Once the location of Canberra's first publicly-organised LGBTQIA+ event in the ACT, today Glebe Park, located in the heart of the city, acts as a meeting place for Lucy Dingwall and Sita Sargeant, two queer women waiting patiently to begin their walking tour.
As a number of tour participants arrive, Lucy announces to the group: "Canberra is Australia's queerest city".
She is right.
In the most recent census, Canberra was found to be home to the largest percentage of same-sex couples in any state or territory.
And, while homosexuality was only officially decriminalised in the territory in 1976, the city has a long history of LGBTQIA+ advocacy and resistance.
Neither self-proclaimed "history nerds" Sita nor Lucy know where their strong interest in exploring the past came from.
Both women work in archiving in some of Canberra's top institutions but they continue to be inspired by every new piece of the puzzle of the territory's story that they put together.
"We are living through a time where we actually get to go through our history, and kind of say, 'who are we?' - we get to look at events in the past and go, 'what stories do we want to draw out from that?' and 'who do we want to be as Australians?'," Sita says.
"And like I always say, history is just gossip that doesn't hurt anyone, and why wouldn't you want to just listen to gossip?"
She Shapes History is a not-for-profit history group run by Lucy and Sita — started purely based on the moment they looked around Canberra and asked themselves, "Where are the women?".
"Many stories have been lost, unrecorded, devalued and untold as a society, it’s easy to forget that women were behind many of the moments that shaped Australia," reads the mission statement on their website.
Since then, the women have been operating walking tours around the parliamentary triangle over the past few years, covering the often unreported ways that females have shaped history.
To establish their walking tour specifically on Canberra's queer history, the pair drew information from a range of sources, including a report commissioned by the ACT government written by historian and author Graham Willett called Acting Out.
The lost history
Willett, who has worked in the queer history field for most of his life, says many queer people in the past had a strong incentive not to leave records.
"They would often not keep diaries, not keep letters, address books, and so on [as] all of that was used by the police as evidence."
Tour guides Lucy and Sita echo this sentiment, giving a disclaimer at the beginning of the tour that while queer history is already hard to track, the history of First Nations people who identified as transgender, gay or female is even more difficult to uncover.
Willet says records were also often destroyed by family members after queer people had died, to protect their reputations or families.
"The world before the 1970s was one in which sodomy between men was criminalised in all its forms, and any expression or suspicion of homosexuality – in women or men – could easily result in social ostracism, loss of employment, and estrangement from family and friends.
"The most obvious source of the material is the police records because it was against the law for men to have sex with each other."
'He could hardly have imagined what he was about to trigger'
In the 1970s, the queer rights movement in Canberra began to gain momentum, with various groups and organisations emerging to advocate for the rights of LGBTQIA+ individuals.
Though Willet says one event, in particular, featuring two men — known as Brian K and Walter — triggered "the formation of Australia's first homosexual rights organisation".
"When Brian K decided one chilly Canberra night in February 1969 to go cruising, he could hardly have imagined what he was about to trigger," Willet says.
He and Walter were that night caught with their pants down by the local police.
Brian was later found guilty by a jury of indecent assault on a male and he was sentenced to six months in jail.
Walter was not jailed and some years went by before the case caught the attention of a university professor.
"At this point, Brian and Walter disappear from history, Brian into jail. But the case ... caught the eye of Thomas Mautner," Willet says.
A lecturer at the Australian National University, Mautner met with Brian K's lawyer and together they established Australia's first homosexual rights organisation, the Homosexual Law Reform Society of the ACT (HLRS), and began to lobby for the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
'They made such a bloody mess of it'
In 1973, the federal government took steps towards decriminalising homosexuality.
"[They] passed a motion saying 'we think homosexuality ought not to be a criminal offence', but that didn't change the law, only the [state and territory] ministers could do that," Willet says.
South Australia was the first state to decriminalise homosexuality in 1972 but Willet says the ACT's own legislation, not passed until years later, was still history-making, as South Australia took a while to get things "quite right".
"They did in 72, but they made such a mess of it because nobody [was] prepared, they had to do it all again in 1975," Willet recalls.
Decriminalisation of male homosexuality was first proposed by the ACT government in 1973, but the legislation was not able to take effect until the federal government allowed the laws to pass in 1976, with the help of the HLRS and, by way of a catalyst, Brian K.
"So [South Australia] was the first ... and then the ACT catches up in 1976," Willet says.
'History, gossip that doesn't hurt anyone'
While also giving a rundown of how homosexuality came to be decriminalised in the national capital, Lucy and Sita also relish in the more salacious details of Canberra's queer history during the tour.
There is a pit stop at a hotel on one of Canberra's more suburban main roads, a location they say was used to film gay pornography in the 80s.
A nosy around the Gorman Arts Centre, reveals the history of a women-only entertainment troupe that performed under the acronym WET in the 90s.
During a short trip to the site of Heaven, Canberra's first privately owned queer club that opened in 1993, the guides tell tales of the 10 commandments patrons had to follow while at the venue, including one commandment surrounding consent.
Lucy and Sita also point out stickers and posters as they traverse Canberra's city — each sticker could be a clue to a secret queer rave or perhaps a gateway to a locale to meet like-minded individuals.
Lucy says the most shocked member of each tour cohort are usually men.
"I want to say the most pearl-clutching, the hands-on mouth person is always a man on the [walking] tour," Lucy says.
Of course, not all details of history are as salacious as pornography in a suburban hotel.
Lucy and Sita acknowledge the history that may have been lost alongside those who died in the HIV AIDS crisis.
In 1986, HIV came to Canberra and that same year the ACT AIDS Action Council set out to broadcast its safe sex and safe injecting messages with advertisements on the city's buses, using the slogan "You don't just catch AIDS (You have to let somebody give it to you)".
A conservative politician at the time said the ads would encourage people to have sex and "attract more people to homosexuality practice". Even the ACT health authority announced it was opposed to the ads and would not fund them, but the ads still went ahead.
Canberra, Australia's queer capital
The tour comes to a close in Braddon, one of Canberra's queerest neighbourhoods.
Braddon's main road was shut down for a massive street party in the hours after the announcement of the same-sex marriage yes vote.
Canberra actually had the highest vote return rate at 82 per cent, coupled with the highest yes vote at 74 per cent — a fact tour guides Lucy and Sita like to finish on.
As the mostly female members of the tour part ways, smiles are exchanged, everyone feeling a little closer to their community than before.
Kate Ross, a woman who recently came out as a lesbian only a few years ago, thanks Lucy and Sita for their time.
"I suppose it's a bit sad because I lived through all of this and didn't know about it," she says.
"But in another sense, now that I'm beginning to know a lot more of the queer history, I feel much more like part of a community."
