1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage

An End to the Way: Pulp Becomes Classic Down-Under

– 292 – An End to the Way Pulp Becomes Classic Down-Under Jeremy Fisher In Australia, all of which lies south of the Equator, the summer break is between November and February and covers Christmas and New Year. These holidays and the warm weather combine to slow life down. Nothing much happens in Australia in January. Everyone is in a holiday mood. The country parties. In the summer of 1974, when I was nineteen years old, my lover and I went on a vacation. I was on break from university, and my lover had taken leave from his job as a psychiatric nurse. We’d decided we would travel north from our home in Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, to Queensland, one of two Australian states named after Victoria, whose successors still take their place as Australia’s constitutional monarch. Victoria’s prurient influence looms large in Australia; she was still queen (for another 22 days) when Australia became a nation on January 1, 1901. Since we had the usual family commitments for Christmas, my lover and I proposed to set out for Queensland after New Year’s Day. I hadn’t been there since I was a young boy, when my family lived in a tropical town just south of the state border. My lover had never been that far north. An End to the Way – 293 He had grown up in Wollongong, an industrial city eighty miles south of Sydney. (Sydney, in turn, is about 640 miles south of Brisbane, which is the capital of and the biggest city in Queensland.) Being the age we were, we didn’t plan our trip in much detail. We simply bought second-class train seats for Brisbane and traveled north overnight. The train, then and now, takes about seventeen hours to make its way from Sydney’s Central to Brisbane’s Roma Street station. We had to sit up all the way, since we were in second class. Traveling that way wasn’t much fun, we decided as we rested in our dingy Brisbane hotel after our arrival. We spent a day or two in hot, muggy, and rather dull Brisbane; then, again without much thought or reasoning, we booked a train farther north to Cairns. We again booked second-class seats because we saw that the train left Roma Street at 10:00 a.m. and arrived in Cairns at 2:30 p.m. We were so green we didn’t realize that the 2:30 p.m. was actually two days after the train left Brisbane, as the distance between Brisbane and Cairns is almost twice that from Sydney. But as we looked once more at our timetable , this became clear to us about half an hour after we left Brisbane. We didn’t want to spend two nights sitting up, so we grabbed our bags and alighted from the train at the next stop. Australia in January 1974 was still a country searching for its own identity . Just thirteen months before, it had emerged from twenty-three years of conservative government. The new Labor government, under prime minister Gough Whitlam, had set itself an ambitious reformist agenda. Within days of its election it had reversed earlier policies committing troops to the war in Vietnam and had recognized the government of China. It also had an impressive package of social policies to enact. The rights of women to equal pay and recognition under the law were quickly implemented. The new government did not do much, though, with regard to the decriminalization of homosexuality. The Australian Labor Party included a significant number of Catholic parliamentarians whose church opposed decriminalization . In any case, the national government could do little on this matter; its powers with regard to such laws extended only to the Australian Capital Territory—a small buffer of land surrounding the national capital, Canberra, in New South Wales—and the enormous but sparsely populated Northern 294 – Jeremy Fisher Territory. Legislation relating to the criminalization of homosexuality for the rest of Australia was in the hands of the governments of the six states of Australia. One of these, South Australia, had pioneered homosexual law reform in 1972 (and in 1895, South Australia had also been the first political territory anywhere in the world to allow women both to vote and stand for election). In New South Wales, where I lived, homosexuality remained illegal until 1984, but...