The following edited extract is from a new book, A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia, by Tessa Morris-Suzuki.
In a life that spanned more than a century — from 1882 to 1989 — Monte Punshon witnessed crucial events in Australia’s modern history. Monte was a pioneer radio broadcaster who travelled the country with children’s theatrical troupes and defied convention with her active involvement in the underground world of queer Melbourne in the 1930s.
Her love of travel took her to China and Japan, and she studied their languages before becoming a warden in a wartime internment camp for Japanese civilians. In the postwar era, she was an early advocate for closer ties between Australia and Asia.
She had lived through the great depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s, the Boer War and two world wars; she celebrated the Australian Federation in 1901 and deplored the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975; as a child, she displayed her handiwork at the 1888 Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition, which marked the centenary of the British colonisation of Australia.
For nations as well as for individuals, celebrations of temporal milestones — birthdays, anniversaries, centenaries — are moments for reflection on where we have come from, and where we are going. Which dreams have been fulfilled, and which have vanished into the void of time, or transformed themselves into nightmares?
In the early 1980s, as Australians looked forward to the 200-year commemoration of the arrival of the First Fleet with its cargo of convicts, they were challenged to consider what sort of country Australia had become, and equally importantly, what country they wanted it to be in the future.
But there was no escaping the reality that the historical act being celebrated was the invasion and expropriation of Indigenous lands by foreign colonisers. The mood of celebration was mixed not only with unease but also with protest, particularly from members of the Aboriginal community and their supporters, whose central slogans were “White Australia has a Black History” and “40,000 Years Don’t Make a Bicentennial”.
As the federal government began to plan for the bicentenary, there were discussions about the possibility of holding a major expo, echoing the grand Melbourne exhibition of 1888. A tentative plan for a Sydney expo was drawn up, only to be dismissed as too expensive. But the government of Queensland, led by the ebullient right-wing premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, glimpsed an opportunity for a Brisbane exhibition to attract global attention to the state’s expanding economy, and particularly to its growing role as an international tourist mecca.
This was a time when St Kilda’s gay and lesbian scene was blossoming. For Monte, outings to these venues were a revelation. On one early visit to an all-women’s disco, she looked around in astonishment and exclaimed, “Goodness! I wouldn’t have thought that there were this many lesbians in the whole world, let alone just in Melbourne!” There was also a host of new and experimental plays, films, novels and poems exploring long-suppressed sexual identities.
The staff and patrons of St Kilda’s gay bars adored Monte and treated her like royalty. Monte revelled in the attention, and delighted in the spectacle of the glittering costumes and performances that outshone even the early-20th-century extravaganzas of J. C. Williamson and the Bijou Theatre. In these settings she would drink chartreuse or Cointreau, and enthral — and sometimes startle — her young companions with her flirtatious comments and her intimate revelations about past loves.
Meanwhile, a global disaster was starting to unfold. In June 1983 newspapers reported the death in a Melbourne hospital of a middle-aged visitor to Australia from the United States, the first recorded death in the country from Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
The AIDS pandemic, which was to cast a pall of fear and pain over the gay community in Australia and worldwide, had begun, and some of Monte Punshon’s closest friends were soon deeply engaged in the struggle to respond to the crisis.
The expo promised to breathe new life into the flagging popularity of the Queensland government headed by the recently knighted Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who had held the office of premier since 1968. Best known for his social arch-conservatism and his dismissive attitude towards liberals, feminists, human rights activists, journalists and others, Bjelke-Petersen in many ways embodied the (not necessarily fair) stereotypes of Queensland widely embraced by Australians from the southern states and by some people from further afield.
Gay rights were among Sir Joh’s particular bugbears. During debates about the risks of AIDS-contaminated blood transfusions, he described homosexual people as “insulting evil animals who should go back to New South Wales and Victoria where they came from in the first place”.
The Queensland Parliament’s response to the AIDS crisis included a revision to the liquor licencing laws, hurriedly passed in 1986, allowing bars and hotels to be stripped of their licences if they served food or drink to “sexual deviants and perverts”. This proved, of course, completely inoperable and was rapidly abandoned, not least because, as the Queensland Hotels Association anxiously pointed out, most publicans “would be unable to spot a deviant in a crowded hotel”.
