Sherene Clow
DR: Can you talk
about your involvement within the community in Castlemaine?
SC: My involvement started almost five years ago, around marriage equality. When the government decided to do the postal vote and plebiscite, I broke out into hives and knew that families like mine with two mums and a child would probably be used as fodder in the ‘No’ campaign. I spoke to a friend of ours who worked in suicide prevention, and said, This is going to impact people. I’m fairly confident and comfortable in who I am and it had a physical effect on me immediately, so I can’t imagine what impact it might have on the mental health of people coming out of the closet or grappling with their sexuality, to have a public vote on whether they’re entitled to equal rights. So she said, Let’s have a meeting. And she pulled together all these people I’d never heard of or met before. We sat around the table and said, What can we do to try and soften the blow for our community? They thought we should write a letter to the council and ask them to fly the rainbow flag in support.
So all I did was ask a question to Sarah and the next thing there was an official letter with all of these symbols at the bottom from all of these organisations and me, and the Council put it to a vote. It got voted down, four councillors said, no, it’s a federal issue, it’s not for us to weigh in on, and three supported the motion. The community were outraged and really upset. I think we all thought that we lived in this bubble that was very LGBTQIA+ friendly, and then we found out that our elected representatives didn't want to make a gesture to support us. It started from there really.
Then we began a support group for people that weren't coping very well in that three-month period and I said that I'd sit in on that even though I had little to no experience. Barb Huggins and I would sit down at Castlemaine Community House once a week and people would come in and talk about what had happened to them that week and how they’d reacted and what they'd heard in the media. I shut off all social media. I stopped listening to the ABC. I had to use a lot of self-care tactics to avoid finding out what the opposite campaign was doing and spruiking.
I guess I was activated, and it just led to multiple opportunities. The next thing was probably the radio. Main FM said, do you want to do a radio show? So we started Queer and Now radio.
DR: How did they know to approach you? Had you worked in radio before?
SC: Yeah, there was another step in between that, you’re right. Once the vote was over, Martyn Shaddick at Community House applied for funding to do a picnic, to celebrate and to say thanks to all the allies that supported us. Basically just a little let's get together and celebrate that this is over. And it was at that picnic that Main FM did a live broadcast. They interviewed me and said we need someone to do a radio show. And I said, I'd love that, because I love music. So, that's how that began. And then CHIRP got another grant, and we did a thing with Terence Jaensch called Let's get Proud. So I was a consultant on that.
DR: What was that?
SC: It was basically a community consultation to see what the LGBTQIA+ community wanted and needed. We did some workshops and established that we wanted business support. We wanted the youth to have a space outside of school. And we were going to do a table that floated between local events called ‘A Place at Our Table’ that would help LGBTQIA+ people find their community.
When Council didn't fly the flag they offered us a roundtable so I was involved in that from the start. And that group became a steering group. I've been on that for all those years since. So there's been lots of volunteering. Then during the 2020 lockdowns, CHIRP got more funding for a specific LGBTQIA+ engagement officer, and they asked me to apply for the job, because I'd been doing all the work on a voluntary basis and had a good network by then. I'd had a few years of radio under my belt and was on the steering group. So that's how I ended up being in paid employment to do what I had been doing previously for free.
DR: That's fantastic. And what were you doing prior?
SC: I'd been working in my family business doing the administration and accounting kind of stuff, and I was a qualified primary school teacher. I haven't done that for a while, but I’ve still got my registration, and even now I'm doing work with the Pride crew up at the high school to try and create a pathway for them across to community health. So, they can access counseling and other services should they need them. I think a lot of people don't understand what's on offer, and where help is if they need it. So it's been part of my job to create pathways and let people know that there's Rainbow Tick credited places in town, should they need support.
DR: Have you always lived in Castlemaine?
SC: I moved to Harcourt which is just down the road about 17 years ago, and then moved to Castlemaine. And then my partner and I bought a property just out of town at Faraday and lived there for eight years and I've been back in Castlemaine for eight years.
DR: What was your experience of being part of the LGBTQIA+ community before you became involved in activism?
SC: I didn't really know anyone else. We lived quite separately. I grew up in Bendigo and I quite liked the anonymity of Castlemaine. Initially, I liked that I didn't really know anyone. I was still working in Bendigo and just lived here. Whereas now I feel deeply embedded.
DR: How did it feel back then, being gay in the town?
