s Sexual Inversion (1897) the first work discussing British gay history appears to have been banned (though some US printings got into the country eg into the State Library of NSW). Censorship also operated in films and television and still operates (eg, the banning of the Italian gay director Pasolini’s antifascist film Salò which can only be shown under restricted conditions). Civil unions are legal as is gay marriage.

In 2008 Australia signed the United Nations Declaration on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity and has signed several UN civil rights covenants descending from the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, of which it was a founder signatory (the first clause of the Declaration guarantees equality for all). These covenants include the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. The exact status of these covenants in Australian law remains to be clarified. High Court cases have found the there is a legitimate expectancy that they will be obeyed (British judges go further and have judged that a legitimate expectancy means that anything which has a legitimate expectancy in regard to law is in fact law).

Facts

Australia is the only nation which is both a continent and a country. It does not have land borders with its neighbors and may be described as an island continent. At 7,692,024 square kilometers (2,969,907 square miles) the country is the sixth largest nation in the world. It is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy and has been from 1901 when the six British colonies of which it was then comprised came together as The Commonwealth of Australia and a written constitution came into force. The head of state is the British monarch; the Governor General is her representative in Australia. This constitution was however in actual fact a law made by the British parliament (not a constitution which came from the country itself as was the case with the US constitution or South Africa’s most recent constitution): it’s creation was thus a neocolonial act.

The head of state is the British monarch though the Governor-general, who lives in Australia, acts for her or him. The country consists of 6 states: Queensland, New South Wales (NSW), Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and the island state of Tasmania. In addition there are 2 federal territories (the Australian Capital Territory, where the capital Canberra is situated, and the Northern Territory which was formerly part of South Australia when it was called the Northern Territory of South Australia). The states have their own parliaments but the territories are under federal control (both territories have legislatures but any laws passed by them can be overruled by the federal parliament).

Australia is situated between 2 oceans: the Indian Ocean on the west and the Pacific Ocean on the east. To the north its nearest neighbors are the huge island nation of Indonesia, the small island state of Timor l’este (East Timor) and Papua New Guinea, and to the east of Papua New Guinea the Solomon Islands. Some 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) off the coast of Queensland lies the overseas French dependency of Nouvelle Calédonie (New Caledonia) and, beyond Nouvelle Calédonie, Vanuatu. Off the southeast coast of NSW and Victoria and 2,300 kilometers (1,400 miles) away is New Zealand.

At the 2011 census the population was 21,507,000. In the same census 61.1 % of people gave their religion as Christian (Roman Catholics at 25.3% being the largest group with Anglicans next at 17.1%, while 22% said No religion. Smaller religious groups include at 2.5%, Islam 2.2%, Hinduism 1.3% and Judaism .5%. Per person nominal GDP was $US55,305 in 2019 one of the highest in the world (though over 2 million people are judged to live in poverty). Ethnicly Australia consists of over 350 groups: some 300 introduced different peoples and at least 50 surviving Aboriginal tribal groups. English is the spoken language and Chinese, mainly in its Cantonese form, is now the second most spoken language. Large numbers of Greeks and Italians emigrated to Australia after World War Two due to poverty after the 6 year war. In recent years many emigrants have come from the Middle East (eg some 476,000 Muslims). Over 600,000 New Zealanders live in Australia due to free entry.

The name Australia comes from the Latin word australis meaning south; it was first used in the name terra australis incognita (the unknown south land) by the early Catholic Spanish and Portuguese explorers who also called the country Terra australis del espiritu santo (the south land of the Holy Spirit, after the Holy Spirit, the third in the Christian Trinity). In English it was also known as the great south land. The word Aborigines is Latin for original inhabitants.

History

Human inhabitation has been traced back over 50,000 years in Australia (a piece of ochre in the National Museum of Australia, for instance, has been dated to 40,000 years before the present and was gifted by the archeologist Rees Jones: it shows that social rituals involving use of ochre were then established 40,000 years ago; such rituals take many decades, centuries or thousands of years to establish). Paintings at a rock art site in north Queensland at Laura have been dated back 37,000 years (see the illustration of the work in Crossing Cultures:conflict, migration and convergence (2009), edited by Jaynie Anderson). Following humanity moving out of Africa when Homo Sapiens emerged, humans may have crossed from boats from the islands to the north west of Australia or even walked when they were joined to Australia. Aboriginal peoples may also have come from Papua New Guinea which was joined to Australia until 10,000 years ago. The island state of Tasmania to the south of continental Australian was joined to the mainland until about 10,000 years ago. It is now also known through genetics that there was another early invasion of Australia about 4,000 years ago when people from south India reached the country.

Chinese, Muslim and Portuguese sea explorers were the first Asian and European peoples to reach the country from at least the 14th century. In 1642 the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman reached Tasmania and the mapping of Australia, the last continent discovered by Europeans, began. The British naval officer Captain James Cook discovered the east coast of Australia in 1770 and sailed along it mapping it for the first time. French explorers also reached Australia.

