Plebiscite
Short Story | 500 | On being a queer teenager during the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey
We are thirteen, but we feel the enormity of paper weighing on our shoulders. Like papier-mache, the tiny slip delivered to our parents chews us up and spits us out, remoulded into campaign machines.
We gather around a school laptop, using Microsoft Word to design an amateur poster with clipart and tables. We research and collate names of countries, listing them in neat columns and rows, a grid of three by seven. We double-check that Malta, the most recent to enshrine it, is a real place.
Though it takes up a good chunk of the single A4 sheet we’ve allotted ourselves, it’s still depressing. A measly 21 countries out of the conservative count, 195. We take out calculators and run the figures. It comes to approximately ten percent. We do not take comfort in this, in seeing ourselves reduced to numbers like this.
But we know the numbers anyway, always checking the population statistics to reaffirm to ourselves that there were more like us out there. In 2017, our population was a disputed figure, ranging anywhere from 1.2% to 5%. In our cohort at school, we made up a good deal more than that. When we are older, we will look to the next generation and we will see a good deal more than us, but for now, we are all we know.
We report in hushed whispers our clumsy reconnaissance from asking our parents, as casually as we can manage, whether they’ve gotten their voting slip yet. We share the views of those privileged adults who will decide this matter for us irrevocably. Some cannot be bothered to vote, and threw their slip in the trash. Others are casual in their support, but that does not content us.
One mum votes YES because she has a gay friend. We worry what her answer would’ve been if she hadn’t met him.
We are thirteen and we sneak to a home with a coloured printer. Our rainbow-splashed pamphlets come out streaky and unprofessional, but we fold them in thirds, and we set out across the neighbourhood anyway. We need to finish our mission before our parents come looking for us.
We dawdle when we see open garages and people in their gardens, none of us brave enough to pop the paper in someone’s mailbox while we can be observed. We walk in silence because we are tense and we are carrying one hundred pieces of paper. We think one hundred is a big number, unaware that the Australian Christian Lobby has coffers that far outstrip a single home printer. We finish our stacks and reconvene, flushed and breathless, adjusting the sweaty straps of our school backpacks.
We each slip a spare sheet into our bags to take home and discreetly place in our parents’ mail. We get into cars and spin tales to distracted adults about our hangout – about the movies we didn’t watch, the gossip we didn’t share. We listen to the cold tones that crackle through the car radio in the paid segments of broadcasts, telling Australia that it’s okay to prioritise family values.
We are thirteen, and we wonder when we children were excluded from the notion of families.
A Reflection on Craft
This is another one inspired by Jarad Bruinstroop’s 2023 poetry collection, Reliefs, specifically his short poem titled Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey:
“All my life I thought I lived here.
Now I see I’ve been a guest.”1
Although this was largely a recount of my memory of being a queer thirteen-year-old during the time of the plebiscite, including the very real story of my friends and I designing and hand-delivering Vote Yes pamphlets, I chose to only refer to the main protagonists (an unknown number of thirteen-year-olds) using collective pronouns like we, our, and us. I wanted to highlight the way the queer community bands together during times like the plebiscite, when we’re all placed under scrutiny and we have the entire country determining which rights we should be allowed to get.
The plebiscite was an isolating time for many. I was very lucky to have two close friends who were also queer, and we spoke a lot at the time about what we were going through. I remember very vividly the constant radio ads from the Coalition for Marriage, and being outraged at their misleading name. They were against same-sex marriage!
I also remember my aunt and uncle telling my mum that they had thrown their ballot in the bin, because it “doesn’t affect us.” It was like they couldn’t extend their empathy to anyone beyond their immediate selves, not even to their niece. In the final line of my story, I wanted to capture that feeling of exclusion that came across so well in Bruinstroop’s poem and emphasise what young queer Australians were going through since we didn’t get a voice at the time, hence:
“We are thirteen, and we wonder when we children were excluded from the notion of families.”
J Bruinstroop, Reliefs, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2023, p. 71.