SC: I think I felt safe. We never hid ourselves here. Whereas I wasn't that comfortable in Bendigo. I felt that this was a bit more progressive. And there was a great eclectic mix of people here. Even working in quite straight environments. I worked in one of the pubs here for a while and I didn't ever feel the need to hide who I was or worry about that. So that was good. I think the council thing was a shock – until then I thought everyone was open and friendly and supported us.
DR: Yeah, it was a shock to me as well, when I read about it.
Yeah, I think part of the complication was that a lot of the staff at the council identified as LGBTQIA+. So when the flag was voted down, their work environment became fractured. The workers didn't feel supported by the elected councillors and started to put flags up around the office, and then the councillors felt like they were being bullied for a decision that they thought they’d made in good conscience. And the newspapers were very supportive of the councillors. It was a really weird dynamic. A lot of the staff quit and then three members of the council quit. So, everyone felt like they had been bullied and victimised, and there were really no winners.
It was this really awful situation where everyone came out feeling raw. So it's taken a lot of years, and the right staff on council and the right elected people, to build those bridges. And personally, I think that the people they have working with the steering group now are fantastic. We've had heaps of traction and we’ve got lots of things going and lots of funding and events up with the Council’s help. They’ve been completely on our team in the last couple of years and it's been great. But I think there's some community members that are still very hurt by how it played out.
D: Did you get the flag up eventually?
SC: Well, now the flag goes up 10 or more times a year. The council fly the flag for days of significance, but they don't have a permanent flag up. It took a long time. There were many months of literal tears around the table with us trying to explain why we needed support, and them saying, this isn't really a council issue.
They were saying, we want you to feed in what you need to feel supported. And someone from our side would say, we need you to be get inclusivity and diversity training. And they'd be like, but that's not what council is for – so it just went back and forth for months. They were happy for the staff to do it but they wanted councillors to opt in. It was tricky. It wasn't until we started working collectively, saying, Can we do this as a project? And can you help out with the pride picnic? Can we grow that and get Council support, and can we use Council buildings to do certain things? Once they created the role of equity officer and Sarah Gradie was in the role that things changed. All of a sudden, we had traction and it really helped.
DR: Have you sensed a palpable change in the atmosphere in the town since all those changes were made?
SC: There’s been a palpable change, particularly since Covid-19. There’s been a huge influx of metropolitan LGBTQIA+ people move in, and they’re already activated, a lot of them. So they’ve found many different ways to contribute and they’ve moved here because there was already an established working group. Particularly The Alluvians – that group is so well embedded into Castlemaine and has been running for 15 years. I couldn’t even tell you how many partnerships move here deliberately and say, This pandemic has made us realise it’s time to retire, and we don’t want to retire in the city. Castlemaine has got a queer group. We can go up there and automatically be hooked in.
When I was given the role of community engagement, I set up an Orphans Christmas get-together and 60 people came. From that catch up, someone said, I want to start a choir, and then the Castlemaine Pride choir came along and we had this group that was multigenerational and mixed – people that would never have associated with one another under any other circumstance. I think probably more than half of them had all just landed in Castlemaine. So, they formed this group which has been hugely successful, and from that the painting groups come out. So all of these other little groups have been community driven. They’ve been birthed from this one get-together. And there’re so many great little community things that have taken off – like the Falcons football club, which might not be exclusively LGBTQIA+ focused but their inclusion of non-binary players as well as women has created a sporting space.
And there's an artistic space and now there's a book club that's come up. And there was a tennis event. They had 90 players it was the biggest regional tennis LGBTQIA+ event in Australian history. There are all these little things that are kind of popping up. It's a great, diverse demographic that are interested in different things.
DR: Do you think the support for LGBTQIA+ plus community is unique here compared to other regional towns?
SC: I think there's been a collective change nationally since all this happened. But the difference in Castlemaine, is that, by putting me in – and it doesn't have to be me, it could have been anyone in a paid position with this as the focus – it takes the fatigue away from volunteers. One paid person can have a huge knock-on effect.
DR: And how does it feel for you – being so active and making such a tangible impact on the community?
SC: It feels good, but it also feels like a big responsibility sometimes. It's such a diverse group, I can't ever cater to everybody's needs and that's tricky. I'm hopeful that I can make a case that this role needs to be a full-time role and I would like to support it with somebody else, because I don’t feel like I can reach everybody or I'm going to get along with everybody – but if two people were sharing it. I think it would have an even broader impact.
DR: What do you think the difference is in the experience of younger LGBTQIA+ people living in Castlemaine, as opposed to Melbourne or a bigger city?
