First Nations people will lead the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras parade on Saturday 2 March to highlight their proud history and our ongoing fight for equality.
The float this year is a play on the overall Mardi Gras theme of ‘Fearless’. It will created and led by First Nations people of diverse gender and sexuality, together with family, friends and supporters.
Organisers say the theme highlights the ground-breaking work Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTI peers did to pave the way for people today, saying their float will pay homage to those who were fearless in a time when it was neither popular nor fashionable to do so.
They say their key messages this year as “Visibility”, “Blak Fearlessness”, “Resistance” and “Always was, always will be fearless.”
The entry is supported by the Aboriginal Project at ACON, NSW’s leading HIV prevention, HIV support and LGBTI health organisation.
The first Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community entry was in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade of 1988.
Arriving in the same year as Australia’s Bicentenary celebrations in true MG tradition, the entry was a satirical, fun, flamboyant piss-take on the first boat landing of the British on Aboriginal shores.
It’s important to acknowledge that although this entry has gone down in Mardi Gras history as ‘the first Aboriginal float’, it was an entry from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. with organiser Malcolm Cole, identifying as Aboriginal South Sea Islander.
It often gets reported that Malcolm’s float led the parade in 1988, as you’d think it would have in the bicentennial year. But it didn’t. It travelled in eleventh position in the parade of 57 entries, despite requesting to lead the parade.
It would be sixteen more years before a mob of First Nations’ people would be positioned as a ‘Welcome to Country’ procession at the front of the parade in 2005.
Last year there were calls for Perth’s Pride Parade to put a First Nations float at the head of it’s parade.
The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is being covered by SBS. A live stream of the parade will be available on SBS On Demand and the SBS Twitter account and Facebook page on Saturday 2 March. SBS Arabic 24 will report live from the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade to Arabic-speaking audiences around Australia. You can watch the SBS highlights of the parade coverage on Sunday March 3rd at 8.30pm.
OIP Staff, image: Jeffrey Feng