In 1788 the British invaded the continent to use it as a jail for imprisoned criminals (convicts). They set up camp at Sydney Cove within Sydney harbour where Sydney, Australia’s largest city, is sited. Introduced sicknesses led to the decimation of the Aborigines and their land was used for wheat growing and raising sheep (Australia once had 100 million sheep and was said to ride on the sheep’s back). Their tragic fate is outlined remorselessly in more recent books such as those by Henry Reynolds. What occurred (as with British and European conquest of the United States, Canada, the nations of Central and South America such as Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Argentina, and in many countries in Africa, for instance South Africa) was genocide on a huge scale. For example, Aboriginal waterholes and the country’s rivers were poisoned when cattle dropped their faeces in them and the water became undrinkable. In some cases Aborigines were given poisoned food and in many places there were orders to shoot on sight. In short Australia as in all the countries mentioned above was and is a land covered in blood: all were founded in their modern form on genocide.

However those Aborigines living in the center of the country and the huge interior deserts and in the northeast Northern Territory in Arnhem Land survived and continued to live and practice their ancient way of life. Today the Australian Aboriginal peoples own 15% of Australia, a much higher figure than in neighboring New Zealand where it has been estimated that the native Maori peoples control less than 1%.

Convict settlements were founded soon after the founding of Sydney in 1788 at Norfolk Island (to the northwest of the eastern coast of the mainland) and at Hobart and Port

Arthur in Tasmania and then in Brisbane and Western Australia at what is now Perth. Gradually the whole continent came under British control and settlement (invasion from the Aboriginal point of view) moved from the coast into the interior. The convict system was abolished beginning in 1840 in New South Wales, 1853 in Tasmania and finally in 1868 in Western Australia.

The British colonies in Australia became self governing from 1843, initially with New South Wales. Local laws were and are different in each state (as in the United States which is also a federation). From 1788 British law overlay all Australian made laws including what is now called Aboriginal customary law (since the Aborigines did not read or write their laws were passed down orally). However gradually colony (and later state) based legal systems of law emerged as colonial and later state legislatures made laws. In 1901 as already noted the colonies federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia and independence was gained from Great Britain.

Queensland controlled the south of Papua New Guinea from 1883 until independence in 1975. Australia fought in both world wars on the side of Britain. However conscription was not introduced in either war (unlike New Zealand). Great Britain and the United States have been major influences on Australian culture with Australia in turn strongly influencing New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and South Pacific nations. Now via the internet (for instance Google Images, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook) Australia can interact with all the 193 nations of the world: see for instance photos of the Sydney gay and lesbian Mardi Gras on Google images.

Australia, like New Zealand, is widely admired as a functioning democracy (for instance in southeast Asian nations such as Indonesia and Thailand which has had many military coups) and for this reason has in recent years faced an influx of boat refugees.

The emergence of gay history in Australia

As in other countries of the world, the period since the beginning of gay liberation in 1968 (see France), has seen a flowering of gay history. Australia has been a leader in gay history in several areas. In Melbourne the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) was founded as an initiative of the Fourth National Homosexual Conference held in Sydney in 1978. The archives has been a major promoter of gay history. They now have over 100,000 items, 50,000 cuttings and 400 shelf meters of items. Their web site has a bibliography of Australian gay history to 1999. From 1998 ALGA has organized a series of annual gay history conferences (no other country in the world has such annual conferences). The gay historian and tertiary educator Graham Carbery, his partner Gary Jaynes and the University of Melbourne historian Graham Willett are key figures in the archives. The archives now has a brilliant professional archivist, Nick Henderson.

MANNING CLARK Australia’s premier historian for the period from 1788 to 1938, Manning Clark, the first Professor of History at the Australian National University, has many references to male homosex in A History of Australia (6 volumes, 1962–1987). The history covers the period from the first sea explorers up to 1938. The first volume appeared 8 years before the Australian gay movement began in 1970.