SC: I think there's less opportunity for younger people to seek services that can help here, particularly gender affirming services. But in Melbourne, there’s also a massive waitlist. The services just aren’t enough, whether you’re regional or metropolitan. I'm hoping that'll change here through my advocacy in the hospital. Health services are a problem for young people. For some young people, even though their pronouns are respected at school, and the teachers are taking that on board and doing training, they have to be someone else at home. That has a big impact. So I think there's still a long way to go and the discrimination is still exactly the same as it's always been. But a lot of people are educating themselves and able to make adjustments.
DR: What do you think about the impact of changing language on the community?
SC: I hope that people’s pronouns will be included in any kind of meeting, or setting, as well as an Acknowledgement of Country. This is how we make everybody feel included, because we can’t tell by looking at somebody what their gender identity is, or what their sexuality is, or what their nationality or family history is.
It's all very new, so we need training around this. This is life changing and life saving for some people, and it’s really not that hard for everybody else to just respect what other people call themselves, it doesn't take anything away from you. Then we can all make a big impact. Because I think, from the feedback I get, when people are misgendered over and over and over again, that impacts their mental health and their ability to feel comfortable outside of their house or their work or wherever they feel comfortable. Their world gets smaller and smaller because they’re not prepared to put themselves through that again and again. Whereas it’s really quite a simple thing for the rest of us to do.
Maybe there’s a bit of privilege where I sit in that acronym. The Ls and the Gs sit up the top and we have a pretty easy time. People can’t tell that I’m a lesbian – maybe by how I present, but you can’t really know that unless I tell you so. I can slip in and interact in a heteronormative way, and work in various environments. But gender is definitely very different to that, so I feel strongly about advocating for them. Because when I was a younger person in the closet, I didn't have a voice to do that. Now that I'm not, I feel like if I can help people or speak on their behalf, that it's kind of an obligation to do so.
There’s a really eclectic mix in Castlemaine of people that have been here for generations and working-class people – there’re the Hotrodders and there’re all sorts of subgroups, and some of them know queer people and some of them don’t, and some of them have no exposure. I think there is always that fear of what we don’t know. We’ve been the butt of jokes for a long time, and it’s deeply embedded in culture that boys aren’t to be sissies, girls are to look a certain way to have any value. When that starts to get challenged, there’s a bit of pushback. For the most part, we can find our people here, but that doesn't mean that everyone’s going to be welcoming with open arms.
There will be discrimination, particularly in this political climate. There's a lot of platforms for people that don't like who we are or what we represent to them as a concept. I don't think they see us as people.
DR: Have you seen any other examples of that push back?
SC: During marriage equality, I had many different people come into the support group. I had an older lesbian who was quite masculine – people had wound down the window and screamed abuse at her just literally walking down the street. So she’d come in quite distressed, saying, I’ve never experienced that before and I felt scared. Bullying definitely still happens within the schools, and still ripples below the surface sometimes, but I firmly believe that things are getting better.
My daughter has had some discrimination at school.
DR: Oh, really? What happened?
She had a boy say, where’s is your dad?. She is like, I don't have a dad. I've got two mums. And he said, But you must have a dad, everyone's got a dad. You can't exist without a dad, and really gave her a hard time in front of other kids that thought it was funny. And so, she's like, I'm like a joke! So we shipped her off to school with her book that we made about how she was conceived and how we used IVF and how we chose a donor and her whole story and I just said to the teacher, I think it's time, even though they might not be up to reproduction at school yet. Her story is valid, and she's very much got two parents that love her and she shouldn’t be subjected to any kind of bullying just because her family looks different. It’s tricky in some ways that you have to be the educator as well as being entitled to an education for your daughter.
I guess we will always be aware that choices we made to bring her in to the world will probably impact her. It's not really fair. She didn't choose to have two mums. But I guess that's the choice we made and we’ll deal with it as we go
DR: There seems to be a lot of rainbow families here, and quite specific support for them with playgroups and things like that.
SC: I think it's really important for kids to see other families like theirs and other families that are different to theirs rather than just one type of family. There are lots of different setups with families everywhere, so it's great to have spaces where, no matter what your family looks like, you can come along – whether you've got two dads or three parents or two mums or whatever combination. Yeah, I think that would have been helpful for my daughter back then. Because every now and then she would ask, Who else has two mums?
DR: What do you think of Pride events or the idea of Pride in general for the community.
