Australia loves an underdog. Give us another take on Ned Kelly, or a prison-tour story of the notorious escape artist Moondyne Joe, and we’re seated with popcorn. These stories feed a national image Australia has adopted and cherished for more than two hundred years. Mateship. Larrikins. Defiance in the face of authority. Rub some dirt in it, toughen up, she’ll be right. We have a national narrative about the Aussie battler: uncomplicatedly masculine, white, cisgendered, and straight.
Of course, it turns out that nothing is ever actually uncomplicated (and thank goodness for that). Our national mythos has a few blind spots, which is often where the best stories are. If you scratch at that sepia veneer and look for histories of LGBTQIA+ Australians before and around the turn of the century, you’ll find people like Captain Moonlite, a gay bushranger. You’ll find Marion-Bill Edwards, a pansexual genderqueer thief who wrote a vibrant and unapologetic memoir in 1907. The good old Kelly Gang included a man named Steve Hart, who was known to dress in ‘female attire’.
I grew up loving history, but always felt cut off from Australian stories. When I finally started my PhD, a creative writing project focused on telling queer histories for young people, my knowledge of LGBTQIA+ history in Australia was sparse. I didn’t expect to find much explicit evidence of queerness before 1900 – and knowing the legal realities of homosexuality at the time, I expected most of it to end in tragedy.
To my surprise and delight, I found myself surrounded by stories of Australians who skirted the gender and sexual norms of 19th-century society. Newspaper articles. Letters. Memoirs. Photographs. At times I had to interpret and read between the lines; I searched for words and phrases like ‘unnatural’, ‘abominable’, and ‘impersonation of sex’. I went down rabbit holes tracing rumours mentioning innuendo regarding governmental measures to try to curb homosexuality. Some of the stories have been stifled or forgotten, but they are there.
Some of these stories are, of course, tragic. Edward de Lacy Evans, widely understood today as having been a trans man, was confined in Kew Asylum. He was subject to medical sexual assault, discovered as ‘a male impersonator’, forced to wear women’s clothes, and publicly outed in the media frenzy that followed, which has chilling echoes in the anti-trans rhetoric that has been on the rise in the UK. Edward de Lacy Evans never recovered. Captain Moonlite’s lover James died in his arms, and he was executed shortly after. Although Moonlite had begged to be buried with James, they were buried separately (though this was rectified when Moonlite was exhumed and reinterred near James in the 90s). Steve Hart died at Glenrowan Inn, putting truth into his words: “A short life and a merry one”. People were beaten, imprisoned, transported, murdered, and executed for their queerness, and the echo of that violence has had a long arm. That doesn’t even begin to cover the experiences of queer First Nations people, at the intersection of racism and queerphobia. Coloniser history prioritises written records, and as a result Aboriginal stories of queerness are often ignored, distorted, or actively silenced, far beyond the scope of white coloniser queerness.
It’s easy to see, then, why so many novels about LGBTQIA+ history end in tragedy. There is a sense that anything else disregards the legal and social reality of 19th-century Australia. And perhaps this is one reason there is such a dearth of queer Australian historical fiction written for young people – putting aside the obvious pearl-clutching these books can elicit. In Australia and abroad, young LGBTQIA+ people find themselves used as political collateral, and their access to their own history and community is weaponised. We saw it in the 2014 Safe Schools debate, and we are seeing it again in the growing number of book challenges in libraries and schools.
There is a perceived risk in exposing young people to queer stories – but the truth is that there is greater risk in isolation and loneliness, in not being part of a wider community and in feeling ahistorical in a world anchored in narrative. A 2020-2022 ABS National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing found that a disproportionate number of gender nonconforming people had experienced suicidal ideation, and the 2019 Private Lives 3 study from La Trobe University found queer people across the broad spectrum of gender and sexuality suffered high levels of abuse, discrimination, depression and anxiety, often accompanied by suicidal thoughts or behaviours.
Queerness is not a monolith, and YA novels don’t require a happy ending, but even as we acknowledge tragedy and despair, we also need stories that place hope at the centre. It’s a balance I sought to find when writing A Flash in the Dust, a queer historical YA thriller set in Western Australia in 1899. While writing Flash, I spoke to young queer people all over Western Australia: warm, funny, clever kids who are desperate to see their experiences and identities represented on the page. I felt a keen sense of responsibility to search for stories of queer resourcefulness and community, especially as they had been so gapingly absent from my own adolescence.
I found them. Marion-Bill Edwards wrote a bold, brash, joyous memoir in 1907, detailing their sexual exploits and their gender play. Harriet Elphinstone-Dick opened Melbourne’s first women-only gymnasium in 1879, thrashed men in swimming races for fun, and raised chickens with her partner Alice Moon. Johann “Jack” Jorgensen was a trans man who joined the Victorian Mounted Rifles and excelled as a soldier. These are the sorts of stories I followed and drew strength from while I was writing my book. For young people, these stories are part of a queer inheritance that has been fractured not only by centuries of censorship and persecution, but also by the devastating AIDS crisis. Queer historical fiction can help to bridge those gaps, shining a light on the mateship of LGBTQIA+ people who fought together against oppression and bigotry, and the defiant historians and archivists and curators who keep queer histories alive in the face of prejudiced authority and systemic silences.
And, after all, the underdogs and the larrikins: the gay or cross-dressing bushrangers and the genderqueer thieves and the hundreds of thousands of others who risked cutting their merry lives short, if only they could find one another.
Meg Caddy is the author of A Flash in The Dust, (University of Queensland Press) which this month won the CYA category of the ARA Historical Novel Prize.