LGBTIQ Equality, My Story

Writing my way out of the closet

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GAY MESSIAH Graham Chapman in Monty Python's The Life of Brian.
GAY MESSIAH Graham Chapman

A Writer finally comes out.

THE late, great Monty Python comedian Graham Chapman was the inspiration for my coming out.

In the year that homosexuality was decriminalised in the UK, he famously hosted a party for all his friends, introduced them to his male partner, then got on with his life.

The news didn’t reach our small town until long after my homophobic brother and his poofter-hating mates had come to revere Chapman and his cohorts as the best thing on their TV screens, but it was a great affirmation for me to discover that the Python’s camp humour had its roots in a living, breathing homosexual.

I wanted to find a similar way to tell everyone myself and thought seriously about hosting a coming out party at my very first house in the town of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. But it became apparent very quickly that there was no way I’d get everyone I knew and loved in the same place at the same time – they had far too many ‘issues’.

A few very close friends, and my sister Jen, already knew. I’d told them in person after going through much angst.

I have always been much better at expressing myself in writing than any other form of communication anyway, so I embarked on writing to everyone in my life. Not just a few people, but everyone – I drew no line in the sand for my sake, or theirs.

The first step was to find a beautiful book of postcards, and I was attracted to a lovely set by Asian master print-makers. I took my time and wrote that I had come to terms with my sexuality, sharing the good news that this had given me a much-needed dose of personal happiness.

When the writing task was complete, I determined that I’d walk to the local post office, buy enough stamps for well over 100 postcards, and simply post my future out to the world.

It proved to be one of the longest walks in my life.

Katoomba is a very small community, and as luck would have it I met many people I knew along the way, some of them what I’ll call ‘Difficult Cases’ – people for whom my postcard news was going to come as something of a challenge.

I endured their meaningless chit-chat, and just internalised my resolve to keep going to the post box, through which I was convinced freedom from the closet was only days away.

The first phone call came from my cousin, whose instant, unquestioning support spoke volumes of acceptance. Great start.

Two family friends turned up. Over cups of tea this support lessened a little when the inevitable “I already knew” crept into the conversation.

If they already knew, why hadn’t they had enough courage to be inclusive when they’d asked, quite regularly, did I “have a girlfriend?” by adding just three words to that question, “or a boyfriend?”

REACHING OUT Coming to terms with sexuality is an internal journey.
REACHING OUT Coming to terms with sexuality is a journey out of oneself

Stony silence stretched out in many cases to more than a week, followed by stilted phone conversations in which people forced themselves to utter what they thought they should say.

Some Difficult Cases needed a little encouragement, so I went to see them. One crossed the street when he saw me. One broached the subject with a weird question: “Why do all lesbians hate men?” as though I’d know the answer even if such an ignorant assertion were remotely true. One looked startled when I passed her at the supermarket, her face not altering as I smiled, made eye contact, said “hello,” and kept going, since obviously she had a problem.

One assumed my postcard was a suicide letter. Another misread the words “I am gay,” thinking I’d written “I am angry”. What can you do?

“I am gay too,” was an interesting response, from the married father of two. That was out of the blue!

But it wasn’t all bad or weird: “Got your lovely postcard,” said dear Sal, mentor, friend, superwoman and strong out lesbian who’d long inspired me.

And the phone call from my grandmother, who said that she would help me find a cure, because: “They can fix all kinds of things these days, you know”.

“But I’m not sick grandma, I don’t need a cure,” I replied.

“Oh thank goodness,” she said, quick as a flash, her total belief in the way I felt about myself eclipsed generations of people in her wake.

At her 90th birthday a few months later, she raised her arms in delight when I arrived, enfolded me in a hug as the shouted: “You are so special!” so loudly that it echoed off the ranks of Difficult Cases in the family, standing in maudlin, silent rows. Priceless, unconditional acceptance.