The work was written during the period when male homosex was being legalized (starting in 1972 in South Australia, as already noted, the Australian Capital Territory in 1976, Victoria in 1980, followed by NSW in 1984). However there is only one reference to homosex in the index: in volume 6, p. 448, in discussing the writer Frank Dalby Davison, Clark refers to his forward looking stance on homosexuality and belief in the abolition of laws prohibiting it. There are continuing references to vices and debauchery in the first 4 volumes especially in relation to the convicts. References to homosex include: volume 1 (1962, covering the period from the first European discovery of Australia to 1821) pp. 22, 90, 98–99 (debauchery; possible references only), 146 (the landholder John Macarthur claims that vice of every description was openly encouraged in NSW); volume 2 (1968), covering the period from 1822 to 1838, pp. 154 (the vices of Sodom and Gomorrah: on them see Israel), 216 (possible only; beastly sexual play), 248–49 (allegations against Reverend William Yate: they are discussed below), 330 (possible only: that Greek quest for beauty), 333–45 (the Molesworth Report relating to the convict system in NSW and Tasmania where homosex amongst the convicts was discussed), 334 (NSW called a Sodom in the newspapers), 335 (unnatural crimes and the words Kitty and Nancy used for homosexuals), 339, 341 (unnatural crime prevalent and the huddling of boys together in a convict ship); volume 3 (1973), covering the period from 1824 to 1851, pp. 38 (John Hutt, the successor to Captain James Stirling, the first administrator of the European settlement at Perth and what was to become Western Australia, was a confirmed bachelor), 39 (John Hutt though he married, but very unhappily, only had room in his heart for his career and his mother), 54 (possible only: a man on a ship with a black wig and red eyelashes), 222 (the abomination of sodomy and the eating of human flesh), 338 (the explorer Ludwig Leichardt: he wanted an heroic friendship with another man and spoke much of that love between man and man which surpassed that between man and woman, as though it were a love between two souls [a Biblical reference: see also Israel], but was much given to ‘brotherly kissing’’’), 369 (unnatural crime; the phrase is put into inverted commas and so the idea is queried), 362 (unnatural crimes used twice but without inverted commas), 414 (2 possible references); volume 4 (1978), covering the period 1851–88, pp. 28 (Victoria called a second Sodom), 116–17 (possible homosexuality amongst Chinese miners on the Victorian goldfields), 116 (a Chinaman had been seen committing an unnatural crime with one of the brute creation near the dwelling -place of a highly respectable married man (possible only, depending on the sex of the animal in which case, if male, a case of homobestiality), 117 (probable reference: filthy and immoral habits were still arousing the abhorrence of the white man), 126 (diggers on the goldfields danced with each other), 138 (Sir John Robertson, then Jack Robertson, a member of the NSW Legislative Council, often invited his opponents to smell his arse), 148 (the Victorian explorers Burke and Wills adored each other), 306–312 (the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon), 306 (Gordon had loved a man, Charley Walker. He had loved a woman, Jane Bridges), 308 (Gordon’s ineffectual encounters with women), 311 (the novelist and writer Marcus Clarke had loved Gordon as only a man of imagination can love another man), 316 (Gordon despairing of ever being able to enjoy the wonder of a man with a woman, swallowing huge quantities of alcohol), 326 (Joe Byrne, one of the members of the Kelly Gang had a David and Jonathan friendship with one Aaron Sherritt", another member of the gang). Overall the history shows the strong influence of Christian fundamentalism in Australian history from 1788, where homosex was condemned in Australian culture in line with British imported puritanism. (The last two volumes were not read for homosex references by this author.)

It will be noticed that, by volume 4, when the gay movement had been in existence for 8 years, the discussion of homosexuality is broader. Because of his fairly extensive reference to male homosex Manning Clark may be considered the father of gay history in Australia.

Manning Clark’s diary reveals an infatuation with a male pupil at Geelong Grammar in Victoria, one of the country’s most prestigious schools where he had taught (see the biography by Mark McKenna) and in Canberra he was surrounded by many male disciples and acolytes. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman who came from the left and was an apostle of mateship, the Australian code of male bonding which, from the 1890s, was seen in intellectual and socialist circles as one of the main ideas in Australian culture. Indications are that he was somewhat conflicted about homosexuality (at the same time as having strong male friendships): for example, a review in the Sydney Morning Herald of Xavier Pons’s biography of the poet Henry Lawson took an antagonistic view on homosexuality when Pons asserted Lawson was homosexual (Henry Lawson was a hero of Clark and he wrote a book on him). Manning Clark moved in Melbourne Bohemian circles when he lived in Victoria before taking up the professorship of history in Canberra in 1949 at what is now the Australian National University; he remained in Canberra for the rest of his life.

MARTIN SMITH The journalist Martin Smith published the first survey of Australian gay and lesbian history in a series of articles in the Australian gay monthly Campaign from April 1977 to April 1978. It was titled Our Australian Gay History. The articles centered around discussion of what the author considered to be major gay and lesbian figures and were arranged chronologically (the native Aborigines were not discussed): those discussed included the Sydney clergyman William Yate, the German explorer Ludwig Leichardt, the poet and writer J. Le Gay Brereton, the poet Christopher Brennan and the book collector David Scott Mitchell. Like Manning Clark, Martin Smith went to original sources though he made some wild statements which were not substantiated (for example that there were gay bars in Sydney in the first half of the 19th century). The Mitchell Library reading room was then a smallish room and users could easily meet. For instance, in his discussion of the poet Adam Lindsay Gordon Martin Smith refers to Manning Clark suggesting to him that he research the relationship between the Catholic Priest Father Julian Tennyson-Wood and Gordon.

Martin Smith’s background was right wing (for example he once stood for the Liberal Party in a NSW election); he was also illegitimate, then a big stigma in Australia, but his father was wealthy (or so Martin Smith believed). In his eyes he came from the landed gentry. He was not a conventional right winger however and constantly changed political positions throughout his life. He was strongly influenced by such movements as the anti-nuclear movement and was a hardcore activist who got arrested at gay demonstrations in the early years of gay lib in Sydney (unlike many presently alive who have never demonstrated for gay rights).

He was the author of the first Australian gay play and a pioneer work of gay drama, Love has many faces (1970), whose production in Sydney caused a furore but nevertheless got a