The first state to call time
One sitting day was enough: in 1975 South Australia became the first Australian state to decriminalise homosexuality.
On 27 August 1975, South Australia became the first Australian state to fully decriminalise sexual acts between men. The law abolished the offences of sodomy, "gross indecency" and soliciting. And it created an age of consent that was the same for same-sex and different-sex contact. It came into force on 2 October.
A look back shows how long the road there had been. Until 1899, sodomy could carry the death penalty in Australia. After that, life imprisonment was the maximum penalty for decades. In Victoria, the death penalty even remained on the statute book in certain circumstances until 1949.
The reform debate was triggered by a death. On 10 May 1972, George Duncan, a law lecturer at the University of Adelaide, drowned in the River Torrens. Three vice squad officers were linked to his death. The case revealed how systematically homosexual men were being harassed.
Even so, progress was slow after that. In July 1972 the Liberal MP Murray Hill introduced Australia's first serious bill. All that remained of it in 1973 was a legal defence for acts in private between men over twenty-one. At the same time, pressure from the street grew. On 15 September 1973 the Proud Parade made its way through Adelaide, the city's first Pride march, and the group CAMP openly demanded the abolition of the criminal provisions.
How deeply criminal law had intruded into people's lives became clear in 1979. In that year, police files on homosexuals were burned in the crematorium at Centennial Park.
The other states and territories took their time. Victoria followed in 1980, New South Wales in 1984 and Queensland in 1990. Tasmania was the last to follow, in 1997, twenty-two years after Adelaide.