With all the consummate skill of a country woman Grandma had hand-made clothes for my dolls when I was a toddler. She never questioned my behavior, or shamed me, she just joined in the fun and made a safe place for a young gay boy to play.

The overwhelming majority of my postcard’s recipients I never heard from again – close family friends, people I grew up with, people who were welcome in our home and accepted by our family in the face of their own ‘scandals’, people who had cried on my shoulder when I shared the intimate details about our mother, their friend, as she died. People who should have known a lot better by the accepting example that she set.

Some Difficult Cases hung in there for a while, but fell away in the wake of me manifesting my first gay relationship. For many people it’s okay if you’re gay and single (and lonely!) but bringing a partner into their home creates a challenge of “What do we tell the neighbours?” proportions, poor things.

For someone who was sent-off from his community with a mass of support, I certainly came home to a resounding rejection.

But growing up in that community had taught me to help others, so it was with a great sense of validation that I later heard about another coming out.

“I’ve done a Mike,” one young gay family friend said to his loved ones as he got real a few years after I did, at a much earlier stage in his life.

That was all I needed to hear that I’d done exactly the right thing, the Difficult Cases be damned.

To anyone who is closeted, my best advice is to love whoever you want. If anyone has the guts to ask you what your sexual orientation is, reward their courage by telling them your truth. Forget coming-out – it’s just society’s outmoded and unnecessarily pressure-filled way of working out who is ‘normal’ and who is (to quote The Life of Brian) a “very naughty boy”.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

My Story, Writers

The tale of a legend

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STONE SISTERS The Three Sisters rock formation abive the Jamison Valley, Echo Point, Katoomba, Blue Mountains, Australia (Photo: JJ Harrison).
STONE SISTERS The Three Sisters rock formation above the Jamison Valley, Echo Point, Katoomba, Blue Mountains (Photo: JJ Harrison).

A short look at a tall story

WHEN I arrived back in Australia after living in the UK for most of the 1990s, I was attracted back to the region where I did most of my growing up – The Blue Mountains, a World Heritage wilderness only 100 kilometres west of Sydney.

I eventually settled there and fell in love with the place all over again, embarking on a research and writing cycle that would continue for the next twelve years.

This all began with the news that the region’s ‘original’ story, the so-called ‘Legend of the Three Sisters‘, which had been taught to generations of Australian children as a genuine Aboriginal myth (and sold to millions of international tourists), had in fact been made up by a non-Aboriginal man.

I was eventually given the opportunity to publish a feature article on this subject in the December-January 2011 edition of Blue Mountains Life Magazine (Vintage Press).

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that the following article contains images and references to deceased persons.

Legends, Interrupted

How the Aboriginal legend of the Three Sisters trumped a tall story

Across the Mountains of the late 1970s wonders were common – a witch’s shadowy profile cast across rocks, colourful mountains devil ornaments, and a train ride straight down a cliff. My young imagination also lapped up a legend told on postcards, tea towels, a fountain, and an illustrated book.

The legend told of three Aboriginal sisters who disturbed a bunyip in the valley and were saved by their father who turned them into stone using a magic bone. He transformed himself into a lyrebird to escape, but in doing so lost the bone, leaving him to search the undergrowth (as lyrebirds do) so that one day he might find it and turn them all back into human form.

This story held more intrigue for me than explorer’s achievements, which were taught with a sense of pride at school. But there was a silence on local Aboriginal heritage, and I grew to assume there was little to know about the tribe in the Three Sisters legend.

Fifteen years later I attended a reconciliation meeting and met Gundungurra and Darug people mobilising to work on Native Title claims. Around that time a story hit the local media that the Aboriginal legend of the three sisters was created by a non-Aboriginal man. In the fallout, even that claim turned-out to be untrue – the first fake was actually written by a caucasian schoolgirl with a rather apt surname – Patricia Stone.