SC: Some people just don't need the events, including a lot of the community that I haven't reached. They’re content in their partnerships and their friends are just their friends that they have met through work or however, so they don't need friends that are involved in the LGBTQIA+ community. I lived a long time like that too. That's quite a legitimate and sustainable way to live, and statistically that's the people you’re going to come across the most. And they’ve said to me, we don't need Pride events.
But for other people that are single, or have moved here and don't have any friendship base, it's really crucial. Sometimes if you're part of this community, even if you feel safe, there's a perception that people are going to reject you. There might be a lived experience that people have rejected you. So to be yourself in a new environment is really daunting. But if you can go into a painting group or a walking group or whatever, and know that that part of your identity is not an issue, it just takes that whole apprehension away. You can connect with people on a different level because being queer is only a small part of who you are. But if you're not comfortable with that, or if you don't feel safe in who you are, it becomes all-consuming. So, I think Pride events in all their forms meet that need. It's creating a safe space for people who feel like they're the only person that's like this.
DR: Do you think?
SC: Yeah, I definitely did.
In the past, there's been rules about how to even be queer, and that's made life difficult too – for lesbians, you had to be a lipstick lesbian or a butch lesbian. There was not much space for people just to come as they are. Like you had to look a certain way or behave a certain way.
DR: Yeah, there are stereotypes within the LGBTQIA+ community, which is ironic
I think young people are really challenging the stereotypes and that is a great thing. So, I'm hoping that people can just come as they are and it doesn’t really matter how you look or identify, you're just welcome to come along.
I think perhaps the gay men might speak to that too, there's been a lot of pressure on them to look a certain way and present a certain way. I'm hoping that that's changing too. I guess each little subgroup might have different ideas about that.
DR: And what about your personal story?
SC: I was definitely in the closet for my teenage years. I was aware that there were others around, particularly gay and lesbian people, but I distanced myself from them because I didn't feel like it was a safe thing to be. In Bendigo I saw violence towards LGBTQIA+ people. So, I'm like, I don't want to be that. Even though I know I'm that I don't want to be that, so I'll do my best to compartmentalise it or just not go there. So from that point onwards, if I felt comfortable with somebody, I would just say to them, I'm a lesbian. But I never joined any community groups. I never felt comfortable. I tried a few times when I lived in Melbourne, and felt like, these are not my people. Again, it was that butch and femme thing, because I don't really fit in either camp. I used to say, I feel like they run in packs, I don't feel comfortable. I'm not in a pack so I'm not going to do that. That was really isolating and depressing. I think I was very depressed for a lot of my 20s, and disconnected. I reconciled all of that, it took a lot of therapy and a lot of external help. That's why I feel like I'm in a position that I can help other people now, and hopefully they won’t have to go through that. That’s the end goal.
DR: What would you still like to see happen here in Castlemaine?
SC: I would like this as a full-time job. It's great that they've got me in this role for three days a week. But I think it would be great to have someone specifically in council, I think it would be great across a few different organisations to have a team of people that were actually paid to create space and safety in the bigger organisations in town.
DR: And how would you describe the community here?
SC: I think it's just a beautiful mix of people. There's a lot of educated people, a lot of progressive thinkers in this town, a lot of artistic people. And I feel like the collaboration that Castlemaine has is fantastic. The only reason I've been able to get traction is that I’ve been working with Mount Alexander Shire Council, with Castlemaine Community house, and with CHIRP. All of these groups working together help get things done. And there's a great sense of community. There's lots of trials of different ideas here and it’s unique – there's housing trials and suicide prevention, Safe Space trials and all sorts of things that benefit different parts of the community, not just LGBTQIA+. It's small enough that you can know a lot of people but it's large enough that you can sit back and have a quiet and private life, should you want one.
DR: I think that sounds ideal.
SC: Yeah. And there's lots of beautiful venues that have incredible live music that come and play and there’s great culture and art exhibitions. I think there's something for everybody. In many ways.
DR: Are you planning to stay here indefinitely?
SC: Yeah, absolutely.
DR: Can you tell me a little bit more what you do with the radio program Queer and Now?
SC: I'm a producer and co-host with Amalie O'Hara. We share it down the middle – she programs one week, and I program the next. She's 13 years younger than me so she's got a different perspective and a different lived experience, and she brings fresh eyes and ears. We try to program a lot of queer music. We look at national and international news. My goal was to try and have one to two guests every time I program to promote something that's happening. We've had people talk to us about workshops at community house, that might be something like mechanic workshops for non-binary and women. We talk to whoever's got something happening. It's a bit of a chat show with music.
