We Were Always Here

This is a walk about building. Not about the laws that hurt people — though they did — and not about the years that took friends away — though they did. It's about the bookshops, kitchens, radio stations, health clinics, churches, pubs and ordinary front rooms where Melbourne's lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer communities made spaces for one another, long before the city was ready to make space for them.

We start in Fitzroy, in the streets where people lived quiet, careful, often double lives in boarding houses and back rooms in the decades when love itself was a criminal offence in Victoria until 1981. We move along Brunswick and Gertrude streets — past the bookshops and printers that put a community's name in print for the first time, past the kitchen tables where the Victorian AIDS Council was first imagined, past the front door of the country's first community-controlled Aboriginal health service, where Blak queer Melburnians have always been part of the story. We cross into Collingwood along Smith Street — the narrative spine — past the pub that became a sanctuary, the corner that hosted the first marches, and the building where Joy 94.9 still broadcasts a community to itself every day of the year.

The through-line is belonging. The dancefloor as sanctuary. The shopfront as declaration. The radio frequency as homecoming. You'll meet activists, publishers, nurses, DJs, drag performers, grandmothers, teenagers and elders — people who, between them, quietly taught a whole city how to live differently.

This walk is a living history. Many of the people in it are still here, still building. We tell it with care, with hope, and with the understanding that the most important parts of any story like this are still being written.