SIXTIES SISTERS Lyall Randolph's water sculpture of the Three Sisters graced the entrance of the Scenoc Railway from the 1960s to the 2000s (Photo: Tim Driver).
SIXTIES SISTERS Lyall Randolph’s water sculpture of the Three Sisters (Photo: Tim Driver).

“None of that was a revelation to Gundungurra people around here,” Gundungurra Elder Sharyn Halls says at Echo Point this year. “We always knew what the tourists were told was a made-up story. Many of us thought it was quite funny what visitors were willing to believe.”

The day is just dawning and already flocks of tourists are arriving to take in the panoramic view which is one of the Blue Mountains’ biggest drawcards.

“My father Lenny McNally used to stand me and my siblings here and tell us the stories about the land all around,” Sharyn says, sweeping her arms from east to west. “The story of this place is much, much more than the Three Sisters, from here you can see all the waterways and pathways of our traditional land.”

Sharyn grew up in Bankstown, but spent weekends and holidays in the Blue Mountains. “We’d go camping out to the Megalong Valley with Dad and our immediate and extended families. After a while we realised we were only being taken to places that were important, we were being shown our country. During those trips I learnt how to catch and gather food, and other skills to do with family life, from my Nana Lindsay.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE Gundungurra Elder Sharryn Halls.
LOCAL KNOWLEDGE Gundungurra Elder Sharyn Halls.

“Dad liked to travel, to the Southern Highlands and out to Jenolan. He was a jockey and he’d round-up the wild brumbies from the valleys. In the Megalong he’d break them in, then muster them into Camden for sale.

“He knew the best way to get there through the mountains – he’d been taken out there with the old men who still spoke traditionally, and they knew the routes between all these places. But Dad wasn’t taught his language, only bits and pieces. Unfortunately he and his generation had to change to survive.”

Survival for Gundungurra people meant making difficult decisions when forced to leave their country.

“People ended up in Katoomba in a place they already knew and used called The Gully,” Sharyn relates. “They made a conscious decision to come, because there were resources here, and they could avoid the mission system. If you ended up in a mission you were only encouraged to settle down. The movement of Aboriginal people was restricted right into the 20th century.”

Gundungurra man Ron Fletcher recalls: “Our family lived for two periods in The Gully in about 1940 and 1949. Everyone got on really well down there because we were all battlers”.

“Our Aunty May and Uncle George Hannah, and Uncle Jack Brooks were still living in The Gully when they built the Catalina Racetrack,” Ron recalls of devastating events in 1957, when Gully residents’ homes and community were demolished to make way for a commercial racing development.

“It wasn’t until 1988, when they put up a memorial at the old Megalong cemetery, that my sister Dawn was reminded that our great grandparents were buried down there. That got her curious about our Aboriginal heritage. Dawn was never a backwards kind of person,” Ron smiles. “She felt very strongly about that side of her, and many people with Aboriginal blood were starting to take notice of how things were changing.”

Dawn Colless (1932-2003) became ‘Aunty Dawn’, elder of the Katoomba Clan of the Gundungurra at a time when local indigenous people began reclaiming their place in the Blue Mountains. One point of focus was The Gully, where the Catalina racetrack had long since fallen into disrepair.

An excellent speaker heard by many giving Welcomes to Country, Aunty Dawn told anyone who would listen about the significance of Gundungurra places and sacred sites. She was also the keeper of a secret she’d been entrusted with as a girl by her mother and grandmother – a legend about the Three Sisters.

“Our Aboriginal family had to be very careful when telling us about the old ways – they were frightened we would be taken away,” Dawn’s brother recalls. “I can remember the inspectors coming to our house twice,” Ron smiles, “I think when they saw we all looked well-fed, that we were being looked after”.

“Not many people realised how ill Dawn was in her last years,” Ron remembers. “She was determined to do what she could in the time she had left. Not long before she died, she agreed to meet some visiting indigenous women. They told her the Three Sisters were linked to the Seven Sisters, and a sacred site as important as Uluru.”

