How a hate-fuelled killing sparked a revolution in Australia
By Nick Galvin
When the curtain rises on the new oratorio Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan it reveals a lone male figure suspended high above the stage, twisting and turning seemingly in agony - or is it ecstasy?
Audiences at the Adelaide Festival, where Watershed received its world premiere in 2022, were transfixed by the spectacular, terrible beauty of the opening scene.
“It has this kind of miraculous effect on the work,” says director Neil Armfield. “You can feel the audience gasping as the curtain goes up and a man descending over this strip of water very, very slowly. A vulnerable human body over water seems really rich as a symbol of the human spirit.”
Mark Oates and Mason Kelly in Adelaide Festival’s 2022 production of Watershed.Credit: Andrew Beveridge
Watershed, which receives its Sydney premiere on Friday, is based on the murder of George Duncan, a gay man who died in 1972 after being thrown into Adelaide’s River Torrens by a group of men.
Two police officers were later acquitted of the killing and there has yet to be a conviction. However, three years after Duncan’s death, South Australia became the first state in Australia to decriminalise homosexuality.
“I was aware of it at the time and that there was clearly something very weird happening in Adelaide,” says Armfield, who was at Homebush Boys High School in 1972. “But I probably couldn’t have given details to anyone who asked me about it except that there had been a horrible gay hate crime. They didn’t call it that then, it was called poofter bashing.”
Director Neil Armfield wanted to find “some poetic idea beyond the horrible facts”.Credit: Louise Kennerley
Fourteen years later, Armfield himself was lucky to survive a gay hate attack in inner-city Sydney.
“I was king hit and there were four or five men that I assumed wanted to kill me,” he says. “I was screaming, ‘Why are you doing this?’ There was a gush of blood which freaked them out, but I knew if I dropped to the ground they would kick me.”
Mason Kelly and Ainsley Melham.Credit: Andrew Beveridge
Armfield escaped his would-be killers only after a passing motorist intervened. A couple of days later he went to Darlinghurst Police Station to report the attack.
“The humiliating, really horrible thing is they showed absolutely no interest,” he says. “I said I could have identified them. This was at a time where there were murders happening all along Anzac Parade at gay gathering spots. I just never heard from the police again.”
More than 30 years later, and with that terrifying experience still seared in his memory, Armfield was approached to make a work to mark George Duncan’s death and the subsequent legal changes in South Australia.
He enlisted multi-award-winning author Christos Tsiolkas, playwright Alana Valentine and composer Joseph Twist for the project. His concern was to “find some poetic idea beyond the historical facts and the horrible facts of brutality”.
“The idea of taking the work on was to look at the legacy of Duncan’s death as much as the horror of his death,” he says. “And we also thought it was very important to create a great sense of the danger and the allure of desire on gay beats. It’s about the shifting shadows and the darkness and men meeting each other for sex. The thing that would’ve drawn Duncan there in the first place.”
In the same month the NSW Parliament offered an apology for laws criminalising homosexuality, Armfield hopes Watershed will help those within and outside the gay community to “come to terms with the past and be stronger for the future”.
“When we opened in Adelaide there was a huge standing ovation. And then when audience is normally filing out, most of them were sitting there with tears running down their faces. And I realised that when you get up to the foyer, you’re looking straight down to the Torrens exactly where it all happened.”
Watershed: The Death of Dr Duncan, Sydney Opera House, June 14-16