In early 2020, comedian Zoë Coombs-Marr had plenty planned.
She had moved to Melbourne and was about to launch into a series of live shows. Then the pandemic upended all our lives.
Lockdown forced the cancellation of her shows and with no work prospects things were looking grim until Jon Casimir, managing director of Guesswork TV — which produces hit ABC comedy shows including Rosehaven, Hard Quiz and The Weekly with Charlie Pickering — invited her to pitch a TV show.
"I tossed around some ideas, which were all duds, and — this was a throwaway comment — I said, 'Oh, you could do a queer history, but I'm sure someone's already done that'," she recalls.
"Then when we looked into it and people have sort of 'done it' in different ways but we realised that this documentary was begging to be made and it's the show that I would want to see.
"Queer history is still very much hidden and, when we started researching, there was so much stuff I just had no idea about."
After three years of extensive research and filming, Queerstralia is about to hit ABC TV screens.
The three-part documentary series is written and hosted by Coombs-Marr, with activist, writer and actor Nayuka Gorrie exploring the experiences of First Nations people.
It features interviews with Hannah Gadsby, Magda Szubanski, leading LGBTQI+ activists and historians.
With the staging of the 45th Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the fight for equality by the "78ers" — who staged the first march — has been well documented, but Queerstralia has dug much further back in time and explores the experiences of people across the country.
"There's so many interesting stories," says Coombs-Marr.
"Learning about lesbian convict games I found incredible.
"Australia was once known as the 'Sodom of the South Pacific'.
"We've got a gay bushranger, Captain Moonlight, and even before there was a word for transness, people we would now classify as trans were just living their lives, passing as the opposite sex, living out their genders in colonial times.
"Also, a lot of the First Nations' histories and perspectives that I've been lucky enough to be working on are really eye-opening. They're incredible histories and they just haven't been told."
Zoë Coombs-Marr — as most comedians do — loves to push the boundaries.
She's performed stand-up comedy in Australia, the UK and the US for more than a decade and won several awards over the years, including best show at the 2016 Melbourne Comedy International Festival, in which she performed as a hack male comedian called Dave (inspired by the misogyny she encountered in the comedy scene).
In 2019, her show Bossy Bottom won a prestigious Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
In 2020, Bossy Bottom was filmed and released internationally on Amazon Prime Video and she's also appeared on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering.
Queerstralia is her first foray into factual content, but this is no dreary history doco.
It's cleverly produced, interesting, funny and moving. Coombs-Marr's comedic wit brings some light relief to sad and often shocking stories of persecution, discrimination and lives lived in secrecy that endured through generations.
"I love making people laugh. It's a joy, but comedy is also a way of processing the world and I find the world very dark and very funny at the same time, and I think comedy is a way of going to dark places and surviving," she says.
"So much of queer culture is funny and irreverent, look at drag, we don't take ourselves too seriously and, in producing Queerstralia, we're dealing with queer history with lightness and irreverence, but we also wanted to give it the same gravity of an official history and it was important to treat people's personal experiences with the respect they deserve.
"While we explore different stories in different eras, there's a common queer experience, a thread between the 1850s, the 1920s, the 1970s and today, and that is one of isolation and loneliness, the same experience of not fitting in, not really feeling part of society, not feeling part of your family, of being different from a very young age, of having to figure yourself out."
And that is a common queer experience across generations, cultures, gender.
"Then, the other common thread is defiance and finding community," Coombs-Marr says.
"We've seen people, time and again, just living their lives the way that they have to and I look at them in total awe.
"We owe so much to the activists, and history is often about the big achievements, but people who were just living their lives, who don't get the kudos they deserve are the legacy, I think they're amazing."
The generational sense of isolation is an experience Coombs-Marr can relate to.
While her parents and sisters — who she also interviews in the show — were hugely supportive, she found others in the regional New South Wales town of Grafton, where she grew up, were not so accepting.
"I'm very lucky in that my parents were really accepting, and I knew would have accepted me however I was. Dad said, 'As long as you don't join the police force, the army or the church. He was a Catholic priest who bailed," she says.
"Because of that, and I suppose it's just who I am, I was always very bolshie, like, 'I don't care what anyone thinks', but you do care what people think, especially when you're growing up.
"And there was no place for me in Grafton. It definitely was not OK to be gay in Grafton and I experienced a lot of bullying, also for just being weird, so I lent into being weird.
"I thought, 'If I'm going to stand out, I'll make it seem intentional'. That was my strategy.
"While society today is pretty accepting, it hasn't been in my lifetime and there is still homophobia, certainly transphobia, out there and kids get those messages.
"You have a sense that you are in a particular group of people who not everyone likes.
"I think a lot of queer people have had this experience as a small child.
"You're still afraid of the dark or what's under the bed and you're having these thoughts and realisations, and trying to work out how to navigate the world and you realise, 'There's something about me that some adults hate'.
"That's something you have to work out for yourself. That's not a shared experience with your parents and that, in itself, is isolating.
"You are on your own on that journey and, I think, [this] is why queer people, when we find each other and connect, it's such an intense experience, because we're often coming from a place of isolation."
Coombs-Marr hopes that — in documenting Australia's queer history and presenting it in an engaging and entertaining way — Queerstralia might enlighten people and challenge some lingering prejudice in the community.
"Queer people have been here in all different guises the whole time and, while there have been all sorts of attempts to stop us, we just keep showing up.
"We keep showing up in every generation, born into straight families and going, 'Oh no, I'm different'.
"For anyone to suggest being queer is a 'modern lifestyle choice' or that it's somewhat unnatural, you just have to look at history and we are all over it.
"We are just part of what it is to be human and it's weird to think that that has been such a battle to have that basic concept accepted."
The three-part series, Queerstralia, premieres on ABC TV and iview on Tuesday, February 28, at 8.30pm