In 2002 Dawn told what she knew of the legend of her mothers to the Gundungurra Native Title hearing. Local authorities began to consult with Gundungurra people about public versions of the legend of the Three Sisters. The Gully, or ‘Garguree’, was proclaimed an Aboriginal place in the same year.

Sharyn Halls is adamant that: “It’s about time the traditional people of The Blue Mountains take a leading role in tourism here, to get out there and understand their country, to be independent, not reliant.”

“So much information about our stories has been lost because we didn’t really have anyone to ask,” Ron says. “We are the last to remember our Aboriginal side. It was always in me, but I was very reluctant at first. Dawn was so passionate about Aboriginal affairs that she inspired me.

GULLY GUIDE Gundungurra Elder Ron Fletcher showing local dignitaries the entrance to Guragaree, 'The Gully', Katoomba.
GULLY GUIDE Gundungurra Elder Ron Fletcher.

“Sometime I go to The Gully to interpret it for visitors as part of the Reconnecting to Country project, with some of the other Gully elders. I’ve been on trips down to the Burragorang, and it makes you feel strong, and you feel they’re walking with you, your family who have been there long before you.”

Today, many tourist destinations in the Blue Mountains assiduously avoid interpreting the Three Sister story at all, but a public version of the Gundungurra legend is available. What’s interesting to note is the inclusion of Patricia Stone’s names for the sister – Gunnedoo, Wimlah and Meenhi – the result of a variety of spellings over the years.

“Because of what happened to Gundungurra people, the continuity of our stories was broken. Our stories were diluted with other stories. The structure is there, but it’s in a different form,” Sharyn Halls outlines. “The important thing is that you don’t interpret someone else’s story on their behalf, you only tell your own. Patricia Stone’s story is one version, many people don’t really care it got told so much”.

“The legend of the Three Sisters is just basic practical education for youngsters not to stray from the safety of their home. It’s a thread that runs through all the versions I know of,” Sharyn explains. “Some of the names are a bit strange,” she laughs, “but nevertheless people have used them. I believe one hundred percent that’s what the legend is.”

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.

Secret Means Business

TALE FOR SALE Victor Barnes' 1972 Golden Book.
TALE FOR SALE Victor Barnes’ 1972 Golden Book.

Milestones in the commercialisation of the fake Aboriginal Legend of the Three Sisters.

1931 The Sydney Morning Herald publishes ‘The Three Sisters’ by Patricia Stone (who visited Katoomba c.1925). The names ‘Wimalah’, ‘Meeni’ and ‘Gunedoo’ first appear in print. The sisters are giants turned to stone by Yooma (a tribal wizard) to protect them from a neighbouring tribe during a battle.

1949 Outdoors and Fishing Magazine publishes ‘Legends of the Mountains’ by naturalist Charles Melbourne (‘Mel’) Ward (1903-1966), who moved to the Mountains in 1943. Patricia Stone’s version is used uncredited in reworded form, including her names for the sisters.

TALE TELLER Naturalist Charles Melbourne ('Mel') Ward was resposible for disseminating the fake legend of Katoomba's Three Sisters.
TALE TELLER Naturalist Charles Melbourne (‘Mel’) Ward.

1950’s Mel Ward distributes Legends of the Mountains from his museum in the grounds of the Hydro Majestic hotel in Medlow Bath, claiming to have been told the legend by Aboriginal people.

1967 Bondi Mermaid sculptor Lyall Randolph’s Three Sisters fountain is installed at The Scenic Railway, telling a variation of Stone’s legend with coin-operated narration punctuated by water spouts. The money is donated to charity.

1972 Golden Books publishes The Legend of the Three Sisters by Victor Barnes, a new illustrated version of the transformation of the three sisters into stone by their father to save them from a bunyip.

1997 The Blue Mountains Gazette published ‘The Three Sisters story Untrue?’ in which linguist Charles Illert proposes: “The story behind Katoomba’s Three Sisters may be a myth created by white men with large imaginations.”

