alga NEWSLETTER Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives Inc PO Box 124, Parkville, Vic 3052 Website: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~alga/ Incorporated Assn No. A0000240Z Newsletter No 19, September 2003 ABN 92 450 443 760 ISSN 1037-3756 History Soars! The Archives has been very busy in recent months and people in the ongoing maintenance work (the there have been some important developments in the unglamorous but essential work such as photocopying field of gay and lesbian history coming out of the broader and filing). New projects under way include Jodie’s community as well. This newsletter highlights some of organising of our theatre programs, Graeme’s listing of these. broadsheet clippings, and Bill’s work on the Truth references. See below for dates of coming working bees. Out walking One of our stalwarts has, however, flown the coop. Rosi The Archives’ history walks are becoming more and Carr is off to Britain to study. As a volunteer over a more popular. At Midsumma earlier this year – partly as couple of years now, she has been involved in ordering a a result of some very good pre-publicity in the Age – we number of our collections of papers including the Lesbian had about 200 people join us. Teachers’ Group, Kim Downing, Kimberly O’Sullivan, The walk itself was all new, taking us through Fitzroy- and compiling a set of queer issues of the student press. Collingwood, and was our first-ever twilight walk. More recently, as an actual trained archivist, she has Designed by Wayne Murdoch and Graham Willett – and been helping us with processes and procedures. We will lead by them and Adelaide’s glamorous Dr Gertrude miss her cheery good spirits and her skills and we wish Glossop – the walk might have been somewhat her well. hampered by the failure of the sound system and by the delays occasioned by the need to herd so many people Dates coming up across roads and down alleyways. Certainly twilight descended into darkness before we had finished our tour. Anniversary function But the mood held and most of us made it to the end. 2003 marks the 25th anniversary of the Archives, founded at the fourth National Homosexual Conference The walk was also marked by the Inaugural John Wilson in Sydney in 1978. We invite members and friends to join Memorial Dash for Freedom, commemorating the us in celebrating the occasion over a catered dinner on evening in 1863 when a dragged-up John Wilson, Saturday 25 October, at the Betty Day Centre, 67 Argyle approached by the police at the corner of Victoria and Street, St Kilda, from 7 pm till about 11. The cost is $25 Brunswick Streets, made a run for it. Congrats to the per head (includes non-alcoholic drinks, BYO liquor), and (anonymous) winner, who got a copy of Australia’s bookings are essential – see back page. RSVP Homosexual Histories for his efforts. Wednesday 22 October. We now have three different walks on offer and have We are pleased and honoured to have Joan Nestle as our delivered them to a number of groups – RMIT students; speaker. the Queer Collaborations Conference (twice, such was Working bees the demand!); and Melbourne Uni’s Pride Week. The next series of working bees will be held on Sundays, starting 1 pm in the training room at VAC (6 Claremont Volunteers at work Street South Yarra), from 1 pm till about 5. Sundays 28 In 2003 we have experimented with Sunday afternoon September, 19 October and 12 November working bees as an alternative to Thursday open nights (we’ve still been available for visitors wanting to make Annual meeting appointments on Thursday nights). The working bees ALGA’s Annual General Meeting will be held on have proved successful, with new volunteers getting a Thursday 11 December,.30 pm (venue to be advised) chance to see what the regulars are doing and the There will be light refreshments after the meeting and all afternoon time block giving more of an opportunity to members are invited to attend. advance a task. It has also enabled us to involve more NLA grant application The Collection: Acquisitions In June this year, ALGA made a submission to the Recent donations have included: National Library’s Community Heritage Grants program, Video of ‘Last Drinks, A Film about a Melbourne pub’, which provides grants of up to $8,000 to groups involved donated by the director, Kate Morrow. ‘Last Drinks’ is in preservation activities. about the Prince of Wales Hotel in St Kilda, completed in ALGA has asked for funds to digitise the badge and 1999 just before major renovations were to begin, t-shirt collections, in order to minimise handling and marking what was thought to be the end of the Prince exposure to direct light of originals. This comprises $1K that its patrons knew and loved (from the 1970s, home to for a digital camera and the rest is for specialist labour