This compelling ABC series shows how little you really know about Queerstralia

Queerstralia
★★★★

As a birth announcement, the beginning of Australian queer history was startling. It was also not exactly one for the history books. “Clear sky. Good weather,” wrote the captain of the Dutch ship Zeewijk back in 1727. (So far, so good.) “Two persons found committing the abominable sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. A sorrowful and godforsaken act.”

Zoë Coombs Marr in Queerstralia.Credit: ABC

There it is, shrouded in shame and criminality. In many respects it’s a complicated first scribble on the clay tablets of Australia’s queer culture. At the same time it’s a stark reminder of the challenges which lay head (and continue to do so) for a culture sprung from a cocktail of secrecy and shame.

Queerstralia tackles, in three parts, Australia’s queer history from penal colony to Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, a complex journey through colonisation and criminalisation, trans pioneers and cross-dressing bushrangers, to the Mardi Gras, Australian drag culture and the legalisation of gay marriage.

Comedian Zoë Coombs Marr is tasked with unraveling the details, delivering early a caveat on her qualifications. “I’m a comedian, not a historian,” she says. But it’s a shrewd decision. Australia’s queer history is replete with hardship and exclusion. A little levity is not unwelcome, for those who endured it, and for the audience invited to now look back.

Nayuka Gorrie.Credit: Justin McManus

As it turns out, like most minority groups, they were not the authors of the history books. So the history books largely and conveniently forgot about them. And yet, queer culture was everywhere: in art, in literature, in our colonial history, in police records. While it is still an incomplete document, scratch the surface and the pieces of the jigsaw start to emerge.

Coombs Marr is not alone on her quest. She is aided by activist, writer and actor Nayuka Gorrie, who steps in while the program explores the intersection between our queer and Indigenous cultures, and Anthony Brandon Wong, who serves as the program’s slightly hilarious narrator. (If you listen hard, you will hear Ghost from The Matrix.)

The arrival on our shores of World Pride has triggered something of a mini-tsunami of queer-themed content. This series lands just after the feature, Outrageous: The Queer History of Australian TV, from producers Andrew Mercado and Margee Brown, which takes a deeper dive into one specific piece of the gay jigsaw: the iconic TV soap Number 96.

Queerstralia is naturally broader. TV, for example, is only a small fragment of the story it is telling. But it delivers a robust, and nicely irreverent, telling of Australia’s queer history. It bounces around a little, but that works for the most part in getting to the good bits quickly.

“The idea of a beginning, a middle, and an end is very linear, it’s a very straight structure,” Coombs Marr says. “But that doesn’t feel true to how anything works actually. That’s not how we experience our lives. It’s certainly not how history works.” (That said, episode one is a little slow to fire up, so stay with it.)

Queerstralia is not a grandiose historical tome made for television. Nor is it quaint and educational. It’s intentionally funny, and a little wry and dry. It departs from the historical documentary format as quickly as it can, and it benefits from a lack of stiffness. It’s jolly, except when it’s deeply affecting, and the delicate balance works nicely.

It’s also deeply personal. It isn’t the history of the culture as a whole; rather, it is the story of the various stories that make up the pieces of the jigsaw. The specificity of its stories up the emotional stakes and make it compelling. Striking too is how little you think you know. About our queer history, about our trans history and how the many micro-histories which make up the whole intersect with immigration, feminism, and social change.

Queerstralia is on ABC, February 28, 8.30pm and iview.

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