Colin Cameron & Stephen Goldsmith
DR: Has Castlemaine changed
a lot since you’ve been here?
SG: Well, we've been here 20 years and it's very obvious to us that the people have changed. There’s so many people that have moved up from Melbourne in that time. When we first moved here it was interesting, but it was very biased towards the people that were born and bred here back then. Now when you go down the street, particularly on a weekend, there's so many young families that have obviously moved from somewhere else.
And the number of queer people is just amazing – it's peculiar. I assume there are other towns like this in Australia. But it's really unusual. I guess it’s because it’s not that far from Melbourne, and there’s two large towns nearby – Ballarat and Bendigo. So, it's a perfect position. And on a train line, that makes a big difference.
CC: We had criteria for what we really wanted. I expected to retire on a cliff over the ocean, which just didn't happen. But when we first came here, the estate agent that was selling the place said, we need more people like you here.
SG: We were just lucky. We wanted a little bit of land because we liked gardening, and we wanted a bush garden. We wanted a bit of space, I suppose. Because we were living in Melbourne. We were in West Preston for 10 years, I think, before we moved here. We just reached the stage in our lives where we wanted to go to the country. We wanted the quiet and nature. I grew up in the country. Colin is a city boy. Born and raised in Richmond. I moved to Melbourne probably in about ‘75 or ’76.
DR: How old were you then?
SG: I was 22 when I moved and I met Colin in ’77 when I was 23. Colin was 29 when we met.
DR: You have had such a long relationship
SG: It is what it is.
CC: We've got friends in Maryborough that have been together for 50 years.
SG: It's not uncommon. But I always say five years, 50 years – it makes no difference. It's all relative, I suppose.
DR: How did you feel when you first arrived? And how is it different now?
CC: I remember the first day we arrived, we had to stay in a motel because the place was sort of unlivable. And we went to the Albion Hotel.
SG: Yes. The first people we met with there were two gay guys that were running the Albion Hotel and they were the first friends we made – Rhett and Charles.
CC: We went there for dinner and there was nobody else there. We were being very straight, of course – and Chuck came out and said, What are you sweethearts doin’ here? Or something like that. We didn’t fool anyone.
SG: We just slowly met other people. Being the age we were, we weren’t very outgoing, even 20 years ago. We weren't looking for partying and things like that –like when we were young in Melbourne – so it took a while to get to know people.
In the last five years It's changed again because now we're involved in the choir and through that we've met lots of women and so it's become quite exciting now. And then we met some women that we knew in Melbourne who’d moved to Castlemaine. And it's just blossomed and it's wonderful. So yeah, it's really great. And there’s The Alluvians group that we formed, maybe 12 years ago I think.
DR: So you’re part of the founding group?
CC: ‘The Sisters of Alluvia’ it used to be called.
DR: Ah, you’re the original Sisters of Alluvia
CC: We’re the original Sisters of Alluvia.
SG: Yes, it's just become more diverse. It's getting a little bit overwhelming for mebecause I'm not overly gregarious, and somedays I just wish there was nothing on. You know what I mean?
CC: Yeah, there's too much on really
SG: But we've made some lovely friends and that is really wonderful, and I think that makes getting older a lot easier to deal with because we're now aging with people.
CC: Younger than us.
SG: Well, yes, a lot a lot of them are a similar age but now we have lots of younger friends too.
DR: How old are you now? That’s rude, isn’t it?
SG: No, no, we don't ever think about age.
CC: No we haven’t got a thing. I'm 74 and a half and Stephen’s …
SG: I'm 68. I like to say that I’m 70 next year because every decade is like a milestone, isn't it? I feel like I've set in my thirties – the body has moved on, but the head hasn't. And I remember hitting 40 and thinking, I'm old now. Now I think, what a silly thing to say.
DR: So how big would you say the community is that you regularly interact with?
SG: I'd say the group that we mix with regularly encompasses a bunch of guys in the Alluvians that we see on walks. We walk on a Tuesday morning. And there's a Thursday walk that we do regularly. And then there's the choir where we've met a number of women and a couple of trans people.
CC: There's also special things, like the Alluvian’s have a curry night and they have a car rally. And we have Christmas in July – there's a hundred people there, half of them come from Melbourne. We mix with the Bendigo group at the picnics in the gardens. But close people I don't know …
SG: I’d say 20.
CC: Yeah, 20.
