Film - Tiny Empire Collective (producers), 'Daylesford Stories: Acceptance of difference', 2016, Way Back When Consulting Historians

♪ Emotive Music ♪

(Voice of Anne-Marie Banting)
There was something about Daylesford that made me feel extremely comfortable, welcomed and at home.

(Voice of Sarah Lang) There's a real energy here that a lot of people are drawn to. It's never been anything else other than completely friendly and open to people of all walks of life.

(Title on screen) Daylesford Stories: Acceptance of Difference

Sarah Lang: The traditional life of growing up and meeting a man and going and getting married just wasn't for me. I just knew that I didn't fit in. And I was desperately trying to find somewhere where I, you know, sort of felt at home. So it would have been in the mid 90s I moved here for the first time.

Anne-Marie Banting: We started coming up here as a family for some rest and downtime. And every time I crested the hill going in from Ballan into Daylesford, my shoulders would drop and I felt at home.

Bruce Rolfe: The first time I came up here was in 1990. I'd moved from country Queensland and I had been very unhappy living in the country but always wanted to live in the country, but found it very lonely and isolated.

Anneke Deutsch: The country wasn't a very friendly place for lesbians and gays at that time. But I knew from the Women's Balls, they were called Women's Balls but they were really lesbian balls, that Daylesford was a place that was more welcoming.

(Text on screen) Buy why was Daylesford more welcoming than other country towns? What made it so friendly?

♪ Uplifting Music ♪

(Text on screen) The foundations were laid in the 1980s with the commencement of Women's Balls and other social activities. They were initially run by self-proclaimed radical lesbian feminist and Daylesford resident Anah Holland-Moore.

Anah Holland-Moore: We started socially. We had a big gathering called Summer Fair Summer Fair, and of course me with my, you know, naïve hat on as well as my political hat, I enrolled the CWA to do the Devonshire teas, so you know, all the women's groups in Daylesford who were very much the blue rinse set. And of course hundreds of sort of, I suppose, ghetto dykes and you know crew cuts and balds and you know, and the poor old women, they just could not believe what was going on.

We had a dance that Saturday night at the Town Hall and that's what started the Women's Balls. So every year we had the Daylesford Women's Ball.

Sarah Lang: There would be all, interesting people there and it was a really fascinating culture. But it was still quite, it was a very small community back then.

Anah Holland-Moore: It was a women's town to start with, not so much gay and lesbian as it is now. It was all the lezzos and the women.

(Text on screen) Daylesford had an energy. The soil was rich with gold, minerals and healing waters. Miners, farmers, migrants and later artists flocked to the area.

♪ Uptempo Music ♪

(Text on screen) 1980s Daylesford, dotted with old-world buildings, had an understated charm. But somehow, land remained cheap. All of this, alongside the quiet but strong radical feminist lesbian presence, meant that by the 1990s, Daylesford was on its way to becoming a haven for lesbian women and gay men.

Sarah Lang: There was quite a few nights and quite a few quite public events that were known as being gay friendly.

Anneke Deutsch: There was Jack's on a Friday night which was I think organised through Springs Connection. It was upstairs at the Alpha Gallery and that was a Friday night dinner and any local lesbians and gays were welcome and any visiting lesbian and gays were welcome. So it was kind of a way to encourage community and connection for those who were coming up for a weekend from Melbourne.

Sarah Lang: You know it was gay friendly and so you did, you would come over here because even if you weren't out yet you could sort of just hang around other people that you knew were gay.

(Text on screen) A group of lesbian and gay business owners banded together to form Springs Connection in the early 1990s, a network to support and promote their businesses. In 1997 Springs Connection decided to host a relaxing, game-filled 'chill-out' day. From these humble beginnings, ChillOut Festival was born.

Anneke Deutsch: I find it difficult to remember whether we were comfortable walking hand in hand in the main street. But, I think increasingly, there was acceptance and I think ChillOut did a lot for that.

