When the Sydney-based designer Josie Young undertook an online search for the queer history of her rural hometown, she stumbled onto the team researching a podcast about the world’s only gay prison, situated at the heart of Cooma in the New South Wales Snowy Monaro region.
“I sent them a quick note to say I was keen to hear more and stay updated with their findings,” she told Guardian Australia.
Young recalls the experience of growing up queer in rural NSW as “confusing”.
“I was a teenage girl in a small town desperate to be straight and that meant I landed in some pretty vulnerable situations,” she says.
“I didn’t understand my sexuality, I kissed girls and boys at parties but actually liking all genders wasn’t really something I understood could be a thing.”
The investigative journalist Patrick Abboud and film-maker Simon Cunich were keen to include Young’s story in their new podcast The Greatest Menace.
“The first place to go is to think about the young people who are still living in Cooma, the current generation,” Abboud told Guardian Australia.
The performing artist Mark Salvestro divides his time between Cooma and Canberra, but had no idea about the gay prisoners locked up in his hometown until Abboud interviewed him in September 2020.
“As a queer storyteller, I felt rather silly not having known this already, especially after living in Cooma for 22 years, but I guess that’s what the authorities wanted,” he says.
“After the interview, I had this great heaviness in my stomach. I felt a mixture of disgust, shame and betrayal, partly towards myself but also partly towards the Cooma community and NSW as a whole.”
‘Nobody will ask questions’
Over eight episodes, The Greatest Menace exposes the hidden role rural NSW played in the incarceration of gay men from the 1950s to the early 1980s.
Listeners are transported to a time long before homosexuality was decriminalised in NSW in 1984, when the state’s prisons were crowded by a “shock rise” in gay men convicted of consensual “buggery” in the 1950s.
Numbers became so great that Maitland Gaol in the NSW Hunter Valley allocated a wing to them in the 1950s, before Cooma’s Victorian-era gaol was reopened in 1957.
The man behind these policies was Reg Downing, who hailed from Tumut and became NSW attorney general under Labor governments in the 1950s and 1960s, during which he set up a committee of inquiry about homosexuality.
He got support from the then state police commissioner Colin Delaney, who grew up in regional Victoria and did a stint of country policing at Tamworth in the late 1940s.
It was Delaney who labelled homosexuality “the greatest menace facing Australia”.
As Abboud reveals in the podcast, the move to incarcerate gay prisoners at Cooma included a plan to find a cure for homosexuality.
“I think in Reg Downing’s mind and the minds of the people he was working with in the government to establish the gaol and the committee of inquiry, they genuinely believed ‘let’s put them so far away from where anybody will think about it and then we’ll be able to do what it is that we want to do, and run this experiment, and nobody will ask questions’,” he says.
‘A bit of a caveat’
With relatives who run a ski-hire, fuel and food business at Cooma, Abboud also shares insights about rural attitudes to LGBTQ+ people in the podcast.
“I’m Palestinian-Lebanese-Arab Australian, that’s how I identify and I’m very openly gay, and it hasn’t always been that way,” he says.
“My parents raised me in western Sydney and my extended family always had a big issue with me being gay, and still do.”
While making The Greatest Menace, Abboud needed to “check in” with his mother about their country family.
“She was concerned at times, saying ‘what is the family going to say, what do I tell them?’,” he says.
“I was sitting at the table in Cooma with Mary, my relative who I adore ... she’s fed me many meals and nurtured me as a teenager, but I didn’t feel like I could tell her about my partner.
“There’s always a bit of a caveat, particularly with family who are back in the village in Lebanon, or in country Australia. There’s individuals right across my family, no matter where they are geographically, who are really supportive, but ... I really risk upsetting someone else’s relationship if I come forward and say who I am.”
‘So many questions’
Maitland Gaol was run for 150 years as a maximum-security facility before closing in 1998. It’s now a tourist attraction managed by Maitland city council, with oral histories about its gay prisoners included on a self-guided tour.
“Not much is known, by the current operators, about the imprisonment of homosexual men at Maitland Gaol in the 20th century,” a spokesperson for the gaol says.
“We believe it’s important that through interpretation we cover all aspects of life at Maitland Gaol.”
Abboud believes the mystique around prisons is why The Greatest Menace appeals to such a broad audience.
“There’s so many questions I have about what happened at Maitland prison, and about Robert Adamson, the poet we interviewed who ended up there,” he says.
“I think if corrective services would tell us a bit more we wouldn’t be asking.”
Acknowledge and apologise
Currently used as a minimum- and medium-security prison, Cooma correctional centre attracts visitors to its Correctional Services Museum, which Abboud says has expanded its displays to include mention of the gay men jailed in the town.
But he believes more should be done, particularly in the light of higher suicide rates among rural residents, including a disproportionate number of LGBTQ+ people.
The NSW government has yet to schedule its judicial inquiry into gay and transgender hate crimes, which may have ramifications for rural LGBTQ+ people, and an omnibus equality bill is in preparation which will seek to remove a range of gay and trans discrimination, including gay conversion practices.
“I think the authorities responsible for what occurred need to acknowledge it and apologise, because the survivors deserve that and they want that,” Abboud says.
“Of course we’re talking about a former NSW government, but it’s the responsibility of the government overall to acknowledge what happened was a great injustice, and it explains so much about why queer people have been so hated.”
Salvestro believes schools should teach the Cooma Gaol story.
“Our communities across the Snowy Monaro are very proud of their multicultural history around the times of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and rightly so … we also have to give light to the darker parts like the Cooma Gaol,” he says.
“I’d love to see an LGBTQIA+ pride flag in the town or some kind of monument commemorating the mistreatment of the queer community and the part that Cooma played in it.”
Young agrees that The Greatest Menace documents important lessons.
“I hope it will be well received and that the actual history of the jail will become more widely known and acknowledged around Cooma,” she says.
She believes “growing up queer and growing up in rural areas” is different for everyone.
“I think it depends if the rural region is really religious, or how far away it is from a metropolitan area, how much access there is to diverse media and services, if there is a supportive community ... it’s been a journey to get to where I am with it.”
The Greatest Menace is available on Audible.
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
