BLAK AND QUEER

Image credit: State Library of Victoria 

 

Bryan Andy:

My name is Bryan Andy, I'm a Yorta Yorta man, and I'm speaking for this project from Yorta Yorta Country. In thinking about LGBTQIA+ lives, and particularly the First Nations experience, I just wanted to dedicate all that I have to offer today to a dear cousin of mine who just passed. His name is Toby and he's a Wemba-Wemba man from Deniliquin. Today I'll talk about our community, our First Nations community, within a very much an urban setting. But Toby was somebody that was a trailblazer in the regional, remote setting. So whenever I'd go to Deniliquin for funerals or for family gatherings or whatever, he always said to me, come down to The Globe and have a charge with me. And, you know, in his passing and just thinking about him, he was queer, he was gay. He was a gay man, a gay Aboriginal man, a Wemba-Wemba man, who just was kind of in his community standing up to people who might be homophobes, farmers, all those kind of rednecks and just trailblazing in that way. And so I just want to dedicate all of my words and all of my thoughts in speaking about our lives to Toby. 

 

If you're thinking about Fitzroy and Collingwood and, you know, in particular places like Gertrude Street, they used to call it the Dirty Mile. And, um, not only has it had, like, a really important Blak history, it's had a really important Blak queer history. Um, and I'm gonna use the term queer when I talk about LGBTQI+ people when I speak to this. That's a bit of a shorthand thing, but I often say Blak and queer, and that's the mob I'm speaking of. But Fitzroy, Collingwood, the City of Yarra as we know it today, is on Wurundjeri Country. Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. They've had a long legacy of Blak and queer identities. And so as a Yorta Yorta man that's come from a place called Cummeragunja, uh, I'm just, I guess, part of that story, part of that narrative, part of those oral traditions and actual tangible examples of queers just being queers, queers fighting for rights. But yeah, Fitzroy and the City of Yarra has a really beautiful, textured, important, strong, nationally recognized, internationally recognized Blak history. And it's sort of lovely to be part of that Blak queer history that is still around. It's sort of been pushed out in many ways through gentrification, but it's a really important part. And so, you know, it's always been there. 

 

We have contemporaries like Annette Xiberras, who is a Wurundjeri Woman. She's a lesbian. She's a mother. She lost her partner, Cathy. But, um, yeah, I think of people like Annette who's, like I said, a contemporary Wurundjeri Woman who's a lesbian. And when I talk about, I guess, our identities, I know that queer rights have come to the fore more recently through things like marriage equality with international movements. They've had their prong locally with things like the plebiscite. When I think about, I guess, queer identities and from an Aboriginal perspective or a First Nations perspective, they're ongoing. They're part of that Dreaming, the past, present and future combined. They're informed by the past. The future is informed by that past and that present. And so I'm part of that as an Aboriginal man, as a gay Aboriginal man, as a Yorta Yorta Aboriginal man who has played, worked, lived, had fun in places like the City of Yarra. You know, it's really formed my identity as a queer person and it's something you can't always explore in a regional setting. But yeah, like, you know, we've always been there always was, always will be Aboriginal land, and there always was and there always will be that queer presence. 

 

The Builders Arms on Gertrude Street is a really important pub. We call it the Blak Pub of Melbourne, or Fitzroy. There's a plaque that I worked on when I worked at the City of Yarra. One of the beautiful projects I was able to do was to signpost and to place importance on the Aboriginal history of Fitzroy. Builders Arms Hotel it's a really important queer place. Prior to that, it was a very important Blak place, and one of the kind of yarns that I like to highlight is that there was a transgender woman called Vicky Liddy, and she was an Arrernte woman. And, um, all the Blackfellas would go to The Builders Arms. It was a place where if you wanted to find people, you'd go to The Builders Arms. You go to the pub and say, if you know someone came in from out of town, they didn't quite, you know, respect, maybe queer or gay men or

lesbians or queer identities. Um, and they came into The Builders Arms if they got a bit funny about the queer presence there, Um, Vicky Liddy would kind of stand up to that. 