SG: You can meet lots of people and see them regularly, but you don't necessarily … maybe you don’t have enough in common to really want to see them that often. You can still be fond of them but they're slightly on the edge, and that's okay. Maybe one day some of them might become part of your inner friends. That’s life.
CC: There's too many people to see regularly.
DR: You’ve only got a certain amount of time.
CC: We still like to spend an hour in front of the television some nights.
DR: So why did you start the Sisters of Alluvia?
CC: Oh, well that’s a story, do you want me to tell it?
SG: Yeah, you tell it.
CC: The first Christmas, when we were still in Melbourne, we went to John and Steve's place and they used to provide all the wine and all the food and everything and the first year there were – I don’t know – maybe 10 people there. And the next year there were 30, and the next year there were more than they could cope with. So, on that third Christmas we decided that we should start a social group. A lot of the people that were there met at Paul William's place and we all thought we should name a group. So, we met the next month at the Old Mine. John yelled out ‘Sisters of Alluvia’, as in the sisters of perpetual indulgence. And that name was okay for the first 10 or 15 years.
SG: But after a while, a lot of us were aware that that sort of campy name was not really appropriate anymore, a lot of us were not comfortable with it. I mean, Why do we as gay men always sort of apply …
CC: Feminine things …
CG: Yes, women's things to a sort of campiness, you know? It was a bit of a put-down. You know what I mean? …
CC: Degrading
SG: Yeah, I know that's extreme, but I've never been into drag and that sort of stuff. And some people had a self-consciousness about campy names, which of course stems from the self-esteem issue. So it was a combination of things, and we just decided it was time to move into the 2000s. There was slight resistance from a couple of people. They said, why change the name? We like the name it's what we thought up … so we compromised with ‘the Alluvians’ and it's been good. Nothing has really changed.
DR: Can people just become members? How does it work?
CC: Well, it's a gay men’s group. There’s a Facebook page and there's a membership and a website. There’s some administrative people but it's not an incorporated body or anything like that.
SG: That 's more to coordinate the events – its just like 4-6 people.
CC: And people apply through either the Facebook page or the website.
DR: Is it mostly men that come or is it more open now?
CC: It's still a gay men’s social group – gay men, bi men, trans men. But we do lots of other things. The Castlemaine queer campers is not men. And the choir is mixed.
SG: The reason that the group started was because we were a bunch of friends – not everyone lived in Castlemaine, there were some people who lived further afield. So we'd send emails to each other and we started to require an email list so that we could send out information about events coming up. So it just sort of grew. And then we got a lot of people who were like friends of friends that lived in Melbourne, or lived in Melbourne and came to Castlemaine regularly. Some of them had a holiday house here or were thinking of moving up here, and that just grew into what it is now.
CC: We've still got a few people that have a caravan in the bush or a holiday house or something and they’re regular members.
DR: Is it a mixed generation thing?
SG: Yeah, initially it was people mostly 50s and up.
CC: Aging homosexuals
SG: It’s primarily that still, the core of people. But now we're getting a few people who are in their 40s. But that’s once in a blue moon. I think that will change because when you're younger, you're occupied with other things. You're not really interested in being in something you might perceive as an old man's group.
CC: Yeah, well, we were an old man’s group. And still are to a degree.
SG: Yeah, we still are, you know, curry nights. But that will change as the younger people age.
CC: Usually groups have a limited time, don’t they? But this one seems to be going on longer.
SG: I sort of feel because we've met quite a few women through the choir and we're getting quite close to them, that one day, in an ideal world, we won't need these closed off groups ...
CC: We can ignore gender roles
SG: I can understand why some older men in the group feel the need to keep it as a gay men's group. Because it's that feeling of security that they've always felt through their life with their friends. They wanted to keep that because it’s a comforting thing. Because that's how it's always been. You needed other gay men to remind yourself that everything's okay because you’ve got these friends around you, who are like you, and the idea of having outsiders, people who are not like you, sort of breaks that feeling of security. But I personally love the idea of it being more inclusive now.
CC: Yeah, so do I
SG: One day we hopefully won't need these barriers but who knows? Things do go in circles, and there's a lot of uncertainty in the world now.
DR: Do you feel supported by the community at large?
SG: I think so, yeah. We personally don't have a lot of straight friends and never have had. Maybe that's our age too.
CC: When I used to work, we had more straight friends because I was working with them.
SG: That was still not very common, and I think maybe that's just our age as gay men.
