It’s the best part of 15 years since I left the beautiful countryside and fossilized social mores of small-town country Victoria behind for the bright lights of Melbourne. But it’s still a shock to the system to read about a gay and lesbian festival to be held in Yackandandah, not far from where I grew up, next month:
Gary Hayward, who founded the festival with his partner, Andy Stevens, said about 100 people attended the first festival in 2005, which was held in Yackandandah during one weekend and included a dance party, movie screening, drag show and community market.
This year, up to 2500 people from around Australia are expected to flock to 20 events in Beechworth, Falls Creek, Yackandandah and Albury.
The Age‘s article uses the fact that Strange Bedfellows (a 2004 film in which Michael Caton and Paul Hogan pretend to be a gay couple for financial reasons) was set in Yackandandah to imply that the place is a bastion of rural social conservatism, and its (partial) acceptance of the festival might suggest a turnaround in general rural attitudes towards the gay and lesbian community. I’m not so sure. My long-standing impression of Yackandandah is that it always was, by north-east Victorian standards, a little bit Daylesfordish and treechangery. It’s got an olde-worlde main street, a profusion of antique shops, and 15% of the primary vote went to the Australian Greens in the 2007 Federal election.
The (partial) acceptance of the Spring Migration festival might be an sign that that there are more pockets of (and I use the term for want of better) tree-changers springing up around Australia, rather than a significant softening of attitudes in the places less influenced by them.
While overall Albury is still a frighteningly conservative place, I haven’t ever got the impression that someone’s sexual preference was a big deal for most people. Anecdotal evidence, however, still says that in the smaller satellite towns throughout the countryside acceptance of homosexuality, especially for young people is still a prickly issue.
As for Yack, it’s supposedly home to swingers and whatever other counter culture group you care to name, but the validity of those claims, or of it being a beacon of enlightenment when it comes to the gay community, vary greatly.
hey that is really cool
Hurrah for capitalism and local tourist initiatives at least confronting conservative social mores.
The day we see this festival celebrated in Moree or Wagga is the day we’ll know the thaw is on…
As someone from a small whistle stop of Koonwarra in South West Gippsland I readily understood Foucault’s History of Sexuality and how when you repress sexuality it spurts out in all sorts of alternative expressions.
Not if these people right now breakfasting in Parliament House to celebrate five years of Howard’s bigoted changes to the Marriage Act get their way…
…or in the Barossa.
I don’t think people would be openly rude about it, but I suspect they would tell them to choose another town. And so on pretty much all over the Barossa.
We (not the royal ‘we’) are a pretty conservative, Lutherany mob here.
I once commented in another forum that illiberal attitudes in regional communities towards queers, women who wanted to continue working beyond 25, men who didn’t conform to a stereotypical masculinity, people of all kinds who valued ideas and creativity, etc., was a major factor in the long-term demographic and economic decline of such communities. This observation did not go down well with my rural SE Queensland interlocutors, but I stand by it based on the number of smart young women I have seen come to my Brisbane suburban university from up-country Queensland and either (a) remain in Brisbane to pursue their careers after completing their studies or (b) move to another Australian state capital or an overseas city to pursue their careers after completing their studies.
Then there is the case of the Queensland rural community which couldn’t attract a principal to their local school basically because the punishers and straighteners who lived there had made life intolerable for previous principals who had infringed against local norms of dress and comportment by e.g. wearing a beanie whilst walking from home to the school on a bitterly cold and windy day.
This issue has to be seriously addressed if rural communities are (a) to retain smart young people who are potential community leaders and (b) attract professionals in medicine, law, etc., who are badly needed in such communities.
Lynda, yep, the Barossa is a special case because of the Lutheraniness. But rurally speaking one would not need to move very far — across town from the northern wineries to the southern wineries should do it.
Paul: very much so. It’s part of the reason I doubt I could live in my childhood home town again.