 

The story goes that, If someone started up and wanted to have a go at one of the women or one of the queer Mob, uh, Vicky Liddy would pretty much just smash a longneck on the bar, have a go and say, “you want to have a go with this Mob.” And, yeah. So Vicky Liddy, like, she's passed on now and she's Arrernte. I'm not sure where she’s laid to rest, but she's an Arrernte woman from Central Australia. And she found, I guess, a sense of sanctuary and connection with the Blak Aboriginal people in Fitzroy. And so when I think of Gertrude Street Vicky Liddy, she comes up in my mind. She comes up in the minds of a lot of Aboriginal people who have that consideration around queer identities within Fitzroy. 

 

I've got a roll call, a beautiful roll call of Elders: Uncle Jack Charles, who passed away only two years ago. He was an actor. He, you know, had his struggles with substance abuse. He was a film actor. The most beautiful, um, theatre actor, um, he really came into his fore as he got older. He's somebody that had a really strong connection to Fitzroy and to Gertrude Street. He was part of the Blak community. He was a queer man. He was a gay man. He had relationships with men. It was something that, kind of, I wasn't aware of until he sat down and had a yarn to me one day, but I didn't realise he was gay or queer or, you know. Um, I just thought, oh, that's Uncle Jack. But, um, he kind of. Yeah. He loved men. He was a staunch activist. Um, he was a cat burglar, too, which is sort of interesting. But he ran this, um, workshop called Nindeebiya Workshop. He was in and out of prison with his, I guess his kind of need to survive and doing crimes, um, crimes of poverty, basically. But he was institutionalized or incarcerated for those crimes, and he started Nindeebiya Workshop, which was a workshop on George Street just off Gertrude Street. And yeah, basically it was a place where the parkies, or homeless people, could go and get a cup of tea, get a bit of toast in the morning, connect with community. The services sort of go there and, you know, if they needed, you know, health assistance or housing assistance or any kind of welfare assistance they’d go to Nindeebiya and they connect with people. And yeah, Uncle Jack started that stuff. He also had a pottery workshop in that Nindeebiya. So, you know, if you had your toast and tea, you could, um, you know, maybe make a pot or just do something with your hands, basically keep a bit focused. And. Yeah. So aside from his amazing, well respected creative pursuits on the stage and on film, Uncle Jack, those basic things of, you know, looking after Mob with tea and toast, and with ceramics and pottery just to kind of keep people connected and, and I guess, make them feel welcome. So two people, I think of: Vicky Liddy, Arrernte transgender woman, and Uncle Jack Charles, who was a Yorta Yorta man like myself. 

 

Hares & Hyenas; It's such an important part of Fitzroy. Hares & Hyenas started in Commercial Road in the south, down on Boonwurrung Country. I guess they were fortunate enough to find a space within Fitzroy on Johnston Street there, and Crusader and Rowland, who are the godfathers of the queer community in Melbourne. They were so open and so ready to kind of engage different sectors of our community. You know, when you talk about intersectionality, you just look at Crusader and Rowland and what they did, and you realise that they enacted and engaged with intersectionality before it became one of those academic terms. You know, they involved women, they involved lesbians, they involved sex workers, they involved people with a disability, and they involved and engaged Blackfellas. Like, I mean, I was fortunate enough to kind of call it my second home. I lived in Collingwood, but I always spent a lot of time at Hares & Hyenas. We did some really fun, um, Midsumma events, and Midsumma sort of straddles what some people might want to insist on calling ‘Australia Day’ - January 26th. And so I remember having an event at Hares & Hyenas called Australia Day Hangover. So I was thinking, you know, on the 27th of January after everyone's had their barbecues and they'd kind of, “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!” Beers and whatnot, they probably got a hangover like the rest of Aboriginal Australia. And so we had this Australia Day hangover event and just had a range of readings and a range of speakers and just, you know, people kind of come in as part of the Midsumma program to listen to Blak voices and to hear our perspective because, um, yeah. You know, we're often not considered in the general milieu that's, you know, so-called Australia. But yeah, Hares & Hyenas was a really important space, a really nurturing space. And I take my hat off and I give so much love to Crusader and Rowland for providing that space and being so open to, I guess, what we now call intersectionality. 

