Tonight, in the time we have, we hear from someone Who Was There!

Jamie Gardiner OAM is a human rights activist, pioneer of Australia’s LGBT rights movement and member of the Victorian LGBTI Taskforce. He is a vice-president of Liberty Victoria, Australia’s longest serving organisation defending and extending civil and human rights.

A graduate of the University of Melbourne and was a PhD student in Applied Mathematics at University College London. In 1972 he set up and became the first president of the UCL GaySoc, which played a key role in the National Union of Students’ gay rights campaign in the early 1970s. While in London, Gardiner attended meetings of the newly formed Gay Liberation Front and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. In 1973 Gardiner proposed and received support from the NUS to organise UCL’s first Homosexuals in Education Conference.

When Gardiner returned to Australia in 1974, he spearheaded the Homosexual Law Reform Coalition, a campaign to decriminalise consensual homosexual sex in the state of Victoria. In 1975 he took up a position as a mathematics lecturer at the Bendigo Institute of Technology and in the same year contributed to the first National Homosexual Conference in Melbourne.