Sarah Lang: It's the largest regional, gay regional festival in Australia. It's certainly the largest festival this town puts on - brings the most people into the town...ever.

Anne-Marie Banting: The whole community comes out and embraces it, and all the shop owners, they all put the flag out, everybody is included.

Sarah Lang: It's one of those, sort of, I guess what everyone would like to have in every community, in that it really doesn't matter whether you're gay or straight.

(Text on screen) But what is community? What does it look like? And what does it feel like?

♪ Emotive Music ♪

Anneke Deutsch: Historically it's more support during a time when you can't be out. Being with others who know what it's like to make that choice between being out and being true to who you are and facing the insults and ostracism and probably sometimes physical assault.

Or, the psychological damage of being in the closet and living two lives. One life where people know who you are and then perhaps work or everywhere else you live where it's a complete secret. And that takes its toll. So I think having community means that you can be with others who have experienced that same thing.

Sarah Lang: In the time when I was coming out it was really difficult, so I looked at my community as my family, and they were the family that I chose.

Bruce Rolfe: I think the fact that there is a large gay population, they are very accepting, they are very experienced with gay people and therefore somebody like me who comes in and wants to run some livestock, I'm not a freak show.

Anne-Marie Banting: Our community here in Daylesford is very accepting. I've never had an issue. I've never had a problem.  And that's not just our GLBTIQ community, it's everyone that fits, for us.

Sarah Lang: It's lovely to live in a community where being gay doesn't have any negative results at all. We just live like one big happy family.

Film - Tiny Empire Collective (producers), 'Daylesford Stories: What's in a name?', 2016, Way Back When Consulting Historians

Graham Willett: Most of us today would recognise the rainbow flag as a symbol of this very diverse community that we live in. Most people though wouldn’t be able to name what the individual colours are meant to mean. They all have a meaning.

I think in the same way, it’s true when we talk about the community. There are a whole series of names that people give to themselves. And sometimes they just sort of real off LGBTI without necessarily thinking about what that might mean, what those individual bits mean, where they come from and why they matter.

The first terms that we know of that we used do describe ourselves was the word camp – C A M P. You could be camp man, camp woman, camp, camps it was fairly indiscriminate. But that was the common word, it’s the most common word until 1972 when gay liberation arrives from the United States. And then the word gay comes into use.

Anah Holland-Moore: It was a women’s town to start out with, not so much gay and lesbian as it is now. It was all the lezzos and the women.

Anneke Deutsch: It was a lesbian feminist community, that came out of – a lot of the women came out as lesbians during women’s liberation in the 1970s. I think originally we shared some experience of discrimination with gay men but we didn’t share the experience of sexism with them, so lesbian identity was always different.

Graham Willett: They often worked together gay men and lesbians, but they also worked apart. And lesbians in particular felt the need for a separate word. And really that marks a period where a whole series of new words start to evolve. As the movement evolves, as society changes, as more and more step forward to claim their rights, they start to find words to describe themselves.

Anne-Marie Banting: I grew up when there wasn’t that, there was just a gay community. The labeling wasn’t as sensitive and there wasn’t the visibility or the acceptance.

Sarah Lang: I think that’s one of the most gorgeous things about this town, is that we’ve got X amount of girls in this town, we’ve got X amount of boys, some are drag queens, some are camp, some are straight-laced, some are bears. We all love it.

Anne-Marie Banting: We have every part of our community come through here, which is wonderful. They find a safe place. I think Daylesford is a really, really good safe place.

Graham Willett: The use of the LGBTIQ is intended to acknowledge everybody else but to bind them into the same kind of political space. But it’s difficult. It’s always going to be difficult, it always has been difficult since people started using the word gay.

Sarah Lang: I can understand why especially in the earlier days, why lesbians wanted to be identified differently to gay men and why bisexuals wanted their own identity, and transgender and intersex and everybody else. I think we’re in danger however of becoming an alphabet soup and it starts to lose that meaning.

