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Loading ...Gay Australia beyond Sydney
If you love a big gay Aussie parade (you know, the one that adds a little color to the mainstream media each year) and a crushing number of near naked guys out for fun, Sydney has what you’re looking for.
However, if you’ve “been there, done that,” or are looking for a different kind of Aussie adventure, head south, and take a chance on the States of Victoria and Tasmania.AUSTRALIA’S “SECOND CITY”
If Sydney is Marsha, Melbourne is Jan (but we all know the later was really the cool Brady girl, right?).
Women at a street festival. All photos are by Michael Hammet.
Australia’s “second city” is expected to steal the spotlight from its big sister when it becomes the country’s most populous city within the next 20 years. It is already considered by many to be the arts and culture center of the country.
It’s an urban hub with cool clubs, top restaurants, historic architecture, museums, and fantastic shopping. The locals are so friendly I felt like Brad Pitt walking the streets with all the smiles and g’days (take a shot every time you hear “no worries” and you’ll be drunk in about five minutes).
Oh, and a river runs through it.
Since it’s birth in the mid-1800s, Melbourne has been growing up along the edge of the Yarra River. Early city planners designed within a central corridor as a way to curb future sprawl, so everything is just a short walk or tram ride away.
“They were way ahead of their time,” according to Dennis Newcombe, a phoenix-based urban planner.
I preferred the Yarra Tram system to a cab (the mostly foreign cabbies didn’t seem to know their way around town). Every bit of space is maximized.
This might explain the unique use of the city’s lanes – the alleys behind the main streets (with names like AC/DC Lane), lined with café tables, packed with people, and leading to the entrances of basement pubs, restaurants (Robot Sushi was a cool discovery) and cozy cafes.
At night, when the main streets are empty, the lanes are hopping. There also are tiny parks throughout town, called “green wedges,” that infuse nature into the cement and brick urban center.
CHECKING IN
I set my bags down at Hotel Lindrum – a cool boutique accommodation within a circa-1900 Romanesque Revival building, once owned by a family of tea merchants. Hotel rep Damian Hill says, “We’re in the center of Melbourne – so everything is just 20-minutes away.”
The space feels more like a home than a hotel, with modern finishes and warm colors complimenting the building’s original bricks and beams. There’s a professional pool table (from its days as a pool hall) and a pillow menu for the perfect night’s sleep.
Plus, there’s a library of the American Film Institute’s top 100 films of all time.
Next page: What to see, what to do
Tasmania?
Not when I lived there. How far they have come, if it is truly as this article states. When I lived there, it carried a possible custodial sentence to be a gay man, and gay women were rumoured to be raped on sight even by police… gay bashing of both genders and trans people was common, and so was deeply hateful vitriol.
This was not in the 1940’s either, this was in the 1990’s.
Good for them. I wish it had been different when I lived there, I was only able to blossom when I moved to the USA. Hardly a bastion of gay acceptance, but at least not so archaic and demonising in the big cities especially.
ReplyUm, almost all the capital cities in Australia (except for maybe 2-3) have rivers running through it. Tasmania is a bit of a backwater, as Rain says… the person who wrote this article seems to be a bit misinformed.
ReplyI agree that Melbourne is a nice place - less brash and vacuous than Sydney, with lovely public spaces and a buzzing cafe culture (if you like that kind of thing, but I don’t drink coffee or tea so I find cafes a bit pointless…).
Tassie is a great place per se and I thoroughly recommend it for tourists seeking something different providing you can “blend”. As a gay-friendly destination, I’m not so sure - at least not yet. In Hobart you may find some gay people (we didn’t, though my gaydar is all screwy of late) but we found homophobia is still rife when we went outside of central Hobart. We noticed that Tasmania was generally not very switched on to two blokes travelling together. This was in March 2008.
Travellers from the US & Canada may want to note that Australia’s voltage is 240W not 110W so make sure your chargers can cope with different voltages.
Cheers from Nick in Sydney
PS - Michael, please check your spelling - Qantas does not have a “u” (it’s an acronym; see the website or Wikipedia for an explanation) and it’s “wombat” not “wambat”.
Replynice article, i used to live in Hobart but never did the interesting stuff and now i live in Sydney, so am required to inform that Melbourne is in fact a hole of colossal proportions. At least you didn’t think we all rode kangaroos or had pet koalas. You did however make a few geographical errors, crossing the Tasman will in fact take you east to New Zealand which is, you guessed it, a colossal hole of colossal proportions. Also there isn’t a Tasmanian sea. And for those of you who think Tasmania is still gay hell, one of the bigger figures in Tasmanian politics is Bob Brown who is, funnily enough, Gay.
ReplyTasmania was the last State to decriminalize homosexuality, but when it did,the legislation was and is the most progressive in Australia. Tasmania was the first state to set up registration of civil unions before the recent legislation in the Australian Capital territory.
The Federal government of Australia has a law that restricts marriage to one man with one woman. Tasmanians are now debating a possible State same-sex marriage law.
If you like hiking, Tasmania is a wilderness paradise, with many famous national park tracks like Cradle Mountain in the centre of the island and the track to Frenchman’s Cap in the unique cool temperate rainforest of the southwest.
Gay Tasmanian Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Greens in the federal parliament, was a leader of the successful struggle to stop the damming and flooding of the wild Franklin River and much of the southwestern rainforest. He continues to lead campaigns to stop the woodchipping of other old-growth forests in Tasmania.
ReplyThanks for the great article on Melbourne. Come here if you like real Aussie men without the Sydney attitude (see Mark’s comment above for a taste of that.) Don’t forget to check out the scene North of the river-Collingwood in particular–for a good type. Cheers guys. Jack.
ReplyAs an Aussie, I’m all for you guys coming over and checking out stuff beyond Sydney. Melbourne is wonderful - one of my favs - and Tassie is beautiful. But don’t forget that Sydney itself is more than Oxford St and the Mardi Gras. I live in Sydney. The fabulous hub of cosmopolitan and queer-friendly life is Newtown-Enmore-Erskineville in the inner western suburbs. It has the highest concentration of shopping (on actual streets, not malls!), live music venues, bars and clubs outside of the CBD, including gay, queer, drag queen and drag king venues. Check it out!
Echoing Tony F, Tassie decriminalised sodomy in 1997, and quickly enacted a suit of other progressive laws and policies, including a same-sex relationship register. It is also the only state in which anti-homophobia kits are required in all high schools.
But also, picking up rainbow16, the author is pretty uninformed on a range of issues. I’m a professional geographer, and I can tell you that the official population projections from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in no way indicate Melbourne surpassing Sydney anytime in the next century! Check out the stats at http://www.abs.gov.au. And, yeah, all major Australian cities have rivers (or several rivers) running through them. Sydney has the Parramatta, Georges and Lane Cove Rivers, along with others. Hmmm…
ReplyWhy is Mark of Australia calling New Zealand a “colossal hole of colossal proportions?”
Reply