Rodney Croome . gay advocate

h) Culture, history and literature

Love and Freedom in Van Diemen’s Land

This article was published on the Tasmanian Times website on 29.9.09.

In fifty years time, the film Van Diemen’s Land will be remembered, not because it was the first to deal sympathetically with the escape of “convict cannibal” Alexander Pearce from Sarah island in 1822, or that some of its gruesome scenes made film-goers vomit.

It will be remembered because it was the first film ever to approach the subject of convict homosexuality.

The references are subtle.

As the group Pearce escapes with falls asleep around a camp fire, their leader, Robert Greenhill, slides a protective arm around fellow-escapee, Matthew Travers.

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h) Culture, history and literature

Convictism and education

This article was published on Tasmania Times on 26.5.09.

Mark Sayer’s recent comments linking convictism to Tasmania’s poor educational and skill levels have met with a remarkable level of scepticism, from letters to the editor to kitchen table conversations.

In part, the scepticism is political; as a former Labor staffer Sayer has been accused of excusing perceived ineptitude in educational policy and administration.

But mostly the scepticism is historical; how can something that happened 150 years ago influence contemporary attitudes, many Tasmanians are asking.

What I find remarkable about this latter groups of sceptics is how many are happy to accept the influence of history in different circumstances.

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h) Culture, history and literature

A one-sided portrayal of Tasmania

This article on "Whatever Happened to Brenda Hean?" was published in the Hobart Mercury on 8.10.08.

When Brant Webb and Todd Russell emerged from the gold mine that almost became their grave, they were hailed “great Australian heroes”.

But when they stumbled in an interview with Oprah, the mainland media immediately dubbed them “inarticulate Tasmanian miners”.

It’s not an isolated example.

Ricky Ponting is “a great captain” when the Australian cricket team wins, but on more than one occasion has been dismissed by mainland commentators as “a former Tasmanian player” when it lost.

Bob Brown is hailed nationally as “a global environmental hero” when he stands against climate change, but in the mainland press Guy Barnett is consistently “a Senator from Tasmania” when he opposes social change.

It seems when Tasmanians do something brave or good it’s despite us being Tasmanian. When we fall, fail, or do something others don’t like, it’s because we’re Tasmanian.

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h) Culture, history and literature

"The interview: Mark Trevorrow"

This interview appeared in the Age on 9.9.04

The man behind the high-camp character Bob Downe walks up to me after I take a final photo in a city street and says, in an exasperated manner: "I know a good headline for this story - 'He hasn't done badly for a poof'."

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h) Culture, history and literature

New SFU

The new series of Six Feet Under starts in Australia on Monday September 6 at 10.30pm. Here's a preview from LA.

"Six Feet Under" Back Above Ground
Preview of Season Four 
by L. A. Vess, 365.com

Season four of HBO's hit series "Six Feet Under" won't miss a beat when it premieres this Sunday. The action starts out just minutes after Nate (Peter Krause) showed up, bloody and bruised, on the doorstep of ex-lover Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) at the end of last season. What happens next may be a foregone conclusion - but the rest of the new season may prove to have the most unpredictable and surprising plot twists ever seen on the show.

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h) Culture, history and literature

Review of Death of a Drag Queen
(Julian Halls, Ginninderra Press, 2003)

Why would anyone bother reading or writing about drag queens?

(launch speech delivered at Fuller's Bookshop, Hobart, October 12th 2003)

If left to my own devices, Death of a Drag Queen is a book I would never read.

First of all there’s the title.

Death of a drag queen - that’s nothing special, drag queens die all the time. They die little deaths when their songs are misqueued or they fumble their lines. They die long lingering deaths when get their own shows on JJJ or MTV. When the illusion is broken, as it was the other night in a show I was half watching in Melbourne when a wig fell off to reveal wispy grey hair underneath, they die a sudden and very painful death. Simply put, most drag queens present a very compelling case for euthanasia.

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h) Culture, history and literature

Lights, Camera, Queer: representations of gay men in contemporary mainstream cinema

Why Hollywood's homos are as appalling as ever

(published in the Sydney Morning Herald, April 2000)

Mainstream film audiences are encountering male homosexual characters more often then ever before, and it's a rendezvous they're enjoying.

The writers and producers of popular cinema have moved beyond occasionally tossing in a tragic victim or screaming queen to more often and sometimes more subtlely representating gay men. In their turn patrons at Hoyts, Village and Greater Union are forking out in undiminished numbers to follow plots that include homosexual roles.

So should those of us who want to see gay men better represented on the Silver Screen be happy with its new pink tinge?

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h) Culture, history and literature

Review of Priscilla Queen of the Desert

It seems everyone liked it but me

(published in the Sunday Tasmanian, January 1995)

If the background music they play in Department Stores has some hidden power of suggestion over what we buy, Hobart's 1994 Christmas stockings would have been choka with stilettos, rouge and still more stockings.

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h) Culture, history and literature

Review of the republished Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation

Twenty years after it was first published is Dennis Altman's landmark book still relevant?

(published in Island, April 1994)

There is a dangerous arrogance in the contemporary sexual politics called “queer”. This arrogance says that gay identity was doomed from its birth in 1969 to degenerate into an assimilationist project dominated by white middle class men, and that queerness, in its appeal to all the sexually disenfranchised, offers the only genuinely radical alternative.

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h) Culture, history and literature

Review of The Comfort of Men (Dennis Altman, Heinemann, 1993)

But I was far from alone in my assessment of this one

(published in the Hobart Mercury, February 1993)

When I first heard about Dennis Altman's novel The Comfort of Men - over a drink in a gay pub in Melbourne - the author was billing it as 'a book that will show how much Australia has changed in the last twenty years'.

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