SC: My involvement started almost five years ago, around marriage equality. When the government decided to do the postal vote and plebiscite, I broke out into hives and knew that families like mine with two mums and a child would probably be used as fodder in the ‘No’ campaign. I spoke to a friend of ours who worked in suicide prevention, and said, This is going to impact people. I’m fairly confident and comfortable in who I am and it had a physical effect on me immediately, so I can’t imagine what impact it might have on the mental health of people coming out of the closet or grappling with their sexuality, to have a public vote on whether they’re entitled to equal rights. So she said, Let’s have a meeting. And she pulled together all these people I’d never heard of or met before. We sat around the table and said, What can we do to try and soften the blow for our community? They thought we should write a letter to the council and ask them to fly the rainbow flag in support.
So all I did was ask a question to Sarah and the next thing there was an official letter with all of these symbols at the bottom from all of these organisations and me, and the Council put it to a vote. It got voted down, four councillors said, no, it’s a federal issue, it’s not for us to weigh in on, and three supported the motion. The community were outraged and really upset. I think we all thought that we lived in this bubble that was very LGBTQIA+ friendly, and then we found out that our elected representatives didn't want to make a gesture to support us. It started from there really.
Then we began a support group for people that weren't coping very well in that three-month period and I said that I'd sit in on that even though I had little to no experience. Barb Huggins and I would sit down at Castlemaine Community House once a week and people would come in and talk about what had happened to them that week and how they’d reacted and what they'd heard in the media. I shut off all social media. I stopped listening to the ABC. I had to use a lot of self-care tactics to avoid finding out what the opposite campaign was doing and spruiking.
I guess I was activated, and it just led to multiple opportunities. The next thing was probably the radio. Main FM said, do you want to do a radio show? So we started Queer and Now radio.
DR: How did they know to approach you? Had you worked in radio before?
SC: Yeah, there was another step in between that, you’re right. Once the vote was over, Martyn Shaddick at Community House applied for funding to do a picnic, to celebrate and to say thanks to all the allies that supported us. Basically just a little let's get together and celebrate that this is over. And it was at that picnic that Main FM did a live broadcast. They interviewed me and said we need someone to do a radio show. And I said, I'd love that, because I love music. So, that's how that began. And then CHIRP got another grant, and we did a thing with Terence Jaensch called Let's get Proud. So I was a consultant on that.
DR: What was that?
SC: It was basically a community consultation to see what the LGBTQIA+ community wanted and needed. We did some workshops and established that we wanted business support. We wanted the youth to have a space outside of school. And we were going to do a table that floated between local events called ‘A Place at Our Table’ that would help LGBTQIA+ people find their community.
When Council didn't fly the flag they offered us a roundtable so I was involved in that from the start. And that group became a steering group. I've been on that for all those years since. So there's been lots of volunteering. Then during the 2020 lockdowns, CHIRP got more funding for a specific LGBTQIA+ engagement officer, and they asked me to apply for the job, because I'd been doing all the work on a voluntary basis and had a good network by then. I'd had a few years of radio under my belt and was on the steering group. So that's how I ended up being in paid employment to do what I had been doing previously for free.
DR: That's fantastic. And what were you doing prior?
SC: I'd been working in my family business doing the administration and accounting kind of stuff, and I was a qualified primary school teacher. I haven't done that for a while, but I’ve still got my registration, and even now I'm doing work with the Pride crew up at the high school to try and create a pathway for them across to community health. So, they can access counseling and other services should they need them. I think a lot of people don't understand what's on offer, and where help is if they need it. So it's been part of my job to create pathways and let people know that there's Rainbow Tick credited places in town, should they need support.
DR: Have you always lived in Castlemaine?
SC: I moved to Harcourt which is just down the road about 17 years ago, and then moved to Castlemaine. And then my partner and I bought a property just out of town at Faraday and lived there for eight years and I've been back in Castlemaine for eight years.
DR: What was your experience of being part of the LGBTQIA+ community before you became involved in activism?
SC: I didn't really know anyone else. We lived quite separately. I grew up in Bendigo and I quite liked the anonymity of Castlemaine. Initially, I liked that I didn't really know anyone. I was still working in Bendigo and just lived here. Whereas now I feel deeply embedded.
DR: How did it feel back then, being gay in the town?
