The history of Shepparton’s queer community is no longer in the dark.
This is thanks to the recent launch of the Melbourne-based art initiative ‘Queer-ways: Re-tracing Queer Footprints’ in Shepparton.
The Queer-ways team, led by Melbourne artists LUCIANO and George Keats, have mapped out the queer cartography of Shepparton.
This map showcases the stories of locations in Shepparton that have significant meaning to the queer community, as submitted by the community themselves last year.
Now, it’s ready to be viewed at an exhibition at Shepparton Library.
Also included in the exhibition are the queer history maps of Ballarat and Geelong, which were all part of a partnership between the Victorian Government and Midsumma for regional Queer-ways maps as part of Victoria Pride 2024.
Their regional maps followed on from their other Queer-ways maps, which include Daylesford, Wodonga and Mildura for the Regional Queer Footprints 2023, Melbourne, and the City of Yarra, which was the initial project that kick-started the Queer-ways initiative.
In its regional tour, Queer-ways worked with GV Pride to learn more about its organisation and the work it does in the community.
Through working with groups in each of these locations, Queer-ways’ LUCIANO said it highlighted the type of stories being shared and the importance of organisations such as GV Pride.
“An interesting part of the regional initiative is seeing the connections between the different regional communities and shared experiences within the different locations,” LUCIANO said.
“We were so excited to see how much support GV Pride has in the community.
“It wasn’t always the case with communities we visited in the initiative that there is that community support behind community organisations like GV Pride.”
Part of the initiative was the development of an augmented reality map where a local queer community leader walks the listener through the map, reading out the contributed stories of each location.
For Shepparton, that person was GV Pride president Deb Chumbley.
Deb said it has been exciting to see Queer-ways take place, as the future impact it would have on Victoria’s queer history would be huge.
“I was very happy to be the voice of the organisation,” Deb said.
“Queer history is one of those things — like we just don’t talk about queer people as ever existing.
“When we look back, we have historians and antiquarians who go back and try and research queer history like things documented; there’s diaries, there’s talk but no proof.
“I think it’s really important from now that we do start to document while it’s living history, so that in 100 or 200 years time people know there was queer history, that this was part of the narrative.”
As for the future of Queer-ways, LUCIANO said the group was waiting on further funding approvals to cover more regional towns, with three more in the works for the coming year.
To ensure these stories won’t be forgotten in the history books, these maps and their stories will be stored in the Victorian Pride Centre’s Australian Queer Archives and the State Library of Victoria.
The Queer-ways website will also be stored in the National Library of Australia’s PANDORA archive, which collects web publications documenting Australia’s history, culture and people.
The augmented reality map is set to be released at www.queerways.au later this week, but people can still visit it in person to view the Google map and find out more information.
To see the full display and augmented reality maps, visit the Shepparton Library.