Queer Oasis

BRISBANE: Queensland Pride celebrates 21 years of publication in 2012. In the first of this occasional series looking at Queensland’s queer past, Michael Carden surveys the ‘queer oasis’, a short history of LGBT space at UQ.

Most Australian university student unions have a queer club or department. Some have a queer room too, where LGBT students can meet together. Many LGBT people nowadays begin their coming out journey entering their campus queer room. Both QUT and University of Queensland (UQ) have such rooms, whereas the Griffith University one closed in 2009. I came to UQ in 1992 as a mature age, very out undergraduate, shortly after the queer room was established. I want to share some history and memories of that space, especially for people now who don’t know this past.

Back in 1992, the room had just been established. Back then there was no Queer Collective, just a club called Gays and Lesbians on Campus (GLoC), which first formed back in 1973 as Campus CAMP. The room, called the Rona Room, was a two-roomed space, below the Refectory: the smaller room a makeshift office, the larger a meeting and social space. A pink bandana was tied to the window; when it was open the bandana hung outside, a sign to everyone that the room was open.

The room was formally established in 1991, ironically, under a conservative Student Union, but had been operating informally since 1990. When the university magazine Semper relocated, Nick Douglas, one of the editors, encouraged people to meet in the former offices. There had been a struggle at UQ to get a space and formal Area in the Union. In 1990, a referendum for a Union Lesbian-Gay Area failed. In 1991, a group of students – including Sarah Harward, Jeff Ward, Ash Rehn and Darryl O’Donnell – occupied the President’s office, declaring they wouldn’t leave until the old Semper offices became a queer space. The Union relented, stipulating that the room not be named the gay and lesbian room (because of that referendum). So, in the spirit of queer inversion, the GLoC folks named it after Rona Joyner, Bjelke-Petersen’s friend, “heterosexual, pro-family campaigner, bible-bleeting, beige-loving, homo-hating, God-fearin’, anti-funster” (quoting a 1992 GLoC pamphlet). The Rona Room was born and the name Rona became associated with everything queer instead.

The room changed queer life on campus in positive ways, most importantly by being a space where people could hang out together and be themselves. It developed a stronger sense of community. Sometimes it even functioned as a refuge for people needing somewhere to crash when they had family dramas. As ‘our’ space, the room enabled us to hold all manner of events, too, including workshops, meetings and parties, for which the Rona Room was legend. In 1993, an inter-campus networking day held there led to the week-long Queer Collaborations conference being held in Brisbane in 1994, the first time it was held outside of Sydney. That community confidence pushed further change. The Queer Collective was established in 1993 and by the late 90s there were elected queer representatives in the Student Union and a part-time paid worker providing counseling support for UQ’s queer students.

In second semester 2000 the Rona Room was closed and the Red Room Bar built on the site (the bar is where the Rona Room was). A new space opened upstairs in the Union Administration Building, which remains to this day. With the move, the Collective renamed the room. At the opening ceremony in September 2000, without any forewarning to me, the new room was named the Carden Room. The new room was smaller than the Rona Room, so no more parties! However the importance of the room for sustaining a strong queer community was demonstrated by the number of queer folks elected to lead the Union in 2005. 2005 really was UQ’s year of the queer and those queer office-bearers all started their journeys in the Carden Room.

The Howard government’s Voluntary Student Unionism, introduced in 2006, hit hard. Many of the services and facilities that once existed were lost, including the paid counsellor. But the Carden Room remains as a queer haven at UQ with even greater importance in these straitened times. Even without the past resources, it continues to foster the cohesion and organizing that sustains a strong, proud and supportive campus queer community.

Michael Carden is the Convener of the LGBT History Action Group and former UQ student and staff member. The group meets the fourth Saturday of the month at Healthy Communities. For more information email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it