CC: Well, straight men or straight boys used to be very, very scary and threatening. I was thrown out of school by straight boys. When I was in Year 4 – Year 10 now.
DR: What do you mean thrown out?
CC: Oh well, abused –violently and horribly – so I had to leave. My brother was exactly the same, they abused him for the same reason. He was gay and so it was hard initially, to trust straight men. It changed when I started working and all that sort of stuff.
SG: Yeah, I think a lot of that has changed. We all feel a lot safer now but you still have to be careful …
CC: But we do feel safer now.
SG: I'm a very insecure person so I am always wary. There's an element of paranoia about me that makes me cautious of opening myself up to make myself vulnerable, I suppose. I am in my late 60s, so I really don't know how very young people think and what life is like for them. I hear things of course. I know young men still have to be careful now.
And there's also different worries for them that didn't exist for me. There's the economic insecurity that people experience now and the housing issue, which is cruel. But I'm so pleased that schools are so much better now – so, so different. I mean, I thought school was a nightmare.
CC: Recently, there was a trans youth group of 13 to 15-year-olds that had an art exhibition and the counselor was having a discussion with them. One of the teenagers came and talked to Stephen. Stephen asked, And what are your pronouns? – as you’re supposed to say, and we all do nowadays. And she said – at that stage she was ‘she’ – they said, ‘It depends how I feel on the day.’ And I thought that was a lovely thing.
SG: It threw me because I didn't know what to say after that. I thought that's fine. It's fine.
CC: It’s the pronouns thing. Ive got my head around it now and I'm very, very good at it, virtually. That is, more understanding.
DR: How do you approach it?
CC: Well, I use ‘they’ a lot, but I ask people what their pronouns are. And everybody seems to be quite happy to tell me. I think it's a really sensible thing to do. Lots of people that are he/they or she/they have told me that they're very happy to be asked what their pronouns are. And there’s gender fluidity, and pansexual people. When I was a kid, nobody would say ‘I'm a pansexual’.
DR: there seems to be a real shift with younger people in terms of fluidity and confidence, pronouns and self-realisation …
SG: It is good. Confidence is a wonderful thing. I've never been a confident person but to see the young now feeling that way and to hear teachers tell me how it is for kids in school – It's so profoundly changed. I never felt that school was for the kids when I was at school. It was for something else that I didn't understand. Now I love the way that I hear everything is geared towards making the kids feel safe, to affirm what they want in life and to help them get to that. Which is the way it should always have been. I felt back then that there were teachers who were teachers because they thought oh, I’ll become a teacher, that sounds easy. I remember teachers that were just shocking and should never have been in that position. They didn't care.
DR: Do you mean in relation to your sexuality?
SG: I’m just talking about teachers in general. I did experience homophobia, but you know, it was an underhanded sort of thing, like sports teachers yelling abuse at you and things like that. I don't recall what they said, but there was no tolerance for anyone who wasn't playing the masculinity game. Which is a form of homophobia. You never get over that, it sort of stays with you for life, which is cruel. If you could only go back and give them a piece of your mind.
CC: I went to Richmond Tech, an all-boys school, which was very, very rough. I didn't want to do any of the footballs and the crickets and the soccers and whatever they were. So my mother, who was a very sensible woman, used to write a note, Colin does not have to play football. Colin does not have to play cricket. Colin does not have to ... Mum went down to see the sports person and abused him. Good on her, she was a very interesting woman, my mother.
SG: You were lucky to have Hazel
CC: Well, she had lots of lesbian friends.
DR: Has it changed a lot in Castlemaine?
SG: The last three years have been unpleasant in many ways, and these new people have been a lifesaver, because Colin had some emergency surgery three years ago and nearly died. And then COVID came. He had a perforated bowel and required surgery and he had a cardiac arrest at the end of the surgery, and he had to be resuscitated for 30 minutes.
CC: It’s all fixed now.
SG: But it was very hard, that combined with COVID. So, we were isolated, as well as coping with this profound medical issue that disrupted our lives. And all of these new people were sort of life savers in a way, giving us emotional support. As well as our old friends.
It’s a very unusual place Castlemaine, I still can't get my head around it, really. It's well positioned as I said, but for whatever reason, it's unusual. I guess Daylesford’s the same.
CC: Yeah, but Daylesford is a bit different. There's lots of authors here. There's lots of…
SG: Arty people. That’s a big thing.
CC: There’s lots of…
SG: Musicians.