Anneke Deutsch: I think the more groups that are added, the less meaning it really has. It seems like it’s become an umbrella to anybody who’s non-heterosexual and that’s at the cost unfortunately about any information about lesbian health, lesbian ageing and to some extent, information about gay men too. So it’s a big cost I think. It means that our issues and our stories aren’t getting out there.

Anah Holland-Moore: I do think this are progressing really. I think we could do a lot more you know, so that a lot of young people aren’t traumatised and older people. Used to get a lot of suicides and things, that would be great the day all that stops.

Sarah Lang: I think it’s human nature to want to hang out with people who are just like me. Because I know then that you will get me, because you are just like me. So I think there will always be that element, and I don’t ever think that we will ever have one word that covers the whole community. And I think in a way that would be a shame as well because essentially we’re a colourful as all get out so, yeah.

Film - Tiny Empire Collective (producers), 'Dr Gweneth Wisewould', 2016, Way Back When Consulting Historians

Ian Braybrook: She was one of very few women to have studied medicine back in those days. She graduated back in 1915, which is pretty amazing. She was a unique person. Never will there be another Doctor Gwen, never.

There’s so much to tell you about Gwen. She came from a very wealthy family. Wisewould solicitors, Frank Wisewould was her father. Her mother was from Tasmania, one of the Fields from Westbury, Tasmania, very, very wealthy people, very influential people.

How she ever finished up in this little town is just an amazing story. 1938 she came here when she was about 57 years old. When most people are thinking about retiring, she and Ella her companion, made their home here in Trentham.

She fell foul of Dame Mabel Brooks who actually ran the Queen Victoria Hospital. Dame Mabel ruled it with a fist of iron, and she didn’t like Gwen because of Gwen’s bohemian ways. She mixed with the arty, farty people of St Kilda. She lived in St Kilda and she used to just outrage Dame Mabel Brooks because of all the wild parties she used to have. Mixing with all these bohemians, artists and things. She rode a motorbike! Would you believe that? A female doctor which is rare anyway, riding a motorbike on her rounds in Melbourne.

This sort of stuff you know. Dame Mabel Brooks had her in the gun and she found a reason, I’m not really sure exactly what happened, but she had her in the gun and she found a reason to sack her. She was fired from the Queen Victoria Hospital. That meant the end of her career in Melbourne. To be sacked from the Queen Victoria, end of question. So that’s why she came to Trentham.

Instead of packing it in, and she thought about taking up the brush, she was an artist, a very skilled artist too. She thought about that but no decided she would come to Trentham and set up a practice here.

When she came to Trentham, she looked around and thought this is a cold place, so she dressed appropriately. She wore men’s clothes. Men’s boots, men’s trousers, men’s overcoats. She dressed like a male. That sort of shocked the people in Trentham. It was an ultra conservative town when she arrived here in 1938, this town was one of the most conservative town’s in Australia.

Fortunately for her, there was a baby boom going on at this time and the first few weeks she was here she delivered umpteen babies and established herself as a competent physician. The people of Trentham accepted her immediately, despite the fact that she was a bit strange.

She used to drive a pick up truck, big old dodge pick up truck. And she carried a door in the back of it, a house door – that was the stretcher she carted around. She made her way through this place in the winter – it was pretty fierce back then. Mud roads, they were not made and she travelled all around this district looking after the sick. She had rooms down at Blackwood which is about 8km down the road and the road between here and there was pretty rugged. So she did all that. And she’d sort of go til she dropped. People would see her on the side of the road, asleep, dead to the world because she just kept going and going.

She used to operate there at the hospital and Doctor J C M Harper was the Daylesford doctor, they used to work together. She did quite a lot of operating and field work there. And here too at the Trentham Hospital which was a bit of a joke, it had two beds and one nurse. It was her hospital, Doctor Gwen.

She treated people for nothing. She rarely sent a bill, very rarely send an account.