SC: I think I felt safe. We never hid ourselves here. Whereas I wasn't that comfortable in Bendigo. I felt that this was a bit more progressive. And there was a great eclectic mix of people here. Even working in quite straight environments. I worked in one of the pubs here for a while and I didn't ever feel the need to hide who I was or worry about that. So that was good. I think the council thing was a shock – until then I thought everyone was open and friendly and supported us.
DR: Yeah, it was a shock to me as well, when I read about it.
Yeah, I think part of the complication was that a lot of the staff at the council identified as LGBTQIA+. So when the flag was voted down, their work environment became fractured. The workers didn't feel supported by the elected councillors and started to put flags up around the office, and then the councillors felt like they were being bullied for a decision that they thought they’d made in good conscience. And the newspapers were very supportive of the councillors. It was a really weird dynamic. A lot of the staff quit and then three members of the council quit. So, everyone felt like they had been bullied and victimised, and there were really no winners.
It was this really awful situation where everyone came out feeling raw. So it's taken a lot of years, and the right staff on council and the right elected people, to build those bridges. And personally, I think that the people they have working with the steering group now are fantastic. We've had heaps of traction and we’ve got lots of things going and lots of funding and events up with the Council’s help. They’ve been completely on our team in the last couple of years and it's been great. But I think there's some community members that are still very hurt by how it played out.
D: Did you get the flag up eventually?
SC: Well, now the flag goes up 10 or more times a year. The council fly the flag for days of significance, but they don't have a permanent flag up. It took a long time. There were many months of literal tears around the table with us trying to explain why we needed support, and them saying, this isn't really a council issue.
They were saying, we want you to feed in what you need to feel supported. And someone from our side would say, we need you to be get inclusivity and diversity training. And they'd be like, but that's not what council is for – so it just went back and forth for months. They were happy for the staff to do it but they wanted councillors to opt in. It was tricky. It wasn't until we started working collectively, saying, Can we do this as a project? And can you help out with the pride picnic? Can we grow that and get Council support, and can we use Council buildings to do certain things? Once they created the role of equity officer and Sarah Gradie was in the role that things changed. All of a sudden, we had traction and it really helped.
DR: Have you sensed a palpable change in the atmosphere in the town since all those changes were made?
SC: There’s been a palpable change, particularly since Covid-19. There’s been a huge influx of metropolitan LGBTQIA+ people move in, and they’re already activated, a lot of them. So they’ve found many different ways to contribute and they’ve moved here because there was already an established working group. Particularly The Alluvians – that group is so well embedded into Castlemaine and has been running for 15 years. I couldn’t even tell you how many partnerships move here deliberately and say, This pandemic has made us realise it’s time to retire, and we don’t want to retire in the city. Castlemaine has got a queer group. We can go up there and automatically be hooked in.
When I was given the role of community engagement, I set up an Orphans Christmas get-together and 60 people came. From that catch up, someone said, I want to start a choir, and then the Castlemaine Pride choir came along and we had this group that was multigenerational and mixed – people that would never have associated with one another under any other circumstance. I think probably more than half of them had all just landed in Castlemaine. So, they formed this group which has been hugely successful, and from that the painting groups come out. So all of these other little groups have been community driven. They’ve been birthed from this one get-together. And there’re so many great little community things that have taken off – like the Falcons football club, which might not be exclusively LGBTQIA+ focused but their inclusion of non-binary players as well as women has created a sporting space.
And there's an artistic space and now there's a book club that's come up. And there was a tennis event. They had 90 players it was the biggest regional tennis LGBTQIA+ event in Australian history. There are all these little things that are kind of popping up. It's a great, diverse demographic that are interested in different things.
DR: Do you think the support for LGBTQIA+ plus community is unique here compared to other regional towns?
SC: I think there's been a collective change nationally since all this happened. But the difference in Castlemaine, is that, by putting me in – and it doesn't have to be me, it could have been anyone in a paid position with this as the focus – it takes the fatigue away from volunteers. One paid person can have a huge knock-on effect.
DR: And how does it feel for you – being so active and making such a tangible impact on the community?
SC: It feels good, but it also feels like a big responsibility sometimes. It's such a diverse group, I can't ever cater to everybody's needs and that's tricky. I'm hopeful that I can make a case that this role needs to be a full-time role and I would like to support it with somebody else, because I don’t feel like I can reach everybody or I'm going to get along with everybody – but if two people were sharing it. I think it would have an even broader impact.
DR: What do you think the difference is in the experience of younger LGBTQIA+ people living in Castlemaine, as opposed to Melbourne or a bigger city?