CC: There’s lots of ex Commissioners of police and those sorts of people.
SG: There’s something about it. I think Castlemaine’s always been a bit different. The fact that it's a relatively small town, it's got a wonderful gallery, there’s less than 10,000 that live in the town.
DR: Are you guys married?
CC: Yes, we got married on my 70th birthday. We’ve been together for 45 years. We’ve been married for nearly five years.
DR: Were you married here in Castlemaine?
SG: We were the first same sex couple to go to Bendigo Courthouse which was good. It was a small affair. We were just going to go to the registry office and get it done but it was nice having friends along. And then we had a big party in the old tea rooms in the Botanic Gardens the next day so we could invite everyone.
CC: There were over 80 or 90 people there because the tea rooms are dirt cheap to hire.
DR: Did you always want to get married? When did you decide to do that?
SG: No, we hadn’t always wanted to get married because, like a lot of queer people, we’d always associated marriage with straight people. It was more that we wanted our relationship accepted on an equal footing.
CC: The day we decided to get married was the day that the vote came in. We went down to the Theatre Royal because they had it on the screens and there were lots and lots of beautiful young, straight couples with their kids. There was a lot of gay people there as well. I started crying, as I would normally do …
SG: When it was announced.
CC: And all the women and the men were coming up and hugging me ... and … I’m getting emotional now …
DR: What did it mean for you at that moment?
CC: It meant a lot to me
SG: Like a lot of people, I felt that there was an acceptance by the general community and that was a wonderful thing.
There’s still that thing about conforming. But I think one of the wonderful things about so many people getting married and the general acceptance of that, is it helps the confidence of young people coming to terms with things. These little things erode that feeling of, I'm not good enough. I'm not on the right side. I'm different and not accepted. If nothing else, that's a good enough reason. Also to acknowledge the significance of your relationship to yourself. But I don't think it should be the be all and end all.
CC: Both Stephen and I were members of the support group of the Victorian AIDS Council in the ’80s, and I was a psych nurse then. I was on the management board of the Gay Men's Health Centre and the Victorian AIDS Council. I used to go around to the various support groups talking with a psychiatrist about how to help people with AIDS. There were numerous times that a couple had been together for 20 years and one of them had died of AIDS and the parents of the dead man used to come down and take the body away and organise the funeral – all of that. And the partner who was not a member of the family couldn’t even visit. It was just really, really revolting. Twice I had to go and open body bags at the undertakers so they could see them, because the undertakers wouldn’t open the body bag and all that sort of stuff. It was just horrible. And the other thing was medical power of attorney. It was so horrible the way that partners, lifetime partners, were abused because they weren’t married.
SG: Their relationship wasn’t acknowledged as significant.
CC: So that was a big thing for me.
DR: Where did you two meet?
SG: We met at a Caulfield sauna, on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
CC: On the third of October 1977.
SG: I was living at a friend’s house in Fitzroy, and I was a bit depressed. I suffer from depression and anxiety. I was moping around the house, and he said, Look, why don’t you take yourself off to the sauna? I’d never been to a sauna by myself. I’d been a couple of times, maybe, with a friend, and I was a very, very nervy young man. I had to walk around the block about five times before I got the courage to walk up the stairs. Unbeknownst to me, Colin worked there. He wasn’t working that day, but he worked the night before and he woke thinking he left the tap running in the swimming pool.
CC: Which I had.
SG: So, he went in, in a …
CC: Happy jacket …
SG: A happy jacket …
CC: That I got from Singapore …
SG: And a pair of football shorts. He was in the booth where you pay your money, and he followed me around, and that was fate.
CC: I was young, I was young.
SG: I’d seen him the week before and I thought he’d never notice me. And there you go.
CC: Low self-esteem, he had. I had high self-esteem …
SG: So that’s where we met.
CC: Which is surprising.
SG: We moved in together, four months later or something. Colin was living in Toorak in an apartment somewhere near the synagogue. We lived in Carlton for a year together.
CC: And then St Kilda for seven years, and then Ivanhoe for a number of years, and then … I don’t know, it has been a long time.
SG: Meeting Colin was a big change in my life because he gave me a stability that I never had. Colin was very outgoing and confident, and I was exactly the opposite. I had someone who was out there dealing with the world on my behalf, which has its benefits. It also had its downside because it meant that I've never had to push myself so I retained my insecurity, which was probably not a good thing …
CC: My fault. My fault.
