“There was no struggle, nothing. And then he just slipped away ... the river swallowed him.”
This is how a witness described the final seconds of Dr George Duncan’s life, as told to the ABC in 2005, 33 years after the 41-year-old University of Adelaide academic drowned in the River Torrens and posthumously set in motion the zeitgeist of gay law reform in Australia.
The 10 May 1972 death of Dr George Ian Ogilvie Duncan – suspected to be at the hands of Adelaide’s police vice squad, at a time when homosexuality was outlawed in every state in Australia – is an event enshrined in the narrative of the South Australian LBTQI community.
Writer Christos Tsiolkas and his partner Wayne van der Stelt first learned of Duncan’s revered place in SA’s legal history back in the mid-1980s, when the two young Melbourne university students made their first road trip together to Adelaide.
“I remember us going to the Candlelight, which was one of the old queer clubs there, and hearing the story about what happened down at the river – hearing about the gay bashings and police bashings,” he says.
“There was still a real sense of being in a frontier town … we were in the bourgeois, nice part of Adelaide, but we were getting warnings from gay men we were talking to in pubs, saying just be really careful. It was still going on, that was still part of the story of the city.”
On 3 March, Adelaide festival goers will witness the multi-award winning Melbourne writer’s debut as a librettist, with Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan, co-written with Sydney playwright Alana Valentine.
Marking the 50th anniversary of Duncan’s death, the production, directed by Neil Armfield, will be delivered in the form of an oratorio, created by Queensland opera and composer Joseph Twist.
Tsiolkas and Valentine agreed that the traditionally sacred form of oratorio – opera without the sets, costumes and staging, and deemed appropriate by the church for tackling religious material – was the most fitting medium to tell Duncan’s story.
“One of the things about being queer is being sequestered from the sacred,” Tsiolkas says.
“There’s a sense of being exiled from religious traditions and Duncan was a religious man [he was high church Anglican].
“That was what was great about writing an oratorio … doing it but not denying our queerness, because that’s what religious texts have done – deny that our bodies are part of the sacred.
“Duncan died at a gay beat and we wanted that world to be communicated in the words of the music … That’s been exciting, working on those two things, the sacred and the illicit together.”
Legislative ground breaker
The background story documenting Duncan’s life is compelling, as historian Tim Reeves can attest.
The white upper middle class, Australian raised and Oxbridge educated history academic lived a secret life, as most gay men were forced to do, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s .
Reeves has spent the better part of three decades documenting the Duncan case, he served as a consultant on the Watershed project and will be releasing his book The Death of Doctor Duncan at the Adelaide Writer’s festival on 9 March, where it is being launched by David Marr.
The death toll from Australia’s long-standing criminalisation of homosexuality – through murder, manslaughter and suicide – was far from unique in the English speaking world, he says, but the rapidity of legislative changes following Duncan’s death was a world game changer.
Three police officers were early suspected as the culprits who tossed Duncan, a man who despite his education at Melbourne Grammar – an exclusive school which prided itself as much on its athletic prowess as its scholastic rigour – was unable to swim.
After an internal police investigation prompted widespread public skepticism, Scotland Yard detectives were called in to investigate independently – but the subsequent findings tabled in a parliamentary inquiry found that “there was no real intention of causing anyone’s death – this was merely a high-spirited frolic which went wrong.”
In Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan, the oratorio features a work with the chorus: “We thought faggots could float”.
Within seven weeks of Duncan’s body being retrieved out of the Torrens, however, a private members bill was introduced into South Australian parliament. And in one of the more surprising details in Reeve’s book, it was not SA’s celebrated reformist premier at the time – Don Dunstan – who led the charge. It was a conservative in opposition to the incumbent Labor party, Murray Hill – then a member of the Liberal and Country League party, later to become the SA liberals – who pushed for legislation to decriminalise sex between two consenting adult males in the southern state.
Macabre details
Reeve’s book reveals other disturbing details that are unlikely to make it into the oratorio’s libretto: the witness to Duncan’s drowning, Roger James, who first told his story to the ABC in 2005, was also tossed into the Torrens that night (he was never able to identify his assailants).
James crawled out of the water with a broken leg and was rescued by a passing motorist who took him to hospital. That seemingly good samaritan was Bevan Spencer von Einem, subsequently convicted of the abduction, sexual torture and murder of 15-year-old schoolboy Richard Kelvin, and the suspected killer of at least two other gay men whose cases have never been solved. Von Einem remains incarcerated in a high security SA prison, marked never to be released in his lifetime.
And in a final indignity to Dr Duncan himself, when the police finally retrieved his rigid body from the Torrens, the local TV news cameraman was running too late to capture it; the police returned Duncan’s body to the river and fished it out again for the broadcast.
Hill’s legislation was modest. It only prevented police from raiding – without a warrant – private homes where two adult men were living together. But within three years, SA became the first jurisdictional territory in the English-speaking world to legalise equal age of consent for sexual intercourse at 17 years, regardless of gender.
Tsiolkas was only 10, but remembers it well.
“I didn’t have the words to express it at that age – about my identity and my sexuality. But I remember hearing the news…it must have on television, and I remember this quiet thrill – like it started in my belly. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. But that change was huge.”
Valentine says the LGBTQI community today still remains profoundly aware of the way the law governs their lives. “All gay and lesbian and transgender people are uniquely aware of the fact that we live our lives subject to the law, and that the laws have a profound influence on the way you can behave publicly – what the limits of your love are and how they are defined legally.”
Spending decades delving into the life of Dr Duncan – a man who has no surviving relatives to speak on his behalf – Reeves admits to the Guardian he is conflicted about the role he has played in the sudden resurgence of public interest in the academic’s life and death.
“He was an extremely shy, intensely private and taciturn man, he may never have identified publicly as homosexual,” Reeves said.
“And yet he has become a gay martyr, a queer icon in modern day parlance. I can hear him muttering darkly from the grave … if he is an icon, it is not because of his own actions, but because of his cowardly killers, who thought it was OK to throw poofters into the Torrens and then flee as they sank to the riverbed.”
In his conclusion in the book, Reeves writes: “I am the person most responsible for placing Dr Duncan on a pedestal that would not have been of his choosing. I ask now that he be remembered as more than just an epithet.’’
Tsiolkas is more ambivalent.
“Dr Duncan was a man whose life was taken in 1972. He hasn’t done what all of us sitting around this room have done … move through time.
“I wonder, if he hadn’t been killed, would he have eventually found a way to find joy? To find pleasure, find love in the tumult of change that started to emerge? What kind of life could he have lived? And I think that’s the tragedy of the story, that’s the life that was taken away.”
• The Death of Dr Duncan by Tim Reeves is out now through Wakefield Press. Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan opens at Adelaide festival on Wednesday 2 March.