SC: I think there's less opportunity for younger people to seek services that can help here, particularly gender affirming services. But in Melbourne, there’s also a massive waitlist. The services just aren’t enough, whether you’re regional or metropolitan. I'm hoping that'll change here through my advocacy in the hospital. Health services are a problem for young people. For some young people, even though their pronouns are respected at school, and the teachers are taking that on board and doing training, they have to be someone else at home. That has a big impact. So I think there's still a long way to go and the discrimination is still exactly the same as it's always been. But a lot of people are educating themselves and able to make adjustments.
DR: What do you think about the impact of changing language on the community?
SC: I hope that people’s pronouns will be included in any kind of meeting, or setting, as well as an Acknowledgement of Country. This is how we make everybody feel included, because we can’t tell by looking at somebody what their gender identity is, or what their sexuality is, or what their nationality or family history is.
It's all very new, so we need training around this. This is life changing and life saving for some people, and it’s really not that hard for everybody else to just respect what other people call themselves, it doesn't take anything away from you. Then we can all make a big impact. Because I think, from the feedback I get, when people are misgendered over and over and over again, that impacts their mental health and their ability to feel comfortable outside of their house or their work or wherever they feel comfortable. Their world gets smaller and smaller because they’re not prepared to put themselves through that again and again. Whereas it’s really quite a simple thing for the rest of us to do.
Maybe there’s a bit of privilege where I sit in that acronym. The Ls and the Gs sit up the top and we have a pretty easy time. People can’t tell that I’m a lesbian – maybe by how I present, but you can’t really know that unless I tell you so. I can slip in and interact in a heteronormative way, and work in various environments. But gender is definitely very different to that, so I feel strongly about advocating for them. Because when I was a younger person in the closet, I didn't have a voice to do that. Now that I'm not, I feel like if I can help people or speak on their behalf, that it's kind of an obligation to do so.
There’s a really eclectic mix in Castlemaine of people that have been here for generations and working-class people – there’re the Hotrodders and there’re all sorts of subgroups, and some of them know queer people and some of them don’t, and some of them have no exposure. I think there is always that fear of what we don’t know. We’ve been the butt of jokes for a long time, and it’s deeply embedded in culture that boys aren’t to be sissies, girls are to look a certain way to have any value. When that starts to get challenged, there’s a bit of pushback. For the most part, we can find our people here, but that doesn't mean that everyone’s going to be welcoming with open arms.
There will be discrimination, particularly in this political climate. There's a lot of platforms for people that don't like who we are or what we represent to them as a concept. I don't think they see us as people.
DR: Have you seen any other examples of that push back?
SC: During marriage equality, I had many different people come into the support group. I had an older lesbian who was quite masculine – people had wound down the window and screamed abuse at her just literally walking down the street. So she’d come in quite distressed, saying, I’ve never experienced that before and I felt scared. Bullying definitely still happens within the schools, and still ripples below the surface sometimes, but I firmly believe that things are getting better.
My daughter has had some discrimination at school.
DR: Oh, really? What happened?
She had a boy say, where’s is your dad?. She is like, I don't have a dad. I've got two mums. And he said, But you must have a dad, everyone's got a dad. You can't exist without a dad, and really gave her a hard time in front of other kids that thought it was funny. And so, she's like, I'm like a joke! So we shipped her off to school with her book that we made about how she was conceived and how we used IVF and how we chose a donor and her whole story and I just said to the teacher, I think it's time, even though they might not be up to reproduction at school yet. Her story is valid, and she's very much got two parents that love her and she shouldn’t be subjected to any kind of bullying just because her family looks different. It’s tricky in some ways that you have to be the educator as well as being entitled to an education for your daughter.
I guess we will always be aware that choices we made to bring her in to the world will probably impact her. It's not really fair. She didn't choose to have two mums. But I guess that's the choice we made and we’ll deal with it as we go
DR: There seems to be a lot of rainbow families here, and quite specific support for them with playgroups and things like that.
SC: I think it's really important for kids to see other families like theirs and other families that are different to theirs rather than just one type of family. There are lots of different setups with families everywhere, so it's great to have spaces where, no matter what your family looks like, you can come along – whether you've got two dads or three parents or two mums or whatever combination. Yeah, I think that would have been helpful for my daughter back then. Because every now and then she would ask, Who else has two mums?
DR: What do you think of Pride events or the idea of Pride in general for the community.