SG: No, no , no. It's just the way it is – it's just personalities. But yeah, life became wonderful.
SG: Well, we've been here 20 years and it's very obvious to us that the people have changed. There’s so many people that have moved up from Melbourne in that time. When we first moved here it was interesting, but it was very biased towards the people that were born and bred here back then. Now when you go down the street, particularly on a weekend, there's so many young families that have obviously moved from somewhere else.
And the number of queer people is just amazing – it's peculiar. I assume there are other towns like this in Australia. But it's really unusual. I guess it’s because it’s not that far from Melbourne, and there’s two large towns nearby – Ballarat and Bendigo. So, it's a perfect position. And on a train line, that makes a big difference.
CC: We had criteria for what we really wanted. I expected to retire on a cliff over the ocean, which just didn't happen. But when we first came here, the estate agent that was selling the place said, we need more people like you here.
SG: We were just lucky. We wanted a little bit of land because we liked gardening, and we wanted a bush garden. We wanted a bit of space, I suppose. Because we were living in Melbourne. We were in West Preston for 10 years, I think, before we moved here. We just reached the stage in our lives where we wanted to go to the country. We wanted the quiet and nature. I grew up in the country. Colin is a city boy. Born and raised in Richmond. I moved to Melbourne probably in about ‘75 or ’76.
DR: How old were you then?
SG: I was 22 when I moved and I met Colin in ’77 when I was 23. Colin was 29 when we met.
DR: You have had such a long relationship
SG: It is what it is.
CC: We've got friends in Maryborough that have been together for 50 years.
SG: It's not uncommon. But I always say five years, 50 years – it makes no difference. It's all relative, I suppose.
DR: How did you feel when you first arrived? And how is it different now?
CC: I remember the first day we arrived, we had to stay in a motel because the place was sort of unlivable. And we went to the Albion Hotel.
SG: Yes. The first people we met with there were two gay guys that were running the Albion Hotel and they were the first friends we made – Rhett and Charles.
CC: We went there for dinner and there was nobody else there. We were being very straight, of course – and Chuck came out and said, What are you sweethearts doin’ here? Or something like that. We didn’t fool anyone.
SG: We just slowly met other people. Being the age we were, we weren’t very outgoing, even 20 years ago. We weren't looking for partying and things like that –like when we were young in Melbourne – so it took a while to get to know people.
In the last five years It's changed again because now we're involved in the choir and through that we've met lots of women and so it's become quite exciting now. And then we met some women that we knew in Melbourne who’d moved to Castlemaine. And it's just blossomed and it's wonderful. So yeah, it's really great. And there’s The Alluvians group that we formed, maybe 12 years ago I think.
DR: So you’re part of the founding group?
CC: ‘The Sisters of Alluvia’ it used to be called.
DR: Ah, you’re the original Sisters of Alluvia
CC: We’re the original Sisters of Alluvia.
SG: Yes, it's just become more diverse. It's getting a little bit overwhelming for mebecause I'm not overly gregarious, and somedays I just wish there was nothing on. You know what I mean?
CC: Yeah, there's too much on really
SG: But we've made some lovely friends and that is really wonderful, and I think that makes getting older a lot easier to deal with because we're now aging with people.
CC: Younger than us.
SG: Well, yes, a lot a lot of them are a similar age but now we have lots of younger friends too.
DR: How old are you now? That’s rude, isn’t it?
SG: No, no, we don't ever think about age.
CC: No we haven’t got a thing. I'm 74 and a half and Stephen’s …
SG: I'm 68. I like to say that I’m 70 next year because every decade is like a milestone, isn't it? I feel like I've set in my thirties – the body has moved on, but the head hasn't. And I remember hitting 40 and thinking, I'm old now. Now I think, what a silly thing to say.
DR: So how big would you say the community is that you regularly interact with?
SG: I'd say the group that we mix with regularly encompasses a bunch of guys in the Alluvians that we see on walks. We walk on a Tuesday morning. And there's a Thursday walk that we do regularly. And then there's the choir where we've met a number of women and a couple of trans people.
CC: There's also special things, like the Alluvian’s have a curry night and they have a car rally. And we have Christmas in July – there's a hundred people there, half of them come from Melbourne. We mix with the Bendigo group at the picnics in the gardens. But close people I don't know …
SG: I’d say 20.
CC: Yeah, 20.