 

Unfortunately, I've had some pretty harrowing experiences, racially, very racist experiences within the LGBTI community that, um, you know, aren't pretty. But, um, they kind of make me reflect on, I guess, racism within Australia and how, um, you know, just because somebody is oppressed doesn't necessarily mean they have an empathy or an understanding of how oppression works and how you might kind of better serve or support those who are similarly oppressed. When you think of activism and the fight for rights- I used to work with Amnesty International, and so I was really part of that marriage equality push from an international perspective, but also from a local perspective. And it was interesting how the LGBTI community wanted to employ us to sort of say, yeah, get behind us and support us and make this all look visible. And, you know, we also have, you know, the LGBTI community doing that for us. But also we had people like, you know, the conservatives like Tony Abbott as the Prime Minister of the time, he went to the Aboriginal community wanting to denounce this marriage equality push from the LGBTI community. And so it was interesting, interesting to watch how Aboriginal people were almost pawns within this sort of system, within this push for political equality, social equality, sexuality and gender equality. And so, yeah, we're all part of that whole wave. I mean, I remember, you know, being always asked to be involved in the LGBTI push with marriage equality within Australia. And you know, we got the ‘Yes’, through the plebiscite process. 64% of Australia, I think, voted, “Yep, we accept marriage equality as a consideration.” We accept marriage equality to achieve equality for LGBTI people or for, you know, same sex attracted and gender diverse people. And then most recently last year we had the Yes- or No vote for Aboriginal people, for the Voice. And it was interesting to kind of, to see how people like, um, Anna Brown, who was part of that big local, um, equality push. It was sort of nice to read her words in the LGBTI press. Um, last year when we had to kind of get that Voice vote up. And, Anna Brown, she was so vital in that local LGBT or the, the equality push, marriage equality push. But she did some stuff with the Voice and said, look, you know, Mob got behind us, Aboriginal people got behind us for the equality vote. Let's get behind them when it comes to saying Yes. And it was really nice to see that. But it also, I guess, that importance of the marriage equality plebiscite support was that was from a federal level. And so what that meant, and you could see it as a result, once that was established federally, you could see how states stood up and listened to the need to involve or to accredit themselves - to service - the LGBTI community to create a space of equality. Um, and you could see the kind of outcomes of that. And so when the Voice vote was coming up, I remember thinking, well, you know, part of me as a gay man, I'm endorsed by the general Australian electorate. And that's great. And I can see how that sort of manifests in a, you know, a state or territory or even a local government perspective. You know, there's this impetus to support that and to realise that that's what Australians want. And I was thinking, yeah, that's the importance of the Yes vote for, you know, the Voice. And unfortunately we didn't get it across. And I'm going to get a bit emotional here I think. But it was kind of um, it was quite hard as a gay Aboriginal man to accept, kind of realise that, you know, part of me is accepted and then part of me isn't, by what we call Australia. And, um, it was quite confronting, and I'll admit that I kind of went into a bit of a spiral mentally in terms of my mental health, and it kind of affected me. And so it was a really, um, confronting time for me, I guess, in terms of accepting that, um, part of me was accepted by Australia and then part of me wasn't. And I guess I longed for that parallel in seeing how a federal plebiscite that endorses, um, LGBTI lives and equality at that level, um, affected all those state and local councils and all that, sort of all those mechanisms that can support equality within Australia. It was really hard to sort of see how that opportunity was given to us as an electorate, um, in Australia for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives- First Nations lives. And for that Voice to be so important and to sort of see it, I guess, nipped in the bud. 

 

I think what it speaks to is, um, racism within Australia. You know, this isn't me being skeptical, it's me sort of saying that, well, the fact that there are LGBTI people out there that are white, that come from well-to-do families, that come from those structures, that's why the LGBTI marriage equality vote got got across, and that's why we didn't get across as Aboriginal people, because there's a lot of racism in Australia, there's racism in the LGBTI community. The fact that The Voice didn’t get up and get across is reflective of that fact.