Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world

and throughout time. I'm Alice. I'm Jasmine. Today we're talking with George Savules, the curatorial

director of Qutopia, Sydney's Centre for Queer History and Culture.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the Bonarong-Bunurang people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the land on which we record this podcast and pay my respects to

their elders past and present. We recognise them as the custodians of an oral history tradition

far older than this podcast. We have some content warnings for this episode.

This episode will include discussions of AIDS, violence against queer people and other

minorities, including police violence, mentions of the Holocaust and mentions of sex.

If any of that is something you don't want to listen to, feel free to skip this episode and

check out our other content.

Welcome, George, to Queer as Fact.

Thank you very much for joining us.

Hello, hello. So I guess to start us off for our listeners who aren't familiar, what is

Q-Topia and what does your role there involve?

Newtopia came about as a need, well there's been four other attempts in Sydney to set up a museum

for queer culture and obviously they've failed or they've hit assembling blocks.

And it has become a place of culture and storytelling.

It originated with an idea by the late David Paulson, who wanted to commemorate Professor David Cooper's idea of having an AIDS museum,

but they very quickly realised that the story needed to be wider and for the greater community.

And so here we are, we're occupying an old police station, the Darlinghurst Police Station,

where many of the 78ers, first Mardi Gras, people arrested and rioted were brought here to this very building.

So Kutopia is a space where we have repurposed a building that was once a place of trauma for our community to a storytelling.

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