In the years leading up to the bicentenary, Monte Punshon was almost the only person alive who had clear memories of the great Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition of 1888. She still kept the burgundy-coloured newspaper holder she had carefully embroidered, under the supervision of her mother Lizzy, and for which she had won her treasured two-guinea prize.
In 1984, the federal government dispatched invitations to all the nations with which Australia had diplomatic relations. The Bjelke-Petersen government had developed close ties with a number of prominent (and sometimes controversial) Japanese entrepreneurs, and in March 1985 Sir Joh travelled to Tokyo to ensure the country’s participation in Expo 88, and to reassure investors that Queensland “does not have industrial or union problems any more because we are different from other states”.
In that context, when the organisers of the expo looked for someone to hold the ceremonial position of the event’s honorary ambassador, a sprightly centenarian with prim 19th-century diction, who had participated in the 1888 centennial and spent decades nurturing human connections between Australia and Japan, seemed like the perfect candidate — particularly since this centenarian had a special connection to Kobe, which had just signed a sister-city agreement with Brisbane. And so, late in 1985, Monte Punshon received a call from a representative of the expo committee, inviting her to be invested as a “roving ambassador” for Expo 88.
How could she resist? Armed with her needlework from the Centennial Exhibition, and accompanied by Margaret Taylor, Monte flew to Brisbane in December 1985 to take up her new role. She was treated to a tea party with deputy premier Sir William Gunn, Brisbane lord mayor Sally-Anne Atkinson, federal tourism minister John Brown and expo chairman Sir Llew Edwards, who also took her on a personal tour of the 40-hectare expo site, explaining the space-age technology that would soon be on display there.
The following day she was interviewed on television, again in the company of Margaret Taylor, who had spent the previous evening — while Monte rested — out on the town “looking for the scene”. (“I should have taken a microscope,” Margaret later remarked.) Margaret was dressed for the occasion in a black T-shirt decorated with the profiles of two women facing one another, and fastened with a metal-studded leather belt — an outfit that seems to have attracted some attention, but no overt comments, in the studio.
In fact, if the expo organisers had done a little more research, they would quite easily have found the illustrated cover story published in the gay magazine City Rhythm some six months earlier, in which Monte had publicly revealed her homosexuality. It was not until months later that an indignant member of the public read the interview Monte had given to City Rhythm, in which, as the journal put it, she revealed “publicly — for the first time — the details of her homosexual life and her one true love”, and sent a copy to the Queensland premier’s office.
The realisation that the Expo 88 ambassador had recently come out, and was being feted as “the world’s oldest lesbian”, instantly set an alarm bell ringing. Sir Joh’s office promptly contacted Monte, questioning whether she was a suitable person to represent the expo. The controversy made its way into the media, with The Sydney Morning Herald reporting that “Sir Joh’s office would prefer the roving Miss Punshon, 104, to be less gay”. Monte was both offended and upset.
In the end, the expo committee seems to have decided it was best simply to remain silent on the issue, in the hope that it would go away, and meanwhile, Sir Joh and his office had more important things to worry about.
In November 1987 Monte was interviewed on Channel 9’s popular Ray Martin Show and asked how she felt about reports she was a lifelong lesbian. She responded, as she had done elsewhere, by taking strong exception to the label. To say that she loved women—that she had loved a particular woman—was one thing, but, she insisted, “I’m not labelled anything. I’m just me myself. I hate that name.”
On May 11, 1987, Australia’s national broadcaster the ABC aired The Moonlight State, an explosive TV exposé of corruption in Queensland, involving politicians, police, business interests and organised crime. Against Bjelke-Petersen’s wishes, an official commission of inquiry was created, and most of the ABC’s allegations were substantiated. By the end of the year Sir Joh had lost the support of his own cabinet, and on December 1 he retired both from the premiership and political life.
While Bjelke-Petersen’s political power collapsed, Monte’s role as Expo 88’s roving ambassador survived. She continued to go about her ambassadorial duties, visiting schools to talk about the event, and making TV commercials where she said to viewers, “If you missed the 1888 Expo, I’ll see you in Brisbane next year.” But now that the story of the lesbian centenarian was in the media, it was not about to vanish.
