Queering the Collection

By sharing insights and LGBTIQ+ stories connected to Australia’s performing arts history, Queering the Collection highlights the significant contribution of queer artists threaded through our performing arts history.

Profiled artists are invited to respond to items from the collection as a starting point for conversations related to the sexual, gendered and cultural experiences of LGBTIQ+ people and performers. Along with objects from The Australian Performing Arts Collection and a series of photographic portraits commissioned by ACM, Queering the Collection aims to provide an inclusive snapshot ofAustralia’s current and former creative landscape and proudly celebrate queer arts legacy.

Tristan Meecham interviews Janet Anderson, Robyn Archer AO, Colin Batrouney, Caroline Bowditch, Maude Davey OAM, Ben Graetz, Stephen Nicolazzo, Uncle Noel Tovey AM and Christos Tsiolkas.

View the online exhibition HERE

The Australian Performing Arts Collection contains more than 850,000 items representing the history of circus, dance, opera, music and theatre in Australia. For nearly 50 years, we have collected, costumes, objects, programmes, photographs and many more items that tell the story of the performing arts in Australia. 

Many of these items represent the stories of LGBTQIA+ people because queer people have always been integral to the performing arts. The queer dimension to their stories has sometimes been widely acknowledged, sometimes known only within the industry or within communities, and sometimes entirely untold.  Organisations like the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA) have pioneered the telling of historic queer stories, and many of these stories are of people involved with the performing arts. Queer people have played roles in every sense of the term – performing on stage, but also as theatre makers, writers, designers, and all the other roles backstage and front-of-house that are needed to put on a show. 

There is also the performance of queerness itself, and all the choices that implies. Historically, some performers have expressed their queerness on stage and proudly built their performing persona around it. Others, faced with the grim historical reality of prejudice and persecution, have chosen different roles – from subversion, or humorous deflection, to simple silence. Indeed, the collection contains material from the careers of people, like Peter Allen and theatre designer John Truscott, who never publicly acknowledged their sexuality. 

Others were open about their queerness, but even this is not necessarily evident in their representation in the collection. Barbara Angell, Tivoli showgirl turned pioneering female comedian, has, over the years, donated a rich archive of objects and documents from her career to the collection. Following her most recent donation, we featured her reminiscences in an online story. After speaking to me to share her memories of a life in showbusiness, she emphasised that she wanted to get it on the record that “I am, and have always been, gay”. 

Barbara’s determination to make the record clear shows that, as well as gaps in the archival record from historic oppressions and silences, gaps in interpretation can occur; the result of what can happen when we could not, or do not, acknowledge the role that queerness has played in the lives of people in the performing arts. 

Barbara’s determination to make the record clear shows that, as well as gaps in the archival record from historic oppressions and silences, gaps in interpretation can occur; the result of what can happen when we could not, or do not, acknowledge the role that queerness has played in the lives of people in the performing arts. 

For those of us charged with preserving Australia’s rich performing arts heritage and telling the stories of those who have created it, we need to challenge past biases in whose stories get preserved and whose achievements are celebrated. The best way of doing this is to empower artists to tell their own stories. Queering the Collection is a project to explore such experiences, examining some of the many facets of queerness in the history of Australian performing arts from the perspective of seven performers, in conversation with queer artist Tristan Meecham.

Uncle Noel Tovey’s story illustrates the power of personal courage in the face of prejudice. As a First Nations man who had already suffered terrible abuse as a child, he was imprisoned for his sexuality in the 1950s. In his interview for Queering the Collection, he recalls the prejudice he faced from other members of the chorus when appearing in the 1954 J.C. Williamson Theatres Ltd production of the musical Paint Your Wagon. None of this legacy of pain is visible in the public relations sheen of Williamson’s publicity photographs from the show – a vivid illustration of how we need personal accounts to properly understand the past.

One theme that emerges from many of the interviews in Queering the Collection is how the arts can break down barriers of prejudice and be an agent of positive change. Queer performers have been at the forefront of the LGBTQIA+ rights movement, and perhaps no movement in history has so effectively used the arts as a driver to change minds and effect social change.  

For Colin Batrouney, performing in Melbourne Theatre Company’s 1993-1994 production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America was a way to challenge head-on the stigma, shame and silence around the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The play, which presented gay men with HIV as real, complex and human people, helped counter the fear being whipped up across global media.  In Australia, the government’s response, including a 1987 television commercial that presented a bowling-ball-wielding Grim Reaper knocking down people like ninepins, helped fuel this stigma. Angels in America’s humanising and multifaceted approach helped inform Colin in his second career – in HIV prevention with the Victorian AIDS Council (now Thorne Harbour Health). There, he has led a celebratory, fantastical approach to health promotion that recognises people’s complexity and meets them where they are, rather than relying on fear and stigmatisation. 

Angels in America is represented in the collection through the career archive of the production’s designer, Brian Thomson, himself a gay man whose queer sensibility is visible from his earliest student works, through legendary productions including the original production of the Rocky Horror Show and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical. 

Sometimes collections have come from the performer themselves, such as Robyn Archer’s donation of a collection of posters documenting her career from its earliest days. But other queer artists’ careers are represented in partial ways only. In the collection we have material representing an early phase of Christos Tsiolkas’ career, writing for the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre, who donated their archive in 2012. Meecham’s interview with Tsiolkas and Italian Australian theatre-maker Stephen Nicolazzo brings the story up to date – and to a new generation – by discussing Little Ones Theatre’s adaptation of Tsiolkas’ Merciless Gods, and the bond they share as queer Australians from migrant backgrounds. 

Another meeting of generations is discussed by legendary performer and pioneer of burlesque in Australia, Maude Davey. Her work with Mama Alto in creating Gender Euphoria, a show with an all trans and non-binary cast that has taken Australian stages by storm since it premiered in the Fairfax Studio in 2019, represents a passing down of wisdom to a new generation of show-makers. The career that developed that knowledge and experience in queer and women’s theatre, cabaret, circus and burlesque is represented glancingly in the collection – in a handful of flyers and photographs from work she has done with the Women’s Circus, the Software new works program at Midsumma, and similar shows. Providing a place for someone like Davey to tell her story can help weave together such sparse threads into a much more meaningful understanding of the changing face of queer performance. 

A living collection is always developing and always being interpreted in new ways, and the experiences and memories of people in the performing arts must be central to this interpretation. In the Australian Performing Arts Collection, as in all historic collections, LGBTQIA+ people have been ever-present, but not ever-visible, and projects like Queering the Collection provide a vital step towards ensuring that queer people’s stories are valued and survive.  

Ian Jackson
Curator, Dance & Opera
Australian Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne