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Loading ...Gay Australia beyond Sydney
WAY DOWN UNDER IN TASMANIA
Catch a 50-minute flight from Melbourne, south across the Tasman Sea to the State of Tasmania. It’s where the Outback and the Old World meet. Tasmania has a history as one of the more conservative states, but it has made huge strides in recent years (it was the first to recognize same-sex union). I found a nice, comfortable GLTB community – but I had to look a little.
I set up camp in the seaside town of Hobart, which is like England’s Mini-Me. From the outside, the port town looks a lot like it might have a hundred years ago, with historic buildings, vintage boats, and old, winding roads. Warehouses, buildings and homes have been modernized on the inside, becoming galleries, shops, restaurants and modern hotels.
Hobart
The Islington, a gay-owned boutique hotel, is a former manor house where you’ll feel like a queen.
In fact, during my stay, the house manager was Queen Elizabeth’s former personal assistant (it’s that kind of place). A modern atrium, with walls of windows allowing natural light to pour in, is married to the original structure. The walls are covered with works of art you might find in a gallery, like Picasso.
If you’re looking for something a little less formal, you’ll want to check-in at Cordina’s Cottages. Matthew Ryan and his partner Wilmar Bouman have painstakingly restored the former home of the Lord Mayor of Hobart. The main house, outbuildings and lush garden are a playground for guests looking for the comforts of home. Wilmer is a well-known area floral designer, so there are always fresh floral arrangements throughout the compound. And you can walk to everything.
Machine Laundry is a must for breakfast (and you can wash and tumble dry a load while you’re there). The gay-owned diner and yes, self-service laundry, is a colorful ’50s style haunt with great food and lattes. The number one menu item is the Eggs Benedict.
Kaos Café is another gay-owned eatery in town where the community gathers, featuring free-range eggs and muesli with honey (a very popular Aussie breakfast). Ask for the best restaurant in town and the locals recommend Marque IV – and I agree. It’s fine dining in a sophisticated atmosphere, located on Elizabeth Pier overlooking the harbor.
You’ll find nightlife, too. SOAK is a drinking establishment from the owners of KAOS (it’s KAOS spelled backwards), complete with scarlet velvet walls. Flamingo’s is the most popular nightspot, open Friday and Saturday nights. There is also Rockefellers, Lickerish and LaLaLand (the first Saturday of the month, at Halo).
See, there’s plenty to do when the sun goes down.
Next page: Come out in the Outback
great articles guys, I’m from melbourne and living in London & Amsterdam now and really miss Melbourne… (btw for foriegn readers “friendly” rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney explains some of these comments) come and enjoy our great cities!
Why is Mark of Australia calling New Zealand a “colossal hole of colossal proportions?”
As 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…
Thanks 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.
Tasmania 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.
nice 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.
I 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”.
Um, 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.
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.