Rodney Croome . gay advocate

e) Life, love and belonging

'Nowt as queer as folk'

This eulogy was given at the funeral of Roz Houston in Burnie on Friday May 14th 2010.

Just a word or two can say so much.

Take the term “transgender folk”.

This was the way Roz Houston referred to people like herself, people for whom the gender they know themselves to be is not the gender the world has assigned them.

She knew the word “transgender” is new, strange and alien to many people, so she coupled it with a word that, perhaps more than any other, connotes tradition, continuity, connection and belonging.

These values were important to Roz.

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e) Life, love and belonging

The Emancipist

This essay was published in the Spring 2008 edition of Island magazine.

~ At the Market

My cell was bound by iron bars on three sides. This was because it was a police cell, and not one in which wrong-doers were meant to spend any length of time. In each of the two cells joining mine a friend sat quietly. Although we could speak, touch, even kiss if we wished, we chose to sit as far from each other as our confinement allowed. We had not been told how long we would be held, and feared we may be detained many more times. As this undefined period of detention was a form of intimidation, these cells, with their abundance of bars, were perfectly designed to fulfil their purpose.

High up in my cell’s wall was a small barred window. Through it, if I climbed the toilet and braced myself between bars and uneven stones, I could peer to another old police building across the lane. Its forgotten lintels and bricked-in doorframes were fossils from passed carcerial worlds suspended in layers of brick and stone, and now half drowned by a tide of deep, late-afternoon shadow.

Perched precariously in this way above the cistern I heard the cries of the others who had been arrested. Each time a police van stopped in the laneway the cramped detainees would break into chants to which we and the women locked up on the floor below would sometimes respond. Incoherent angry shouting followed as each person the van slowly disgorged was processed, locked up or ejected from custody.

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e) Life, love and belonging

From Taroona to Tórshavn, homophobia hurts everyone.

This article was published on the Tasmanian Times website on December 1st, 2006.

When Mary Donaldson became Crown Princess Mary of Denmark she vowed herself not only to her husband Frederick, but to her future subjects…all of them.

In the words of the presiding cleric, Mary had come from the other side of the world and would now have to acquaint herself with Danes, Greenlanders and Faeroe Islanders.

I was recently reminded of the details of Mary’s vows by Kurt Krickler, Austria’s leading gay activist, and the only Austrian Vienna TV could find to translate Mary and Frederick’s wedding.

Kurt is also one of the few people I know who’s been to the Faeroe Islands.

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e) Life, love and belonging

Restoring optimism to the national story

This statement of aspiration for Australia's future was written for the Australian Future Directions Conference in Melbourne in February 2006, and published in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on 4.2.06.

Last year a fellow marcher in the Brisbane Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade introduced himself to me halfway over the Victoria Bridge. His name was Wendell and he was an unassuming man, humble even.

But from what I’d already learnt of this man from a mutual friend in Melbourne I knew his quiet manner belied a powerful story.

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e) Life, love and belonging

The Today Show

This piece was published in Island magazine, edition 101, Spring 2005

“…the wonderful Tasmanian sunlight, which is like no other sunlight in the world! …warm and impetuous, yet not fierce; dazzling, but not glaring; full of strength, yet tender, glad, vigorous, exuberant, but often suggesting an underlying sadness.”

~ Marie Bjelke-Petersen

It was 6am and I was sleepy, one degree and I wasn’t dressed for it.

The horses were happy. You could tell by the way they kicked their concrete troughs and generally made a racket. Just over their fence there were so many new people, big trucks, cables, satellite dishes. It was a momentous occasion for horse and human.

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e) Life, love and belonging

The Football Team

This piece was published in Island magazine, edition 100, Winter 2005

The quality of a football team can be judged by the distance it travels for its end-of-season vacation. Teams in state leagues end up in an interstate capital, or a Queensland resort if they finished the season near the top of the competition. The national league long ago abandoned Gold Coast hotels for their equivalent in Bali or Fiji.

Teams in district competitions have to settle for a booze-ups closer to home, although not at home because that would defeat the purpose. So it is for players in Tasmanian country rosters whose reward for months of weekend mud wrestling is a bus trip to Hobart, a twenty dollar drink voucher at the Wild West Sports Saloon and a door pass to the tepid amusements and small moral challenges of lap dancing at the Men’s Gallery.

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e) Life, love and belonging

Brisbane Pride Rally

Pro-gay and anti-gay alike; we are all bound together in the dance of change.

(address at the Brisbane LGBT Pride Rally, June 12th, 2003)

Hello Brisbane!

Just a few days ago it was announced that three Tasmanian gay activists, Richard Hale, Nick Toonen and myself, have received Orders of Australia for our contributions to gay and lesbian human rights.

Richard, Nick and I are humbled by these honours. But what is more important to us is what these awards symbolise.

They show how far Tasmanian and Australian society have changed for the better over the past decade.

They commemorate the efforts and sacrifices of the many thousands of people who helped make this change possible.

And they say that advocating for LGBTI rights is a legitimate, important and honourable thing to do.

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e) Life, love and belonging

Another word for freedom

Is Tasmania just a phase that we all grow out of?

(published on the "Discover Tasmania" website, August 2002)

"Are you still living in Hobart?" Most of my friends in Sydney have asked me this question. Some ask it almost every time we speak. When I answer with "are you still living in Sydney?" they huff "don’t be stupid, you know what I mean." Yes, I think, I know exactly what you mean. Like my parents once believing I’d grow out of homosexuality, you think Tasmania is a phase I’m passing through.

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e) Life, love and belonging

The grandchildren of fascism

How two queer Australians cope with their families' Nazi past?

(published in the Sydney Star Observer, February 2002)

From the outside Mauthausen Concentration Camp looks like a movie set, carefully designed with the sole intention of making a dramatic first impression. Inside the gates the drama dissolves into the dullness of a prison camp, with high walls, barbed wire and rows of identical barracks.

It's only when you descend below the surface that the horror really hits you.

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e) Life, love and belonging

"Quiet now boy"

In memory of Peter Croome

(eulogy at the funeral of Peter Croome, Devonport, January 2002)

A great philosopher once wrote that what we cannot say we should feel in silence. When life is at its most beautiful or agonising there is no need for unnecessary words or actions. To experience this world at its deepest and fullest is to be moved to a voiceless awe.

This kind of profound respect for life came instinctively to my father, and was one of his greatest gifts to those around him.

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