Damn that Jeremy! But you know something more than crushing conservative values are at work in Yack, and elsewhere.Looking through the sociological glasses maybe over-construing the reality.Perhaps Gays got a bit bored like most country people get regular,and often migrates to Depression.There will be country folk who are obviously hetero who will laugh at any Gay displays that are up for that purpose.No matter their voting intentions.
Frm what I understand, PC, Clare isn’t much better, although the area around Strathalbyn is reasonably tolerant.
I live in Northern NSW ‘rainbow country” alternative lifestyle capital for those who like living with diversity and work in the local service town Lismore, known by dykes as Lesmore for obvious reasons. My employer specifically targets the gay and lesbian community due to the demographics, but I can assure you that a drive 30 minutes in either direction takes you to some pretty homophobic country. The 27km drive from Lismore to Casino (home of the Queen of Beef Week parade, no queers or vegetarians need apply) is like travelling from Mardi Gras to Salem. There are pockets of diversity and tolerance around the country- but late at night as the pubs close , just be careful whose watching as you hold hands with your same sex partner.
Paul – Hit the nail on the head. My choices after high-school were (a) stay in a parochial, slightly redneck town or (b) go to uni and get the kind of education that would see me able to leave. Guess which I chose?
I don’t mind going back for the odd visit – seeing friends and family is nice (and there are far worse places) but damned if I’d live there with the whole “you’re not local” attitude in the pubs/etc.
Angela – I distinctly remember the attitude of those surrounding towns, suspicion tinged with hatred. I’ve had people from the area crap on about “how those scientists never did nuthin for us” – from someone growing a dry-area-specific-CSIRO-developed crop!
I think the hatred for anything/anyone seen as being outside Pauls’ description is still real across many parts of this country. Wagga and Moree are probably the two worst examples I’ve personally experienced (even as a rural-sounding hetero male!).
Robert – one interesting thing I’ve seen is the slight changes that the Rail-Trail type schemes seem to bring. I’ve had some of the warmest country welcomes in towns that do see different people coming and using such facilities. Off-topic: thoroughly recommend the Wangaratta-Bright railtrail. People are friendly, locals give way to bikes (try that in Casino!), all round good part of the country to visit.
I grew up in a couple of the small towns in the Hunter Valley and I can see little evidence of a thaw. My little brother moved to Melbourne and came out a couple of months later, and I believe that if he hadn’t moved, he would have been a suicide risk or a target for gay bashing, which unfortunately still goes on in my hometown, I too am glad to have moved away.
Incidentally Angela @11 he just spent some time in Casino visiting a mate and ended up borrowing his mates clothes, as his own Melbournian threads were earning him some nasty stares from the locals.
Eventually, us Melbournians moving out of Melbourne will turn this country around from being racist hicksville.
You’re welcome.
illiberal attitudes in regional communities towards queers, women who wanted to continue working beyond 25, men who didn’t conform to a stereotypical masculinity, people of all kinds who valued ideas and creativity, etc., was a major factor in the long-term demographic and economic decline of such communities.
What a load of rubbish.
The major factor is of course the advance of technology, which every year increases the amount of land that can be farmed by 1 person.
In 1950 a single family could maybe work 1,000 acres with the technology they had available to them. Now they can work 10,000.
Tracts of land that used to be farmed by dozens of families with kids, can now be farmed by 1 husband and wife team with a big enough bank book to afford the machinery.
Those 11 other families sold their land to the ones that remained and bought lotto kiosks in the city decades ago. And it wasn’t because they were repressed homosexuals looking for sexual liberation, it was because farming became unprofitable for them.
Right, so the advance of technology is the major reason why three twenty something and thirty something friends of mine who came down from Toowoomba to study at Griffith University are now gainfully employed as a research scientist, a campaign coordinator and a Microsoft manager in Brisbane, Sydney and London respectively rather than returning to the Darling Downs to become farmers’ wives and CWA members.
No Paul, the major reason is lack of employment opportunities in their home town.
And the major reason for that is the advance of technology.
Do you really believe that people who went to University did so with the intention of getting a degree, and then returning to a country town where the only employment is farm labouring? They would have made up their mind about that when they were about 10 years old.