2000s A new (as yet incomplete) sculpture by Terrance Plowright replaces Lyall Randolph’s at Scenic World (formerly The Scenic Railway) in Katoomba.

2013 Various non-Aboriginal versions of The Three Sisters legend still disseminated in written form to Blue Mountains tourists.

ROYAL INTERPRETATION The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Anthea Hammon and Randall Walker at Echo Point.
ROYAL INTERPRETATION The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at Echo Point.

2014 During the 10-minute visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to Echo Point, local business identities Randall Walker (interim CEO of Blue Mountains Lithgow and Oberon Tourism) and Anthea Hammon (joint managing director of Scenic World) interpret the Jamison Valley for the royal couple.

Gundungurra and Darug elders and tourism representatives meet the Duke and Duchess but are not visibly seen to interpret their traditional lands for the visitors.

creating-waves-cover
BUY NOW

(Source and further reading: ‘Aboriginal Legends of the Blue Mountains’ by Jim Smith, Den Fenella Press, 2003).

This article appears in Michael’s eBook Creating Waves: Critical takes on culture and politics.

Day Jobs, LGBTIQ Equality, My Story

The thing about Britain

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BRITAIN AT WAR The 1990 poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square.
BRITAIN AT WAR The 1990 poll tax riots in London’s Trafalgar Square.

TOWARDS the end of my second year working for United News and Media, the staff received news that our company was in the final stages of broad economic reforms that would cut right through the Farming Press office at Ipswich.

Signs of this began when an all-staff memorandum indicated that only one bottle of wine was permitted at business lunches, a message met with glee from people like us who worked at the fringes of this multinational company and had no idea we could even put wine on the company tab!

Perhaps it was our new-found business-lunch rights that finally tipped the company into financial free-fall? I doubt it, because it turned out the mechanics of change were underway years before my position was ever advertised.

By the end of 1997 the writing was on the wall. With no new employees since I’d started, I was faced with being ‘last on, first off’. So I took stock, decided it was time, for many reasons, to return to Australia, and accepted an offer of voluntary redundancy.

Having lived in a permanent state of debt for five years, my payout would be enough to buy a one-way ticket home and pay off my credit card. It was an easy decision to make.

NO SOCIETY LADY Baroness Thatcher on the newly opened M25 Motorway in 1986.
NO SOCIETY LADY Baroness Thatcher on the newly opened M25 Motorway in 1986.

Being part of a folding company was the last in a long list of eye-opening experiences of living in Great Britain’s economy.

The late Baroness Thatcher made no secret of not believing in society, which seemed to stand in the way of her penchant for the free market.

Having landed first in Yorkshire and then South London, I experienced life first-hand in territories where Thatcherism had left its mark on formerly cohesive and supportive communities.

I would later say, with regularity, that everything I learnt about economics and politics I learnt from living in Britain, simply because I joined the ranks of everyday people trying to earn a living in the immediate post-Thatcher years.

Here are some other observations about Britain in the 1990s:-

No-one could afford a day out at the beach. In Australia we call this a human right, but in England day-trippers were faced with whopping public transport costs. Few people I knew could afford cars, but a one-way train ticket for the short trip to London from Ipswich was well over twenty pounds for one person. This was solely due to the privatisation of every possible segment of the railways – one company owned the carriage, another the rails, another the station, and they all wanted to profit from ticket sales. A similar journey in Australia still costs far less than half that, twenty years later.

When buying an electrical appliance, the cable cost extra. What better way to gouge a bit of extra profit than to make the mains cable of most electrical appliances a separate item the customer must buy to use the equipment?

The country was full of criminals. Speaking as a citizen of the nation invaded to set up the penal colony of New South Wales, I have to say the common sight of colleagues being marched out of the office by a pair of police officers says a lot about the British criminal disposition as opposed to the Australian. These were never ‘bad’ people, they were just trying to keep their family afloat in the economy. Every single company I worked for contained employees who were on the take, and I don’t just mean the toilet paper.

