Weston Bate Memorial Lecture at Sovereign Hill

University of Melbourne PhD candidate Jacobin Bosman presents Beyond the Cities of the Plain: Settler Sexuality and Gender on Victoria's Goldfields.

Is queer history urban history? The urban/rural divide has long characterised histories of sexuality and gender, defining cities as spaces of a vibrant queer subculture, and the rural or regional as empty sites to be escaped.

The expansion of pastoral and mining interests in nineteenth-century Victoria, however, made non-urban instances of sexual and gender transgression routinely visible. At times controversial, sometimes exceptional, often they were simply unremarkable.

In this year's Weston Bate Lecture, Jacobin Bosman presents a reimagining of how settler society understood, experienced, and expressed sexuality and gender through a case study of the Victorian goldfields (1851-1879).

Focusing on moments in which the purportedly unspeakable or unknown were rendered publicly visible by courtrooms and newspapers, this lecture discusses the multiple meanings made of same-sex desire and cross-gender expression involving settlers in rural, regional and remote parts of the colony.

In doing so, it presents a new image of this time and area. One in which 'the queer' was as often a fundamental part of everyday experience, as it was a threat to colonial advancement.