Next year marks the 40th anniversary of Sydney’s very first Mardi Gras—when hundreds of the city’s LGBTQIA+ community marched down Oxford St in Darlinghurst before it was violently shut down by police.
Robyn Kennedy was 24 when she marched in the 1978 rally and is a member of the Mardi Gras board. She knew that for the historic milestone, it was important to bring the 78ers together again.
“A group of us 78ers have been getting together and planning activities for the 40th anniversary for a while,” she tells SBS.
“We were aware that a lot of people who were involved in events in 1978 have moved interstate or rural parts of NSW and we’re in an older age band now, so there’s a lot of members of our group who are on aged pensions, disability pensions.”
Kennedy says she knew it would be financially difficult for people to attend so decided to start raising some money to try and cover their travel and accommodation costs.
“So far, about ten people have applied, coming from as far away as Cairns,” Kennedy says. “We have people coming from Hobart and a few from rural NSW and Victoria.
“We’ll then seek people who would be happy to provide billeted accommodation so we can cut the costs down because Sydney around that time of year is pretty heavily booked and pretty expensive.”
Kennedy was on the CAMP executive committee, one of the groups that helped organise the events that took place on June 24, 1978.
“We organised the march in the morning and then in the evening, the ill-fated street party,” she says.
“It was fun to start with,” Kennedy continues.
“People got dressed up in ridiculous outfits, big hair and lots of makeup, bizarre hats and capes. One guy got dressed up as the Pope! So it was lots of fun.”
“We had the truck and a few songs on the loudspeaker, people were having a good time.”
“And then it was just like an ambush when the police suddenly appeared,” she says.
“It was well planned, you could tell because they came out of nowhere and they had taken off their identification badges so they couldn’t be identified. It was really a planned attack.”
Police officers 53 men and women—many of whom were beaten in the Darlinghurst station cells. The next day, the names of those who had been charged were for all to see in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“It was terrible, it was dreadful for people,” says Kennedy.
“In 1978, a lot of people were in the closet, which is why they wanted to go to a nighttime parade and wear makeup and outfits because they didn’t want to be outed.
“Once the names and ages were published, some people lost their jobs, were kicked out of home. It just ruined their lives.”
It wasn’t until 1998—on the 20th anniversary of the rally—that a larger group of the original 1978 attendees got together.
“We marched together again, having not marched together for quite a long time…under the 78ers banner,” says Kennedy.
“That’s actually where the name ‘78ers’ came from, the first time we started marching under that name,” she adds. “And we’ve been marching under that name for 20 years.”
Kennedy said that the 40th anniversary is a great opportunity for a bigger group of 78ers to march together again.
“We know there are not a lot left in terms of milestone parades,” she says.
“Those of us that can will keep marching in every parade but we know for a lot of people, they’ll have to make a very special effort to be there.”
