Weston Bate Memorial Lecture

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.


About the Speaker
Jacobin Bosman is a third-year PhD candidate in History at the University of Melbourne, living and working primarily on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrong Country. His PhD, ”’A Complicated Immorality’: Sodomy, Civic Bodies and Colonial Community in South Australia and Victoria, 1835-1900, explores the significance of sodomy-related offences between settlers in contesting notions of civil society and the colonial body politic. A recipient of the 2026 History Fellows Prize from the University of Melbourne’s Fellows and Friends of History, he has an article on Edward de Lacy Evans slated for publication with the Victorian Periodical Review, and as recently appeared on the SBS podcast Queer Renegades.

IMAGE: L-R: John Gibson and Thomas O'Brien, PROV, VPRS 515/P0000, Central Register for Male Prisoners 11532 - 11987 (1874), p. 103-104; Edward de Lacy Evans, The Australasian Sketcher with Pen and Pencil, 27 September, 1879, p. 101, Trove.