This article details the history of the LGBTQ rights movement in Australia, from the colonial era to the present day.

Pre-colonialism

Whilst identifying as LGBTQ is not uncommon amongst Indigenous Australians today, there is no record of it being a phenomenon in pre-colonial Australian societies. Anthropologists Bill Stanner, Norman Tindale, A. P. Elkin and Ralph Piddington found evidence of polygamy and other non-binary behaviours, but not of homosexuality as such. While there is no evidence of these cultures on mainland Australia, this may not confirm that homosexual and other queer behaviours and identities were absent from mainland Aboriginal Australian culture.

An exception is in the Tiwi Islands. While there is not a lot of evidence that there were formal structures and formal roles within mainland Aboriginal communities in the Tiwi Islands, language that names sexual and gender diversity exists, and there is evidence that there were roles that were quite set out.

Colonial period to 1951

Early laws in Australia were based on then-current laws in Britain, which were inherited upon colonisation in 1788. Lesbianism was never illegal in Britain nor its colonies, including Australia. Sodomy laws, however, were part of Australian law, from 1788 through to 1994 under Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994. The punishment for "buggery" (sodomy) was reduced from execution to life in prison in 1899.

Throughout the transportation period there was a severe imbalance between the sexes, convict and free, and large numbers of convicts were kept in relative or complete isolation from the other sex. Homosexual behaviour was prevalent among Europeans in colonial Australia; Historian Robert Aldrich suggests that sodomy became more common in the 1820s and 1830s. Some historians have suggested that anti-sodomy rhetoric was utilised effectively against the practice of transportation, contributing to its eventual conclusion in the 1840s, although the emergence of gold mining also led to an increase in free migration and settlement.

In 1796 Francis Wilkinson became the first man to be charged with buggery (but acquitted). Class differences appear to have been involved in tolerance and indulgence of gay sex amongst convicts, with little attention paid by working-class convicts, but condemnation from middle-class or upwardly mobile transportees.Babette Smith: Australia's Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era: Sydney Allen and Unwin: 2008

In 1822 an official inquiry into the sexual scandal that resulted from the movement of thirty female prisoners to the male prison farm at Emu Plains reported the rumour that the women had been placed there to prevent "unnatural crimes" on the part of the men.

In a secret dispatch of 1843 the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land stated that women in the Hobart female factory have "their Fancy-women, or lovers, to who they are attached with as much ardour as they would be to the opposite sex, and practice onanism to the greatest extent".

Select committees of the British Parliament inquiring into racism in 1832 and 1837 heard much evidence of the prevalence of scandalism. Major James Mudie testified that the prisoners called each other "sods" and that at Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney boy prisoners went by names such as Kitty and Nancy.Wayne Dynes, The Encyclopaedia of Homosexuality, London 1990

In 1932, an Australian tabloid, The Arrow, described the growth of the "pervert population" of Brisbane, largely men aged 18 to 25, whose activities presented "a scandal of evil almost unprecedented". It called for police action to suppress and end their gatherings. It reported clandestine weddings between gay men there: "In the last two weeks there have been two 'weddings'—ghastly, horrifying spectacles of painted men and primping lads united in a sacrilegious blasphemy that they call the 'bonds of matrimony'."

In 1951, the New South Wales Crimes Act was amended to ensure that "buggery" remained a criminal act "with or without the consent of the person", removing legal loophole of consent. The government of J.J. Cahill increased arrests of male homosexuals and reopened a prison at Cooma exclusively for gay prisoners in 1957. In 1958, the Cahill government appointed a committee led by British psychiatrist Bill Trethowan to inquire into the "causes and treatment of homosexuality".

20th century gay rights movement

While Britain's influence on Australian political culture was still strong in the fifties there was no local appetite for a political response to the Wolfenden Committee, which recommended the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in Britain in 1957. Ten years later there was little comment from any Australian public figure (state or federal) when Britain finally decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales. Some historians have attributed this to the association of homosexuality with the 'convict stain'.

However, it was in the wake of decriminalisation in Britain that the first Australian gay and lesbian rights groups were organised. The ACT Homosexual Law Reform Society, a Canberra-based organisation formed in mid 1969; and an Australian arm of the Daughters of Bilitis, formed in Melbourne in January 1970, are considered Australia's first gay rights organisations. Although, it was a Sydney organisation, the Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP), founded in 1970, that was to gain the most public attention.

