TRANSCRIPT
"I'll resurrect his body, I'll raise him, if that's what needed to change the bloody law!"
It's been over fifty years since law professor Dr. George Ian Duncan was killed by a group of men who threw him into Adelaide's River Torrens.
He had only been living in Adelaide for six weeks and didn't know how to swim.
The area was a well-known gay beat — a place where men gathered to meet and have sex.
The unsolved murder of Dr Duncan in 1972 prompted the South Australian Labor government to begin reforming laws around homosexuality.
In 1975, South Australia became the first Australian state to legalise sexual conduct between consenting adult males.
Slowly but surely, other states followed.
"Sexual laws are still in force here, long after their repeal in South Australia and Victoria. Premier Neville Wran says it's now time to end the blatant discrimination and unfairness endured by homosexuals in New South Wales."
Now, in an upcoming performance by Opera Australia in Sydney, Watershed tells the relatively unknown tale of triumph and tragedy that saw South Australia lead the Western world on gay law reform.
It comes after a formal apology last Thursday from the New South Wales Premier to those convicted under laws which criminalised homosexuality.
Neil Armfield is the director of Watershed and says that no matter how late the apology is, it's incredibly important for those who were impacted.
"I think that that apology is really long overdue. One can say these apologies are symbolic actions, one can say that the apology to the stolen generations was a symbolic action, but it's incredibly important to those who've been the victims or who have suffered, and under inhumane practices in the past.”
No one was ever convicted over the death of Dr George Duncan, but many believe a group of police officers was responsible.
"There was a, there has always been this persistent rumour and whistleblowing within the cops that it was a job by off duty vice squad officers. They had a practice we're told called teaching the poofters to swim. And now there would be this thing of going down and throwing gay men off a gay beat into the Torrens. On this particular night, three men were thrown in one of them, didn't know how to swim. That was George Duncan and the people who threw him in were told that that man hadn't surfaced. One of them stripped off, jumped in the river and tried to get the body couldn't find it and they took off in their car."
Writer Paul Paech was a student in Adelaide at the time.
He says Dr Duncan was an import into Adelaide and was identified as homosexual by a certain item found in his luggage.
"They found in his luggage, a gay guide to the world. It was called a Spartacus gay guide. And this identifies him as being a gay man. The fact that he had a guide to the underground world that homosexual men and women but principally homosexual men, were able to have established for themselves in places wherever of sufficient population, particularly seaside resorts. But every city of any size had places where gay men would gather and go to have drinks, sometimes there were nightclubs, and there we'll what we'll call cruising grounds, outside beats we call them in Australia.”
It was at one of those outdoor gathering spots, or beats, where Dr Duncan and two other gay men were attacked and thrown into the river.
Three years later, South Australia became the first English-speaking state in the world to decriminalise homosexuality.
Paul Paech says people in Adelaide were horrified that someone of such stature would meet such a violent end.
He says the same outrage may not have extended to someone deemed to be of lower status.
"If it had it been an ordinary person, it may just have disappeared. In fact, there was when they were the police divers went down into the river. They found there a body of an adolescent or a teenage boy, who had died some years earlier, probably in similar circumstances, but that had never caused any fracture or any ruckus in the city, the fact that Duncan was such a man of such status, really caused the city great embarrassment and that was the trigger for the law change that eventually happened."
Neil Armfield commissioned Watershed in 2022.
Penned by an all LGBTIQ+ writing team, including Christos Tsiolkas and Alana Valentine, Mr Armfield says he wanted the writers to have a sense of identification with the story.
After himself being attacked in 1980's, Mr Armfield says New South Wales police treated him like a criminal.
"The cops in Darlinghurst just treated me as a criminal really. And so the humiliation was somehow compounded. They also were not interested in identifying these people at a time when there were groups like this going around, murdering people. And I just thought that was appalling."
Watershed performer Pelham Andrews says he hopes the performance reminds audiences of just how recent these events are.
"I want the living memory of these events the heroes and also not forgetting the injustice that was served in the past, I want that to be remembered and for people to go out knowing that, you know, that's something we all have to carry on and also to feel uplifted by the fact that there are people who have made positive change."
Playing both the then South Australian premier Don Dunstan and Dr Duncan, Mark Oates says it's a history that cannot be forgotten.
"Particularly in our current political circumstance, I really want people to understand that we've been on this journey for a long time. And, as Pelham said, that there is there is hope through the struggle that we've been through, and that we shouldn't let it happen again. And we to fail to recognise and understand history is to repeat history, and we can't afford for that to happen."
Watershed opens at the Sydney Opera House this month.
LGBTIQ+ Australians seeking support with mental health can contact QLife on 1800 184 527 or visit qlife.org.au and ReachOut.com also has a list of support services.
