A whole lot of courage: Peter De Waal AM

Campaign Against Moral Persecution foundation member and 78er Peter De Waal AM is finally telling his life story in the memoir It Wasn’t Dutch Courage.

Peter De Waal has released a memoir that looks back on his over fifty years of LGBTQIA+ activism in Australia and QNews got to speak to him ahead of its release.

De Waal told QNews that the idea for It Wasn’t Dutch Courage had come out of a lunch with a friend who encouraged him to write down his life story.

“That was the beginning of it, and it took quite some time but it’s written now,” Peter says.

Born in 1938, De Waal grew up in Nazi occupied Holland and by high school had already realised that he was different to other boys.

“At that age I knew that I was different,” Peter tells QNews, “But there was no word for it in my mind.”

“I went to an all boys school where there were lots of boys who would chase after girls and brag about it but that was never of any interest to me. It was like a dormant sexuality at that time.”

Coming to Australia

In the 1950s the family began making plans to emigrate away from the Netherlands.

“In the mid-50s, Europe was still very much recovering from the Second World War and there was a sense that if you could get as far away from Europe as you could, then you would be safe,” De Waal remembers.

However Peter’s sister and mother were rejected on medical grounds, and after his mother died, and with the spectre of being called up for compulsory military service looming, Peter made the decision to leave for Australia aged just 18.

He first moved to Melbourne where he joined his older brother.

“My brother was eight years older and came to Australia just before the Olympic Games in 1956,” Peter recalls.

“He had sent me an amazing book about Australia with illustrations, and he kept encouraging me to come here. He was living in St Kilda at the time and I joined him there to share a bungalow.”

Peter found work in a warehouse for washing machine parts despite having to navigate a language barrier.

“All the men working there used to laugh at me because I couldn’t speak a great deal of English but they taught me all the swear words so I became very proficient at swearing in English,” he remembers with a laugh.

Exploring his identity

In Australia he finally began to explore his sexuality and make his first connections with other gay men.

“It was very hard at the time as there were no organisations to turn to for help like we have today,” he recalls.

“The only things we had were the bars and the beats. I wasn’t a bar person, I was very shy, so I spent quite a bit of time at the beats and actually made some friends there.”

Through those networks he would eventually meet Peter “Bon” Bonsall-Boone in 1966 who would become the love of his life.

When John Ware and Christabel Poll announced the establishment of the Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP) in The Australian newspaper in September of 1970, Peter and Bon knew they had to get involved and they became foundation members of the group.

CAMP held the first public meetings and protests by gay and lesbian Australians in the early 70s, and began publishing a magazine CAMP Ink.

Coming out – on national TV!

In 1972 Peter and Bon appeared on the ABC show Checkerboard where they spoke about their relationship and shared the first same-sex kiss on Australian television.

As a result Bon was fired from his job at a Sydney Anglican school, which was terribly demoralising for the pair.

De Waal was working as a clerk for P&O. He heard that his appearance on Checkerboard had been discussed by the P&O board but because he hadn’t mentioned the company by name, he got to keep his job.

However, coming out publicly meant that a lot of gay work friends no longer wanted to be associated with him because they feared that would bring them under suspicion.

It could have been more difficult but Peter and Bon had the security of owning their own home in Balmain – the same home that Peter still lives in today.

“To have a home with your own key to lock the door and leave all of that oppression outside, and create your own little haven inside, having that security played a very important role in my life and Bon’s life at the time too,” Peter remembers.

That house became a sanctuary for others when they started the Phone-A-Friend gay and lesbian help line from their home in 1973 which grew into the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service which still exists as part of Twenty10 today.

Our community emerges

Peter remembers this period where gay and lesbian Australians were emerging from the shadows and organising for the first time as “amazing, it was bloody hard work, it was disappointing at times because we didn’t have any allies.”

“There were sacrifices and we started basically from nothing to build up something amazing like we have today, a rainbow community all over Australia.”

Bon and Peter were both at the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras but he feels that the work that was done in the decade leading up to that event has been overshadowed.

“There is a misunderstanding even in our own community that everything started with the first Mardi Gras parade,” De Waal says.

“That was a significant event but I dare to say that Mardi Gras wouldn’t have come about if there hadn’t been people at the time who had done the groundwork.”

If there is one message that readers take away from the book, Peter hopes it’s that “one person, then two people, then a group of people working together, can achieve an enormous amount but you need to be determined, and have resilience.”

“You need to have courage of course, and then hopefully along the way you get some allies that will back you up or support you. Activism can be a very lonely experience if you do it on your own.”

-It Wasn’t Dutch Courage is available for purchase online on Amazon.com.au in both e-book and printed formats.

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