2026 Sydney MardiGras

My brother got to hold the sign for the Rural Fire Service Float at the 2026 Sydney Mardi Gras. I wasn’t there but I saw the footage and there he was looking benevolent and avuncular, waving to the crowd in his RFS uniform and great big firey’s boots. Kenny is a proud Seventy-Niner, one of the gang in the second Sydney Mardi Gras, the one that helped to cement it as an annual event. The ’79 Parade turned out to be a peaceful march with no arrests but still it’s hard to remember or imagine how much courage - or maybe just youthful joie de vivre - it took to go out and proud at that time.

Kenny and I are only sixteen months apart and in our family we had often been bundled together as “the little ones”, We used to share friends and interests, or at least I stood in awe of his creativity and he liked doing “girl stuff” with me.  Sydney in 1979 was a huge experience for both of us. The immediate post Gough years, Kenny’s coming out to what felt like an accepting milieu, the accelerating feminist trajectory – nothing felt impossible in those days. We hung out together for a while in those early days, shared crushes, pairs of jeans, and occasional bongs (it was the seventies so of course) and we blissfully shucked off the confines of a very safe conservative childhood together.  But the crushes always seemed to end up being gay and Kenny discovered drag while I discovered Simone de Beauvoir and over the next years our lives began to disconnect as we grew into ourselves.

The HIV epidemic began in Australia with stealth in the early eighties. Then, all of a sudden, the media fear mongering, the sudden and devastating loss of good friends, and Kenny’s early retirement due to ill health at the age of 28 translated the sensational newspaper articles into a a grim reality for me. People like to tell the epidemic as a single story of fear, loss, activism and resilience, but living through it was nothing like that. It was one phone call and then another. A hospital room. A new doctor. A new drug regime. Niggling low grade fevers. My mother’s grief. Confronting my own grief and impending loss while navigating my first pregnancy. Hope and dread living side by side, like mismatched flatmates who refused to move out.

Kenny only made it through this time with the overwhelming support of an ex-partner who provided him with a place to live and later, work from home employment. Kenny was one of the lucky ones. Lindsay quietly saw to it that Kenny and I suspect many others of his friends had sufficient resources to carry on, and with that, a reason to persist. He stayed in close contact and when life in Sydney became too much Kenny moved to the country in a house near Lindsay’s where the tree change and the new medications started to turn his life around. He had to chop wood for his hot water and he gained 4 kg (all muscle!).  He volunteered with the local RFS and kept the books for a local not-for-profit organisation. I remember him telling me about the moment when he realised that he had a future, and how that realisation was at least as challenging as the opposite assumption that he had made a few years before.

It’s only now, looking back, that I see how extraordinary it all was – and how much it is that courage and love sit quietly in the background of a life, uncelebrated. There he was - my brother Kenny, holding the Rural Fire Service sign at the ’26 Mardi Gras, the same man who marched defiantly in ’79. That sign in ’26 felt like a hinge between eras. For the crowd it was a parade float; for me it was a ledger of survival and stubbornness. Seeing him in the RFS uniform — a symbol of service and protection — made the image perfect. He waved, and the wave carried decades: the courage of ’79, the grief of the eighties, the slow, stubborn rebuilding that followed. People cheered for the spectacle, but I heard the quieter applause of lives that had been saved, steadied, and remade.