SG: You can meet lots of people and see them regularly, but you don't necessarily … maybe you don’t have enough in common to really want to see them that often. You can still be fond of them but they're slightly on the edge, and that's okay. Maybe one day some of them might become part of your inner friends. That’s life.
CC: There's too many people to see regularly.
DR: You’ve only got a certain amount of time.
CC: We still like to spend an hour in front of the television some nights.
DR: So why did you start the Sisters of Alluvia?
CC: Oh, well that’s a story, do you want me to tell it?
SG: Yeah, you tell it.
CC: The first Christmas, when we were still in Melbourne, we went to John and Steve's place and they used to provide all the wine and all the food and everything and the first year there were – I don’t know – maybe 10 people there. And the next year there were 30, and the next year there were more than they could cope with. So, on that third Christmas we decided that we should start a social group. A lot of the people that were there met at Paul William's place and we all thought we should name a group. So, we met the next month at the Old Mine. John yelled out ‘Sisters of Alluvia’, as in the sisters of perpetual indulgence. And that name was okay for the first 10 or 15 years.
SG: But after a while, a lot of us were aware that that sort of campy name was not really appropriate anymore, a lot of us were not comfortable with it. I mean, Why do we as gay men always sort of apply …
CC: Feminine things …
CG: Yes, women's things to a sort of campiness, you know? It was a bit of a put-down. You know what I mean? …
CC: Degrading
SG: Yeah, I know that's extreme, but I've never been into drag and that sort of stuff. And some people had a self-consciousness about campy names, which of course stems from the self-esteem issue. So it was a combination of things, and we just decided it was time to move into the 2000s. There was slight resistance from a couple of people. They said, why change the name? We like the name it's what we thought up … so we compromised with ‘the Alluvians’ and it's been good. Nothing has really changed.
DR: Can people just become members? How does it work?
CC: Well, it's a gay men’s group. There’s a Facebook page and there's a membership and a website. There’s some administrative people but it's not an incorporated body or anything like that.
SG: That 's more to coordinate the events – its just like 4-6 people.
CC: And people apply through either the Facebook page or the website.
DR: Is it mostly men that come or is it more open now?
CC: It's still a gay men’s social group – gay men, bi men, trans men. But we do lots of other things. The Castlemaine queer campers is not men. And the choir is mixed.
SG: The reason that the group started was because we were a bunch of friends – not everyone lived in Castlemaine, there were some people who lived further afield. So we'd send emails to each other and we started to require an email list so that we could send out information about events coming up. So it just sort of grew. And then we got a lot of people who were like friends of friends that lived in Melbourne, or lived in Melbourne and came to Castlemaine regularly. Some of them had a holiday house here or were thinking of moving up here, and that just grew into what it is now.
CC: We've still got a few people that have a caravan in the bush or a holiday house or something and they’re regular members.
DR: Is it a mixed generation thing?
SG: Yeah, initially it was people mostly 50s and up.
CC: Aging homosexuals
SG: It’s primarily that still, the core of people. But now we're getting a few people who are in their 40s. But that’s once in a blue moon. I think that will change because when you're younger, you're occupied with other things. You're not really interested in being in something you might perceive as an old man's group.
CC: Yeah, well, we were an old man’s group. And still are to a degree.
SG: Yeah, we still are, you know, curry nights. But that will change as the younger people age.
CC: Usually groups have a limited time, don’t they? But this one seems to be going on longer.
SG: I sort of feel because we've met quite a few women through the choir and we're getting quite close to them, that one day, in an ideal world, we won't need these closed off groups ...
CC: We can ignore gender roles
SG: I can understand why some older men in the group feel the need to keep it as a gay men's group. Because it's that feeling of security that they've always felt through their life with their friends. They wanted to keep that because it’s a comforting thing. Because that's how it's always been. You needed other gay men to remind yourself that everything's okay because you’ve got these friends around you, who are like you, and the idea of having outsiders, people who are not like you, sort of breaks that feeling of security. But I personally love the idea of it being more inclusive now.
CC: Yeah, so do I
SG: One day we hopefully won't need these barriers but who knows? Things do go in circles, and there's a lot of uncertainty in the world now.
DR: Do you feel supported by the community at large?
SG: I think so, yeah. We personally don't have a lot of straight friends and never have had. Maybe that's our age too.
CC: When I used to work, we had more straight friends because I was working with them.
SG: That was still not very common, and I think maybe that's just our age as gay men.
CC: Well, straight men or straight boys used to be very, very scary and threatening. I was thrown out of school by straight boys. When I was in Year 4 – Year 10 now.