CAMP set out to publicly campaign for political and social change, rather than focusing on law reform. This was apparent when activists John Ware and Christobell Poll announced its formation in an article on the front page of the magazine section of The Australian newspaper on 19 September 1970. CAMP was officially launched on 6 February 1971, at the first public gathering of gay women and men in Australia, which took place in a church hall in Balmain. Within 12 months local CAMP groups had formed in each capital city, creating an informal gay rights network around Australia.

CAMP's first demonstration took place in October 1971 outside the Liberal Party of Australia headquarters in Sydney when a right-wing Christian fundamentalist stood against Tom Hughes for pre-selection. Hughes was the federal Liberal Attorney-General and had spoken out in favour of limited homosexual law reform, so CAMP mounted a demonstration. In January 1971, the Melbourne-based gay rights organisation Society Five was formed, inspired by CAMP, and was to become the largest gay organisation in Australia during the 1970s.

The emergence of this movement in the early 1970s was aided by the growing visibility of the gay and lesbian community in the Australian media. Reform of Australia's tough censorship rules by then Minister for Customs and Excise, Don Chipp, meant that by the early 1970s gay and lesbian content was no longer automatically censored. In February 1970 the first gay themed Australian film The Set was released. While in October 1970 ABC TV's This Day Tonight broadcast an interview with a lesbian couple featuring the first same-sex kiss seen on Australian television. Further exposure occurred when another ABC TV's Chequerboard program broadcast an interview with a gay couple in February 1972 and Australian TV soap opera Number 96 introduced the first sympathetic gay character, Don Finlayson, to local audiences.

This visibility and increasing publicity around the emergence of gay and lesbian groups in major Australian cities soon encouraged more groups to form. Additional gay and lesbian rights organisations included The Gay Teachers Group, and The Homosexual Law Reform Coalition, all gay rights organisations which started in the late 1970s. In May 1973 Australia's first LGBTI focused social service Phone-a-Friend was established in Sydney, which in 1978 saw the launch of Australia's first gay focused news publications The Sydney Star Observer.

However, homosexual law reform first occurred in South Australia, not New South Wales or Victoria. In 1972, in response to public outrage at the murder of University of Adelaide academic Dr. George Duncan, the Dunstan Labor government introduced a consenting adults in private type reform bill. This led to a later more comprehensive reform bill introduced by Murray Hill, father of former defence minister Robert Hill. In 1975, South Australia became the first Australian state to legalise sexual conduct between consenting adult males. This action prompted other Australian jurisdictions to debate law reform for the first time, with the Australian Capital Territory following the South Australian lead in 1976.

In 1973 the Pink Bans were carried out by the Builders Laborers Federation to protest discrimination against gay people by universities in Sydney.

In October 1973 the Australian Parliament passed a motion in favour of the decriminialization of homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. While at the same time, the Australian Medical Association removed homosexuality from its list of illnesses and disorders, two months before the American Psychiatric Association did the same. Following in the wake of South Australia and the ACT the other Australian states and territories reformed their laws between 1976 and 1991. The exception was Tasmania, which retained its laws until the federal government forced their repeal in 1997.

It was in this context that an estimated 500 people marched to and rallied in Martin Place in Sydney on 24 June 1978. Organisers said the march and rally were part of "international homosexual solidarity day" to demonstrate against sexual repression in Australia and other countries. Police attacked a late night street party or Mardi Gras that night and arrested 53 revelers. This response, coupled with the publication of the names of the activists arrested in the local press over the next few days, attracted considerable public sympathy and led to this event becoming an annual community event, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2008. It also inspired similar events in other cities like Melbourne and Perth.

Law reform and the emergence of visible gay and lesbian communities did not however lead to the end of police harassment of individuals, which would continue into the 1990s. The last gay man was arrested on 14 December 1984 in Hobart, Tasmania, when he was found engaging in sexual conduct with another man on the side of the road in a car. He was sentenced to eight months jail.

In 1991, after consistent pressure from Gay and Lesbian Immigration Task Force (GLITF), the Migration Amendment Act (No. 2) 1991 (Cth) was passed, amending the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) to allow Australian Citizens and Permanent Residents to sponsor their same-sex partners to Australia through a new Interdependency Visa.

In 1994, the Commonwealth passed the Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994, section four of which legalised sexual activity between consenting adults (in private) throughout Australia. It was not until 1997 however when the law in Tasmania prohibiting gay male sexual conduct was repealed. The ban on gay male sexual conduct was overturned in the courts in 1996 following Toonen v. Australia that gay male sexual conduct became formally legal in all Australian states and territories when the federal government passed the Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994.

Howard government