Eight homosexual women from Brisbane in their 50s and 60s have quietly but proudly opened the door to a previously unknown part of Brisbane's history from 1970s country town to new world city.
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Their stories are told in a photographic essay book called North of the Border, charting a part of Brisbane's history for homosexuals from Joh Bjelke-Petersen's fear-driven mid-1970s until today.
It's a historical story, it's a love story and it's a Brisbane story.
It's a story telling how hard it has been for gay women to tell their stories of their homes, of their workplaces, of their lives on the weekend in the same way heterosexuals take for granted.
Homosexuality was only decriminalised in Queensland in 1991. That means it was literally a crime to be gay in Queensland until 1991. South Australia had made homosexuality legal in 1972.
Queensland made the change almost 20 years later, after the Bjelke-Petersen government was replaced by the reforming Wayne Goss government.
Interestingly it has taken an "outsider", Heather Faulkner, a Canadian photo-journalist – who has gently persuaded the women to come out and tell their story after moving to Queensland with her partner and enduring her own experiences in Brisbane's gay community.
Heather Faulkner works as a photography lecturer at the Queensland College of Art and began her A Matter of Time project in 2008 as part of her "transmedia" doctoral research; firstly as photographs, now as a book and soon as a documentary.
North of the Border is the book that collects the photos and the women's stories.
She says there is very little pictorial history of homosexuality in Queensland. Gay people in the recent past did not take photos of themselves in the same way heterosexual couples or friends could.
"The fear of just going to the photo lab to get the film developed meant knowing that the technician would be looking at your photographs," she said.
"It means you were constantly under a state of surveillance and you were basically policing your body all the time."
Gay couples would not photograph themselves holding hands on the beach, cuddling on the couch, laughing and hugging while doing the washing up, Faulkner says.
"That freedom wasn't afforded them outside their homes and inside their houses they could, but they couldn't document it."
Heather's photos show women in their kitchens, with their pets, with their partners, having a night out, watching television.
One lady is Carol Lloyd, the dynamic singer/songwriter of Railroad Gin, whose 1974 bluesy flute-driven single (It's Only) A Matter of Time was one of Australia's biggest hits for several years.
Lloyd – now seriously unwell with terminal pulmonary fibrosis - was also a very high-profile and successful advertising executive, promoter and arts strategist and never suffered fools gladly.
A tribute concert to her work, Goodbye Ruby Tuesday, will be held on October 20 at QPAC's Concert Hall.
"I never felt inclined to hide my sexuality," Lloyd writes in North of the Border, telling of being jokingly teased by bands like the wildly flamboyant Skyhooks in the 1970s.
"I never felt it was necessary to make any statement. It was pretty obvious what I was. I wasn't the 70s version of Kylie Minogue, looking gorgeous and cute in a frou-frou thing.
"I was a sweaty, in your face rock singer, singing about taking women to bed. I came out wearing sequins on my nipples and not much else with a fur cape."
Fairfax Media spoke briefly with Carol Lloyd this week to ask why she took part in Heather Faulkner's book, which she described as "amazing."
"I guess it is within our nature to want to leave some sort of legacy and have the truth be known," she said.
"And I think we like have the record straight before we pass on."
Lloyd says the gay community of Brisbane in the 1970s was "a family" and talks of the 379 Club in George Street, where the Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP) group began.
"We looked after each other. We liked each other. It was a place where you could party, where you could safely bring new people into the scene," she said.
The genuinely iconic singer said the effort by author Heather Faulkner to reach out to women was "extraordinary."
"I think it's extraordinary that a woman from another country cares enough about this community to tell its story in a caring and understanding sort of way."
Another is Lyn Fraser, a Victorian born in 1957 who shifted to Queensland when she was 18 and was always worried she could be sent to prison for being gay.
As a child she remembered playing as the "captain of the spaceship" and never with the dolls.
"Coming to Queensland reinforced the shame and embarrassment, because you hid," she writes.
"I hid my being gay from people. I didn't want to go to jail. It was a very scary time."
She worked as a waitress at a cocktail bar at the (now demolished) Coronation Hotel on Coronation Drive during the 1970s and 1980s and most of its clientele were gay, musicians, television or film people.
At the time Premier Joh Bjelke Petersen's homosexual deviance laws were in place.
"If two women came into the restaurant and I suspected them of being lesbians I had the right to call the police," Fraser writes.
"Where I was working, most of our clients were gay! We would have had no customers left."
Lyn Fraser says today she would live nowhere else, but Queensland.
"I love Queensland to bits. I don't want to live anywhere else in the world. I think it's wonderful," she says.
"But at that time we were four million years behind everything else, everyone else."
North of the Border: Stories from the A Matter of Time project by Heather Faulkner by UWA Publishing.