DR: What do you mean thrown out?
CC: Oh well, abused –violently and horribly – so I had to leave. My brother was exactly the same, they abused him for the same reason. He was gay and so it was hard initially, to trust straight men. It changed when I started working and all that sort of stuff.
SG: Yeah, I think a lot of that has changed. We all feel a lot safer now but you still have to be careful …
CC: But we do feel safer now.
SG: I'm a very insecure person so I am always wary. There's an element of paranoia about me that makes me cautious of opening myself up to make myself vulnerable, I suppose. I am in my late 60s, so I really don't know how very young people think and what life is like for them. I hear things of course. I know young men still have to be careful now.
And there's also different worries for them that didn't exist for me. There's the economic insecurity that people experience now and the housing issue, which is cruel. But I'm so pleased that schools are so much better now – so, so different. I mean, I thought school was a nightmare.
CC: Recently, there was a trans youth group of 13 to 15-year-olds that had an art exhibition and the counselor was having a discussion with them. One of the teenagers came and talked to Stephen. Stephen asked, And what are your pronouns? – as you’re supposed to say, and we all do nowadays. And she said – at that stage she was ‘she’ – they said, ‘It depends how I feel on the day.’ And I thought that was a lovely thing.
SG: It threw me because I didn't know what to say after that. I thought that's fine. It's fine.
CC: It’s the pronouns thing. Ive got my head around it now and I'm very, very good at it, virtually. That is, more understanding.
DR: How do you approach it?
CC: Well, I use ‘they’ a lot, but I ask people what their pronouns are. And everybody seems to be quite happy to tell me. I think it's a really sensible thing to do. Lots of people that are he/they or she/they have told me that they're very happy to be asked what their pronouns are. And there’s gender fluidity, and pansexual people. When I was a kid, nobody would say ‘I'm a pansexual’.
DR: there seems to be a real shift with younger people in terms of fluidity and confidence, pronouns and self-realisation …
SG: It is good. Confidence is a wonderful thing. I've never been a confident person but to see the young now feeling that way and to hear teachers tell me how it is for kids in school – It's so profoundly changed. I never felt that school was for the kids when I was at school. It was for something else that I didn't understand. Now I love the way that I hear everything is geared towards making the kids feel safe, to affirm what they want in life and to help them get to that. Which is the way it should always have been. I felt back then that there were teachers who were teachers because they thought oh, I’ll become a teacher, that sounds easy. I remember teachers that were just shocking and should never have been in that position. They didn't care.
DR: Do you mean in relation to your sexuality?
SG: I’m just talking about teachers in general. I did experience homophobia, but you know, it was an underhanded sort of thing, like sports teachers yelling abuse at you and things like that. I don't recall what they said, but there was no tolerance for anyone who wasn't playing the masculinity game. Which is a form of homophobia. You never get over that, it sort of stays with you for life, which is cruel. If you could only go back and give them a piece of your mind.
CC: I went to Richmond Tech, an all-boys school, which was very, very rough. I didn't want to do any of the footballs and the crickets and the soccers and whatever they were. So my mother, who was a very sensible woman, used to write a note, Colin does not have to play football. Colin does not have to play cricket. Colin does not have to ... Mum went down to see the sports person and abused him. Good on her, she was a very interesting woman, my mother.
SG: You were lucky to have Hazel
CC: Well, she had lots of lesbian friends.
DR: Has it changed a lot in Castlemaine?
SG: The last three years have been unpleasant in many ways, and these new people have been a lifesaver, because Colin had some emergency surgery three years ago and nearly died. And then COVID came. He had a perforated bowel and required surgery and he had a cardiac arrest at the end of the surgery, and he had to be resuscitated for 30 minutes.
CC: It’s all fixed now.
SG: But it was very hard, that combined with COVID. So, we were isolated, as well as coping with this profound medical issue that disrupted our lives. And all of these new people were sort of life savers in a way, giving us emotional support. As well as our old friends.
It’s a very unusual place Castlemaine, I still can't get my head around it, really. It's well positioned as I said, but for whatever reason, it's unusual. I guess Daylesford’s the same.
CC: Yeah, but Daylesford is a bit different. There's lots of authors here. There's lots of…
SG: Arty people. That’s a big thing.
CC: There’s lots of…
SG: Musicians.
CC: There’s lots of ex Commissioners of police and those sorts of people.
