First Mardi Gras: Newly Discovered Footage

The police attack on the first gay Mardi Gras in Kings Cross late at night on Saturday 24 June 1978 was a pivotal moment in Australian social and political history. Though there had been gay and lesbian groups and protests after 1970, for the first time gay and lesbian rights became a significant public issue, creating a momentum for reforms. Sydney’s gay subcultures became commercialised, geographically focused and visible, while remaining illegal.  

The late-night police riot also provoked a crisis for the NSW Wran Labor government, about the right to peaceful assembly, civil liberties, police power and corruption, uniting a broad alliance of progressive civil society organisations, unions, and ALP (Australian Labor Party) branches demanding the dropping of charges against those arrested, repeal of the NSW Summary Offences Act, and repeal of the anti-buggery law (NSW Crimes Act 1900, s 79).  

See newly discovered file footage of the first Mardi Gras below from Ten Network's Eyewitness News:

Gay Solidarity Group

By 1976 the American Christian Right had gained momentum in its backlash against reproductive and sexual freedom. In California in 1978, state senator Briggs introduced a referendum for a law to ban all supporters of gay rights from any job in the California school system. Connections within the international Trotskyist movement between lesbian and gay activists in San Francisco and Sydney led to a letter in March, appealing for actions in solidarity with the massive Gay Freedom Day march due to be held on the last Saturday in June in San Francisco. After receiving the letter, activists at Sydney University, including myself and Annie Talvé, called together people from lesbian and gay campus, religious, left, campaign and services groups for a series of meetings in the Sydney University Students' Representative Council. This diverse coalition took the name ‘Gay Solidarity Group’. 

Initially the plan was for a morning street march in central Sydney, around demands to ‘Stop Police Attacks on Gays, Women and Blacks’, for repeal of the buggery laws, and against discrimination in employment, education and child custody. It would be followed by a forum on international lesbian and gay solidarity at Paddington Town Hall. Activists from Sydney University, the Political Action task force, the Communist Party, and key lesbian and gay campaigners who were moving away from CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution, formed in 1970) won support for an innovative late-night street party, carnival, festival or Mardi Gras – a celebration dancing down Oxford Street from Taylor Square. We sought and received police permission and hired a modest sound truck. Press publicity for gay liberation and the planned Mardi Gras was prominent in the campus and socialist newspapers, and in the then-progressive Australian. The organisers relied on letters to groups, phone calls, posters, leaflets and word-of-mouth.  

The Saturday morning march from Town Hall to Martin Place with 500 people was larger than any previous gay protest in Australia, but the various tribes were not instantly comfortable with one another. They included leather men, lesbian feminists, Catholics, Communists, anarchists, butch dykes and drag queens, socialists, Liberals, Jews, Protestants, Young Labor, and groups of workers – teachers, postal and railway workers, nurses… 

Sydney's Stonewall 

By 10.30 pm, outside the court at Taylor Square on a cold night, we were unsure if we could get critical mass for our experiment in celebration, but eventually we set off with the small sound truck playing Meg Christain’s ‘Ode to a Gym Teacher’ and the Tom Robinson Band’s ‘(Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay’. Apart from the truck, there were no typical protest placards or banners. Only a small percentage of participants were dressed in carnival costumes. Large numbers of revellers joined as we moved down Oxford Street, but the police decided to not observe the permit. There had never been such a night-time event in an area where police maintained a profitable relationship with the syndicate that ran drugs, gay bars, gambling, sex shops and brothels, all outside the law.  

The police pushed the parade fast down Oxford Street and arrested Lance Gowland, the driver of the sound truck, to prevent the planned dispersal into Hyde Park, so the 1500-strong crowd spontaneously marched down College Street and up William Street to Kings Cross. By the time the crowd was dispersing near El Alamein Fountain, police wagons blocked both ends of Darlinghurst Road and began illegally beating and arresting lesbians and gay men. They did not expect a physical resistance, and the active hostility of people in the streets of Kings Cross. Many arrestees were freed from police wagons, but 53 were taken to crowded cells in the notoriously violent Darlinghurst Police Station in Taylor Square. All night supporters kept vigil outside the cells, gathering bail money and demanding access by doctors and lawyers. The last arrestees were freed from Central Police Station around 10 am Sunday. Some women and men were badly beaten, including Peter Murphy. 

The riot was unexpected, shocking and very traumatic. Exhilarating and terrifying. We knew immediately it was a turning point. We had sought to commemorate the ninth anniversary of New York’s Stonewall Riots, which catalysed a new era in the international gay and lesbian liberation movement. Inadvertently, we replicated that moment for the Australian movement.  

We held emergency meetings on Sunday afternoon at CAMP, 33a Glebe Point Road. Leigh Holloway and Susan Hawke coordinated media responses. Labor Premier Wran attacked the parade participants and lauded the police.  

Outside the Court

On Monday morning hundreds of supporters came to show solidarity with the arrestees’ appearance in the Liverpool Street courthouse, which against magistrates’ orders was closed by police. Seven more protesters were arrested, for peaceful assembly. Large protests were held in support in other Australian capitals, and solidarity actions took place in London and the USA. 

After the court appearances and new arrests on Monday, the Sydney Morning Herald published the names, addresses, jobs and ages of those arrested, exacerbating family conflict, and discrimination in education and employment.  

See file footage below from Ten Network's Eyewitness News:

Drop the Charges Campaign

A large community meeting debated strategy, and the outcome was choosing to apply for police permission for a Saturday morning march on 15 July instead of night-time civil disobedience. Two thousand people came to what was then the largest gay rights protest in Australian history, including many supporters from the women’s and other social movements, trade unionist, student and left political organisations. After police provocation, another 14 were arrested outside Darlinghurst Police Station.   

The campaign to drop the charges and repeal the Summary Offences Act proceeded throughout 1978, with another 104 protesters arrested in a march from the Fourth National Homosexual Conference at Paddington Town Hall.  Pressure was building on the Wran Labor government, which was looking unpleasantly like the reactionary Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland. In 1979 most of the charges were dropped, and the hated 1970 NSW Summary Offences Act was repealed in May. This law had enabled police to control all public spaces and arrest peaceful protesters, beggars, ‘vagrants’, sex workers, fortune-tellers, gamblers, lesbians showing affection in public, men being solicited for sex in parks and toilets, gay men dancing in illegal bars, drug users, people who put up posters, those using ‘unseemly words’, and people drinking in public – which had been particularly used against First Nations people.  

The first Mardi Gras alienated many gay groups, businesses and media, but this was overcome by the peaceful success of the second Mardi Gras on 30 June 1979 attended by 5,000 people, with a week of activities, a fair day, dance and film festival. Street activism and lobbying led to the inclusion of homosexuality as a protected ground in the anti-discrimination law in 1982, the reform of the buggery laws in 1984, a progressive partnership response to AIDS from 1985, and the first step to recognising same-gender relationships in Australian immigration in 1985. 

Ken Davis helped organise the first Mardi Gras in 1978 after receiving an appeal for solidarity actions with the Gay Freedom Day march in San Francisco and to mark the anniversary of Stonewall. He later helped found the Gay Trade Union Group, worked in HIV/AIDS and disability services, and was International Programs Manager for Union Aid Abroad‐APHEDA and Co-Chair of First Mardi Gras Inc. In 2024 he received the Australian Council for International Development Ronald Wilson Human Rights Award for his work in LGBTQIA+ rights, HIV treatments in South Africa, and Palestine justice. 

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Main image: Screenshot from Eyewitness News report about protests following police arrests at the first Mardi Gras in Sydney, June 1978. Courtesy: Ten Network. NFSA title: 613914