Melbourne’s punk and new wave music scene with its for the digitisation. Once digitised, we envisage that melting pot clientele – and a well known camp/gay images will be able to be put onto the ALGA website, watering hole dating back to pre-World War Two). ‘Last subject to any copyright restrictions. This would be done Drinks’ has interviews with patrons, bar staff, musicians, with the assistance of Craig Johnston, our volunteer web bouncers, footage of Pokeys shows, and an interview maintainer. with Jan Hillier. We expect to hear the outcome of our submission in Audiotapes of interviews with three women who have November. If successful, the project would need to be performed as drag kings in Melbourne. Transcripts of the completed within a year. interviews have also been donated to the Archives. The grant guidelines put weight on bidders contributing Thanks to Esther for arranging both of the above. part of the cost of the project themselves, and in our Leigh Klooger donated a collection of magazines and case, this is the cost met by ALGA in housing the t-shirts maps of gay/lesbian venues in Melbourne spanning the and badges in acid free materials, and purchasing a new 1980s and 1990s. computer with the capacity to manage digital copies. From Barry McKay we received CDs of Quentin Crisp The grant scheme required us to include a preservation reading ‘The Naked Civil Servant’, and audio from 2001 policy. A draft policy developed by Kate Clifford and Sydney exhibition, ‘Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know’. Rosi Carr was unanimously endorsed by the June Sample Barry McKay’s interesting presentation of queer committee meeting which extended thanks to Kate and history online at <http://melbqueerhistory.tripod.com/>. Rosi for their excellent work. Sections of the policy This includes text, audio and photographs of sites on the designed for use by volunteers will be used from now on, ALGA History Walks. There are links to a companion eg at working bees. website on gay and lesbian history walks conducted in Others involved in preparing the submission were Gary Sydney. Jaynes, Graeme Price, John Waugh and Graham Willett, with advice on technical matters from Craig Johnston, The Collection: Media Scan Paul Van Reyk and Barry McKay. For a very long time now the Archives has been collecting newspaper clippings. And while they go back Thesis Prize 2002 to the early 1970s, they are at their most complete for a ALGA’s 2002 Thesis Prize of $250 for the best honours period in the 1980s when one of the gay papers used to thesis on a gay/queer topic was won by Danielle subscribe to a commercial clipping service and then pass Thornton from Melbourne University, for her thesis them to us when they had finished with them. After that entitled ‘A Scandalous Trial’. In this she examined arrangement ended, we went on collecting as best we Maude Allen’s decision in 1918 to sue, for obscene libel, could – usually by having a few people clipping on the publisher of an article entitled the ‘Cult of the publication each. The result is a patchy, but still Clitoris’ which implied Allen was a lesbian. Thanks to extensive, set. Now, however, we are about to abandon John Waugh and Esther Singer for again judging the this task. Through our connections in universities and award. other public institutions we have become aware of an electronic newspaper indexing system called Media Our (In)Activities: Homosexual Scan. It is possible using this to select subject- and Histories conference keywords that will produce a very complete listing of There won’t be a homosexual histories conference in references to newspaper and magazine articles for any 2003. We feel it is time to re-charge the batteries, do selected period, going back to the early 1990s. We are other things – but we still see a role for the conferences proposing now to terminate our clipping collection in and we’re expecting HH6 to happen in 2004. favour of offering interested Archives users the opportunity to have a member conduct a Media Scan search for them. ALGA Newsletter No. 19, September 2003 Page 2 There are disadvantages to this in that we will no longer Books of interest be offering access to the articles themselves, only to Julian Halls, The Death of a Drag Queen and Other references, which users will need to follow up at a Stories, Ginninderra Press. A set of mainly library, and this system will not pick up on passing- autobiographical stories set in Sydney. references or occasional queer content. On the other David Menadue, Positive, Allen and Unwin. David will hand, we will save a very great deal in terms of time, be known to many as an activist since the late 1970s and, storage space and copying costs and our feeling is that from the 1980s on, as an openly-HIV positive person this is a direction worth taking.