Many people were closeted. Perhaps it’s a case of like attracting like, but most men I became friends with in England turned out to be gay. From the married father of two to the tough-as-nails London busker, they all came tumbling out of the closet in the wake of my own coming out. It was an eye opener about the choices faced by the British male under the infamous Section 28 of Britain’s Local Government Act, which embedded disapproval of gay lifestyle and relationships into the country’s law. For a nation which had decriminalised homosexuality in 1967, this was a mean-spirited regulation which was seen by many as a knee-jerk reaction to the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.

British food was crap. When you think about the proximity of Britain to the fresh produce of continental Europe, the lack of affordable nutritious food was a terrible side effect of euro-phobia and economic rationalism, and an indictment on the ‘Grocer’s Daughter’ who had contributed to the scarcity. The only ‘fresh’ fruit and veg I saw in my first month were lumpy potatoes, mouldy onions, and bunches of silverbeet, withered and pricey. Most people I knew ate everything out of tins, and ‘boil in the bag’ meals were the norm.

You could still sense the war. People would still queue uncomplainingly for things that were freely available in other western nations. Avoidable diseases were still common in England’s north, and childhood mortality was higher-than-average.

The tenant paid the council rates, not the landlord. Thatcher’s infamous poll tax was well and truly in place when I became a renter in London, and my Yorkshire flatmates showed me the clever ways their parents taught them to avoid the payment as long as was possible. Often, it was the catalyst for moving house.

No-one answered their front door. Due to avoiding paying the poll tax (see above) and the TV licensing charges (see below), I was always under strict instructions from every flatmate I ever had to never open the door to a knocking visitor in case it was someone coming to collect taxes. I was once fooled by the TV license man when he pretended he was delivering a parcel to the first floor flat I shared in Lewisham. He launched himself through the front door into the foyer, and I had to pretend I was a visiting friend who had no idea if the flat had a television or not. Luckily I had some acting training under my belt.

MEN IN SUITS The notorious TV License man and his Doctor Who-like scanner.
MEN IN SUITS The notorious TV License man and his Doctor Who-like ‘scanner’.

It cost a lot to watch the tele. A hefty annual television license fee comes with the pleasure of tuning in to the BBC, oh, and all the other channels who would appear to be doing quite well already with all the advertising revenue they’re getting from the endless commercials, of course. The jury is still out on whether the mysterious vans driving around Britain’s streets are capable of telling who is receiving a TV signal are real, or some kind of psychological warfare. It’s all very Doctor Who. Another reason to avoid answering the front door (see above).

This list is cursory and might seem glib. But it’s also true. I will always remember many colleagues in Britain who worked long hours for the same very low rate of pay I was on, only they had mouths to feed and backs to clothe. I don’t know how they did it, but most worked with a ready smile and by doing without luxuries that most people in Australia take completely for granted.

But I also recall how few of them thought it was worth getting off their backsides on election day and voting.

By May Day 1997 Tony Blair seemed determined to sweep away two decades of Thatcherism, convincing the nation of the merits of ‘New Labor’. I can remember where I was when I heard the news – working on location in the Yorkshire Dales. Never had I experienced such a sense of palpable hope and imminent change amongst the British as I did across that summer. Princess Diana’s death knocked most of that energy out of the British only a few short months later, but I witnessed the brief smile on the nation’s face.

Ever since I returned home I have been vocal about the P-word. Privatisation has not spread its destructive fingers into every Australian industry, yet. I know what an impact it will have on that day trip to the beach if public transport is ever extensively privatised in a nation where long distances are the norm.

I will be eternally grateful for the support I received to travel overseas in the first place, but ‘travel’ is a great distraction. Living and working in another country, for more than a stint fruit picking, is what I call an education.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.