SG: There’s something about it. I think Castlemaine’s always been a bit different. The fact that it's a relatively small town, it's got a wonderful gallery, there’s less than 10,000 that live in the town.
DR: Are you guys married?
CC: Yes, we got married on my 70th birthday. We’ve been together for 45 years. We’ve been married for nearly five years.
DR: Were you married here in Castlemaine?
SG: We were the first same sex couple to go to Bendigo Courthouse which was good. It was a small affair. We were just going to go to the registry office and get it done but it was nice having friends along. And then we had a big party in the old tea rooms in the Botanic Gardens the next day so we could invite everyone.
CC: There were over 80 or 90 people there because the tea rooms are dirt cheap to hire.
DR: Did you always want to get married? When did you decide to do that?
SG: No, we hadn’t always wanted to get married because, like a lot of queer people, we’d always associated marriage with straight people. It was more that we wanted our relationship accepted on an equal footing.
CC: The day we decided to get married was the day that the vote came in. We went down to the Theatre Royal because they had it on the screens and there were lots and lots of beautiful young, straight couples with their kids. There was a lot of gay people there as well. I started crying, as I would normally do …
SG: When it was announced.
CC: And all the women and the men were coming up and hugging me ... and … I’m getting emotional now …
DR: What did it mean for you at that moment?
CC: It meant a lot to me
SG: Like a lot of people, I felt that there was an acceptance by the general community and that was a wonderful thing.
There’s still that thing about conforming. But I think one of the wonderful things about so many people getting married and the general acceptance of that, is it helps the confidence of young people coming to terms with things. These little things erode that feeling of, I'm not good enough. I'm not on the right side. I'm different and not accepted. If nothing else, that's a good enough reason. Also to acknowledge the significance of your relationship to yourself. But I don't think it should be the be all and end all.
CC: Both Stephen and I were members of the support group of the Victorian AIDS Council in the ’80s, and I was a psych nurse then. I was on the management board of the Gay Men's Health Centre and the Victorian AIDS Council. I used to go around to the various support groups talking with a psychiatrist about how to help people with AIDS. There were numerous times that a couple had been together for 20 years and one of them had died of AIDS and the parents of the dead man used to come down and take the body away and organise the funeral – all of that. And the partner who was not a member of the family couldn’t even visit. It was just really, really revolting. Twice I had to go and open body bags at the undertakers so they could see them, because the undertakers wouldn’t open the body bag and all that sort of stuff. It was just horrible. And the other thing was medical power of attorney. It was so horrible the way that partners, lifetime partners, were abused because they weren’t married.
SG: Their relationship wasn’t acknowledged as significant.
CC: So that was a big thing for me.
DR: Where did you two meet?
SG: We met at a Caulfield sauna, on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
CC: On the third of October 1977.
SG: I was living at a friend’s house in Fitzroy, and I was a bit depressed. I suffer from depression and anxiety. I was moping around the house, and he said, Look, why don’t you take yourself off to the sauna? I’d never been to a sauna by myself. I’d been a couple of times, maybe, with a friend, and I was a very, very nervy young man. I had to walk around the block about five times before I got the courage to walk up the stairs. Unbeknownst to me, Colin worked there. He wasn’t working that day, but he worked the night before and he woke thinking he left the tap running in the swimming pool.
CC: Which I had.
SG: So, he went in, in a …
CC: Happy jacket …
SG: A happy jacket …
CC: That I got from Singapore …
SG: And a pair of football shorts. He was in the booth where you pay your money, and he followed me around, and that was fate.
CC: I was young, I was young.
SG: I’d seen him the week before and I thought he’d never notice me. And there you go.
CC: Low self-esteem, he had. I had high self-esteem …
SG: So that’s where we met.
CC: Which is surprising.
SG: We moved in together, four months later or something. Colin was living in Toorak in an apartment somewhere near the synagogue. We lived in Carlton for a year together.
CC: And then St Kilda for seven years, and then Ivanhoe for a number of years, and then … I don’t know, it has been a long time.
SG: Meeting Colin was a big change in my life because he gave me a stability that I never had. Colin was very outgoing and confident, and I was exactly the opposite. I had someone who was out there dealing with the world on my behalf, which has its benefits. It also had its downside because it meant that I've never had to push myself so I retained my insecurity, which was probably not a good thing …
CC: My fault. My fault.
SG: No, no , no. It's just the way it is – it's just personalities. But yeah, life became wonderful.