What will the NSW inquiry into historical gay-hate crimes mean for the bush?
The town of Inverell in the New England region of New South Wales is renowned for rural commodities and its sapphires. But for the past decade it has held a quietly ignominious place in the state’s police records due to the grisly death of a resident in 1989.
Not much is known about Russell Payne, the 33-year-old whose body was found by his landlord in February 1989 in a scene that presented a conundrum to police. Semi-naked, lying on his back in his ground-floor unit, Payne’s body was bruised and his genitals shockingly swollen. Under closer examination, the broken end of a TV aerial was discovered inside his penis.
The local media headlined a murder, despite police suggesting foul play was “a remote chance”. The coronial notes described “bizarre sexual practices” yet made no comment about Payne’s sexual orientation, which remains unknown. Septicemia was listed as the cause of death. After his burial in an unadorned grave, the story disappeared from Inverell’s conversations.
Yet two decades later, researchers picked Payne’s case out of a pile of various rulings of misadventure and suicide. Aggregated using various hate-crime hallmarks, including genital mutilation, a list of 88 suspected gay-hate murders surfaced, dating from the 1970s.
The vast majority of these took place in Sydney suburbs where gay men were routinely bashed and sometimes killed. Payne’s case was one of two in rural areas, and the only one west of the Great Dividing Range.
This week’s announcement by the Perrottet government of a judicial inquiry into historical gay and transgender hate crimes comes after multiple internal NSW Police investigations, parliamentary inquiries and arrests of suspects.
But cases like Payne’s raise an unavoidable question: will the police take another look at the deaths of almost ninety men, and the circumstances that led to many more attacks never being reported? Or are the historical cases destined to remain in the filing cabinets while the homophobic attacks continue?
High-profile metropolitan investigations into the deaths of Scott Johnson and Raymond Keam have led to charges being laid; but for rural cases, the first step still seems to be accepting a hate crime may have taken place.
Kept out of the records
Sue Thompson is a former police gay and lesbian client consultant who previously worked as a case assessor for the NSW Victims of Crime Compensation Tribunal. She has contributed to gay-hate crime research and investigation for more than three decades, including the list of 88 suspected gayhate crimes.
“In 1987, I got a regional-case on my desk that had been through court, and the court had found self-defence,” she says.
The case involved two friends, one of whom had killed the other after allegedly awaking to find his friend groping him.
“Now that, to me, is not self-defence; but it’s the sort of thing that in a country area can be really hard to get some information on, because it can easily be intentionally or unintentionally overlooked, or kept out of the records.”
Shayne Mallard MLC was chair of the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Gay and Transgender Hate Crimes 1970-2010, which reported to government earlier this year. He believes the secrecy around sex between men in country towns has long affected the number of gay-hate reports in rural regions.
“I know in one major regional town that men met down at the river. This is where you get the situation with beats, which is where these murders often occurred,” he says.
“You’ve got men who were identifying as straight but who went to a park or a toilet block and met other men for sex.
“Rural and regional police are strongly networked into their community, and whilst I do respect the police, particularly contemporary police, nonetheless you’re taking a risk if you’re, say, a schoolteacher and you go down to the local bridge and then you get bashed up because you’re looking for sex, and then you go to the police.”
Mallard is one of many anticipating the terms of reference of the judicial inquiry.
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“If there’d been twenty nurses chucked off cliffs and murdered, there’d be a royal commission,” he said.
“The fact is that we know there was in some circumstances a lack of police thoroughness in the investigations, they were often quickly dismissed as a suicide or misadventure, evidence was destroyed.
“It’s unacceptable that our society hasn’t pursued all avenues of inquiry to close this down.”
Retired assistant commissioner of NSW Police, John Ure, gave a live submission to the inquiry, describing the “gravitas” it would bring to the issue.
“The police have established the cold-case unit, and they have got a huge amount of work to trawl through with limited resources,” he said.
Rewriting history
Resources that helped overturn the coronial suicide ruling of Scott Johnson’s death and identified it as a potential homicide – family advocacy, private investigation, and a huge reward for information leading to an arrest – have never been attached to a case like Russell Payne’s.
For the NSW Police, it’s about the burden of proof. In 2018, Operation Parrabell, an internal state police investigation, examined 88 deaths between 1976 and 2000previously identified by academics as potentially involving gayhate motivations. The report found possible anti-gay bias in 27 cases.
As someone who analysed crimes for gay hatred in the era they occurred, Sue Thompson felt this was “absolutely outrageous” and “rewriting history”.
“If you want to do a report to parliament that’s just going on the cases we can prove, that’s one thing; but if you’re actually wanting to deal with things on the ground, on a day-to-day basis, to intervene in matters before they go from abuse to violence to murder, then you’ve got to actually leave the criteria wide and open,” she said.
“If you’re going to sweep possible gay-hate crimes under the carpet and ignore them because there’s not enough proof, then the police are not going to do anything about it, and you’re putting many of those young, emerging LGBTIQA+ people in country areas at great risk.”
Rural LGBTQ+ people have become more visible with the increase in regional events that celebrate diversity. In 2018, the western Riverina town of Hay held its inaugural Rainbow on the Plains festival, while the Broken Heel festival in Broken Hill has been celebrating drag culture since 2015.
But the risks posed by homophobic attitudes remain. According to the final report of the parliamentary inquiry, 79 LGBTQ+ hate crimes were reported in NSW in 2020.
The latest “Private Lives” report on the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ + Australians (with a quarter of its respondents outside cities) indicated a spike in reported homophobic verbal abuse from 25.5% to 34.6%, and a jump from 1.8% to 3.9% in reports of physical violence, since the prior study in 2011. This period covers the federal government’s plebiscite on marriage equality in 2017.
Pressure points
In John Ure’s experience, homophobia in rural communities was rarely overt. Having spent a few years policing in the New England district in the early 1980s, long before the advent of gay and lesbian liaison officers (GLLO), he recalled how gay men in the region lived quietly due to the risk of a prison sentence.
Ure reckons it would have been “a brave government” that ignored the need for a judicial inquiry into historical gay and transgender hate crimes, but says the terms of reference must examine police responses and community attitudes to LGBTQ+.
Hate crime doesn’t get much more personal for openly gay Shayne Mallard, who endured a “small breakdown” during the early days of the parliamentary inquiry, when hearing evidence led to understanding how an attack against him on Oxford Street as a younger man was likely targeted homophobia.
“When the parliament gets a response to government, I’ll move a motion so that parliament will be debating it again. We’re part of a line of pressure points on this issue,” he said.
“The sand is running through the hourglass very fast.”
Michael Burge is a freelance writer based in Glen Innes. His debut novel Tank Water (MidnightSun Publishing) explores the subject of gay-hate crimes in rural Australia.
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