SC: Some people just don't need the events, including a lot of the community that I haven't reached. They’re content in their partnerships and their friends are just their friends that they have met through work or however, so they don't need friends that are involved in the LGBTQIA+ community. I lived a long time like that too. That's quite a legitimate and sustainable way to live, and statistically that's the people you’re going to come across the most. And they’ve said to me, we don't need Pride events.
But for other people that are single, or have moved here and don't have any friendship base, it's really crucial. Sometimes if you're part of this community, even if you feel safe, there's a perception that people are going to reject you. There might be a lived experience that people have rejected you. So to be yourself in a new environment is really daunting. But if you can go into a painting group or a walking group or whatever, and know that that part of your identity is not an issue, it just takes that whole apprehension away. You can connect with people on a different level because being queer is only a small part of who you are. But if you're not comfortable with that, or if you don't feel safe in who you are, it becomes all-consuming. So, I think Pride events in all their forms meet that need. It's creating a safe space for people who feel like they're the only person that's like this.
DR: Do you think?
SC: Yeah, I definitely did.
In the past, there's been rules about how to even be queer, and that's made life difficult too – for lesbians, you had to be a lipstick lesbian or a butch lesbian. There was not much space for people just to come as they are. Like you had to look a certain way or behave a certain way.
DR: Yeah, there are stereotypes within the LGBTQIA+ community, which is ironic
I think young people are really challenging the stereotypes and that is a great thing. So, I'm hoping that people can just come as they are and it doesn’t really matter how you look or identify, you're just welcome to come along.
I think perhaps the gay men might speak to that too, there's been a lot of pressure on them to look a certain way and present a certain way. I'm hoping that that's changing too. I guess each little subgroup might have different ideas about that.
DR: And what about your personal story?
SC: I was definitely in the closet for my teenage years. I was aware that there were others around, particularly gay and lesbian people, but I distanced myself from them because I didn't feel like it was a safe thing to be. In Bendigo I saw violence towards LGBTQIA+ people. So, I'm like, I don't want to be that. Even though I know I'm that I don't want to be that, so I'll do my best to compartmentalise it or just not go there. So from that point onwards, if I felt comfortable with somebody, I would just say to them, I'm a lesbian. But I never joined any community groups. I never felt comfortable. I tried a few times when I lived in Melbourne, and felt like, these are not my people. Again, it was that butch and femme thing, because I don't really fit in either camp. I used to say, I feel like they run in packs, I don't feel comfortable. I'm not in a pack so I'm not going to do that. That was really isolating and depressing. I think I was very depressed for a lot of my 20s, and disconnected. I reconciled all of that, it took a lot of therapy and a lot of external help. That's why I feel like I'm in a position that I can help other people now, and hopefully they won’t have to go through that. That’s the end goal.
DR: What would you still like to see happen here in Castlemaine?
SC: I would like this as a full-time job. It's great that they've got me in this role for three days a week. But I think it would be great to have someone specifically in council, I think it would be great across a few different organisations to have a team of people that were actually paid to create space and safety in the bigger organisations in town.
DR: And how would you describe the community here?
SC: I think it's just a beautiful mix of people. There's a lot of educated people, a lot of progressive thinkers in this town, a lot of artistic people. And I feel like the collaboration that Castlemaine has is fantastic. The only reason I've been able to get traction is that I’ve been working with Mount Alexander Shire Council, with Castlemaine Community house, and with CHIRP. All of these groups working together help get things done. And there's a great sense of community. There's lots of trials of different ideas here and it’s unique – there's housing trials and suicide prevention, Safe Space trials and all sorts of things that benefit different parts of the community, not just LGBTQIA+. It's small enough that you can know a lot of people but it's large enough that you can sit back and have a quiet and private life, should you want one.
DR: I think that sounds ideal.
SC: Yeah. And there's lots of beautiful venues that have incredible live music that come and play and there’s great culture and art exhibitions. I think there's something for everybody. In many ways.
DR: Are you planning to stay here indefinitely?
SC: Yeah, absolutely.
DR: Can you tell me a little bit more what you do with the radio program Queer and Now?
SC: I'm a producer and co-host with Amalie O'Hara. We share it down the middle – she programs one week, and I program the next. She's 13 years younger than me so she's got a different perspective and a different lived experience, and she brings fresh eyes and ears. We try to program a lot of queer music. We look at national and international news. My goal was to try and have one to two guests every time I program to promote something that's happening. We've had people talk to us about workshops at community house, that might be something like mechanic workshops for non-binary and women. We talk to whoever's got something happening. It's a bit of a chat show with music.