She came here with her companion, Ella Miller Belle which is a lovely name. A Scottish lass that she met in Melbourne. She teamed up with her, I’m not sure of the year probably shortly after she graduated about 1918 thereabouts. Gwenny absolutely adored her. Ella near the end of her life for many years was actually stricken with arthritis, she could hardly get around. And Gwenny nursed her at home until the day she died. Completely devoted to her, a wonderful person.

The people of Trentham didn’t ask any questions about her at all. They accepted her as a doctor and a person. When I first started writing and investigating Gwen when I came here. No one knew anything about her. She arrived in Trentham, set up her practice and that’s all they knew about her. She was a good doctor and the loved her.

She was attending a meeting of the committee, that ran the little nursing hospital and she suffered a heart attack at the meeting. She was put into bed and she died that night in her hospital. I think it was quite fitting that that’s the way she went.

She was a marvelous doctor. Very talented, highly regarded surgeon in Melbourne she was. She saved a lot of lives, a lot of lives. That’s what I’d like people to remember. Her sexuality aside, I don’t think that comes into it at all. She was just a wonderful person.

Film - Tiny Empire Collective (producers), 'So Who Was the First Gay in the Village?', 2016, Way Back When Consulting Historians

Anne E. Stewart: So I think it really was based around my children growing up in a gay town and my son once in about grade five, all these boys arrived for a party and he was walking down the drive way and he said: ‘Mum, Mum, tell this young boy’ – he was a bit of a redneck I’d say – ‘you know gay people don’t you Mum?’ I thought that was a bit curious. Then there was another time when he used to sing the playschool song as ‘gayschool’. It was just all these little incidences of kids growing up that made me interested. This is a really gay friendly town and I wonder why it’s so gay friendly?

Then one night at a party I’d had a couple of drinks and because Chill Out was always so much fun, I thought I want to get involved, I want to do something. And I was thinking of calling it, ‘So tell them Mum, you know gay people’ and a friend who’s gay and does theatre work said: ‘Annie, that title, it’s a little bit, you know, it’s not going to work’, so then we came up with, ‘So who was the first gay in the village?’

So I thought, oh great I’ll just go to the library and I’ll start doing the research and it will all be good and I’ll have it. But of course, nothing has been written about this. Because I’d been involved in Daylesford for so long, I’d been on school council, the Swiss-Italian, just you know I’m a community person, and I thought I know a few people I can ask. And then I just started investigating and asking.

As I said, as it went on and I was looking into the research, there’d be people who’d say, ‘Oh I never realized they were gay.’ It’s not the first thing I would ask people, but because I was researching it and looking into why it became so gay friendly, I just started to uncover lots of little stories.

And when your profession is a story-teller, you sort of have this radar and things sort of come to you, attract to you, you know so it just started tumbling on. And then of course the other thing was I’d always heard there was a gay and lesbian archive down in Melbourne so I thought I’ll go down and see what I can find there. Because I did a lot of oral interviews, but when I went down it was so interesting for me because I was like, ‘Oh I remember that poster up on the Town Hall’, that was some of the women’s balls they used to have and it was girls only so, women only, so they’d be out at different locations. So yeah it just slowly came to me, that this show, there’s a lot in it.

I started way back at white settlement, moved on to the bush ranger, then of course Gwyneth Wisewould you would’ve heard of, then Norman Lindsay who was born in Creswick with his family, it was reputed that his brother Robert was gay, he was a costume maker. So just all these little snippets.

The form of the story was, ‘So was Captain Moonlight the first gay in the village?’ was someone else? And you know it, that way I could just add all these different characters.

The thing that turned at the edge for this gay friendly town, was when a lot of the gay businesses started this chamber of commerce and that was what really sort of got it moving along.

Daylesford sort of started exploring these ideas and kids were accepted more because often they did have two same sex parents. So you know we were a little bit at the forerun of it, so I’m really interested to see how that might be developed for other regions so people feel safe with it. Because some people find it threatening the idea of same sex couples. So perhaps we might have a little bit more understanding than some places that we might be able to share with other communities.