Once you get into it. By the time the Second World War breaks out in Europe, the security services are very alarmed about anybody with Japanese connections. And I even found when I went to the National Archives that there are little records of Monty, so they were keeping an eye on the classes that she was taking. The things that aroused fear and alarm at that time were quite remarkable.
I'm Jen Kelly from the Herald Son and this is in Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters. Today's story is about a woman who came to national prominence when she was dubbed the world's oldest lesbian after coming out at the age of one hundred
and three. Her name was Monty Punchin, and her perfect diction and manners disguised her wild past as a bad girl who once hung out at edgy Melbourne bars and secret drag parties, and was monitored in the lead up to World War II by security services who suspected her Japanese teacher was a spy. The story is told in a new book called A Secretive Century Monty Punchin's Australia.
The author, Tessa Morris, Suzuki is Professor Emerita of History at the Australian National University, and she joins us now,
welcome to the podcast, Tessa, thank you now. Monty Punchin had such a long and remarkable life, and I'm sure that people who met her in her later life and saw this dear old lady with her perfect nineteenth century diction would never have imagined that she was once this bad girl who frequented edgy bars and was involved in secret drag parties of nineteen thirty's Queer Melbourne.
So she was quite a remarkable woman in her hundreds, because she lived to one hundred and six. She certainly presented as a very correct speaking, very elderly lady, but one with an extremely sharp memory. But she had had a remarkable life, and really the remarkable life was still continuing, because beneath the very correct surface, the bad girl was still definitely there.
One of the themes that you explore in your book is that when you live such a long life as Monty did, you live through so much history, and in Monte's case, that extends right back to the eighteen eighty eight Melbourne Centennial Exhibition. Can you tell us about some of the many events that Monty lived through.
Yeah, So for me, one of the fascinating things about her life is that it was so long and she lived through so many crucial events in Australia's modern history. So, yes, she was present at the eighteen eighty eight Melbourne Centennial Exhibition.
She actually exhibited some handy work there. She lived through the Great Depression of the eighteen nineties, but also the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties, through the Boar War, the First and the Second World War, the dismissal of GoF Whitlam, And she was there and quite actively involved in the nineteen eighty eight Bisentenary Exhibition in Brisbane.
I can't wait to hear more about that later on because there's a huge controversy surrounding her involvement in the nineteen eighty eight expo in Brisbane. So we'll hear about that more later in the episode. And just going back to the eighteen eighty eight Melbourne Centennial Exhibition when she exhibited she was only six years old when she exhibited her handiwork. It's hard to believe, isn't it.
Yes, it's remarkable. So there was a competition that she went in for as a small child, and she produced this very fine piece of embroidery which you can still see. It's in a museum today and because of that exhibited now tell.
Us more about her early life. Whereabouts did she grow up.
She grew up mostly in Ballarat. She came from a fairly middle class, respectable family in Ballarat. She did also spend part of her childhood in Saint Kilda, and her grandparents had migrated from Britain during the Gold Rush, so it was very much that kind of classical nineteenth century white Australian history that she was born into.
And how old was she when it became obvious that she was a bit of a rebel.
Well, I guess pretty early on. She has a story that she tells about when she was a child, she liked to dress up in her uncle's clothes or her grandfather's clothes, and she was once caught in her grandfather's clothes doing carpentry outside the house and her grandmother said, you know, no good will come up this child.
And she got involved with children's theater groups when she was reasonably young, didn't she yes.
So when she was an adult she started performing on the stage you know, at school she loved performing. She would have loved to have been an actor, but for her quite religious, middle class family that was out of the question. Becoming a professional actor was out of the question. So when she was in her twenties going into her thirties, she became a teacher with children's theater and traveled around Australia with remarkable children's theater groups.
Tell us about what she got up to during the First World War.
So during the First World War she was very active in the theater. Things kind of changed during the First World War. There was a great boom in theatrical activity. Rather it might seem rather strange, but you know, at that time people in Australia really needed a distraction from all the terrible things that were happening around the world. So amateur or semi amateur theater flourished in Melbourne in other parts of Australia during the First World War and
Monty was really active in this. And up until then her parents had absolutely disapproved of her being on the stage in any sort of professional capacity. But during the First World War, in a way, the dividing line between amateur and professional broke down and there were all these groups staging plays to raise money for the Red Cross or other war related causes, and suddenly her father was very happy for Monty to be on the stage because
it was all part of the national war effort. So she got involved in some extremely interesting theatrical performances during those years.
And she was involved in the pioneering days of radio as well, wasn't he.
That's right? Yes, So very early on she got a little slot on radio where she was allowed to really choose the content of her short talks, and very interestingly, I think she chose to tell a version of Aboriginal dream time stories. Now this was a version that had
been written by a friend of hers in Melbourne. They were probably not very close to the original dream Time stories, but the fact that she wanted to tell these on radio when there was so little content related to Aboriginal people seems to be quite pioneering and remarkable for that age.
Exactly. I mean, it would be such an incredibly normal thing to do today, wouldn't it, but ninety years ago would be unheard of.
Yes, Now, thank.
You very much for telling us about her professional background. What was going on in her personal life.
So she met a young man shortly before the Boer War who had wanted her to marry him. She had then gone after the Boer War and actually settled in South Africa, and at one point he returned and asked her to come to South Africa with him, but she had decided by then that really relationships with men were
not for her. So by the time of the First World War she was starting to become engaged in a relationship which really became the love of her life with a Melbourne woman called Debbie Sutton, and this relationship lasted into the second half of the nineteen twenties. They lived together for a while, but ultimately it broke up and it really broke Ponty Punchon's heart.
Just to put this in context at the time, was this something that the two women would have been able to tell their friends and family.
Well, the interesting thing is that at that time Monty Punchen and I think, you know, almost everybody of her generation they'd never heard the word lesbian. She herself, I guess, only starting to work out her own sexuality. But in a way, because of that, for two women, you know, to live together was not really regarded as at all strange or a subject of gossip. It was just assumed there were, you know, two maiden ladies sharing a house.
It didn't seem to have alarmed or concerned her family at all, but they didn't really understand the depth of the relationship that was developing.
Now. Monty always had a passion for travel, and she always had an interest in learning about people from all over the world tell us about her overseas travels.
So she embarked on a journey to East Asia entirely by accident. Really, what had happened was that a friend of hers called Marjorie Rieford, had been given a pair of tickets for a free trip to Japan, which another friend had wanted a ruffle and wasn't able to use. Now, a trip to Japan in those days was a really big deal. It was a lot sea journey and Marjorie needed a companion, so she invited Monty Punchen to come with her, and offe went, and it was an eye
opener for Monty. In the end, she didn't just go to Japan. She went on briefly to China, to Korea and also to Hong Kong, and it really changed her life.
One of the other interesting things about Monty is that she was one of the first Australians to study Japanese, wasn't she.
Yes, she was a pioneer in that respect as well. She didn't actually, you know, formally study at university, but she was one of the first people to take classes initially offered on the radio in the nineteen thirties, and then she signed up for an evening class at Melbourne University. And she was passionate about studying Japanese, even though obviously
it was very difficult for somebody at that time. You know, she'd only had a very brief stay in Japan, and she did have much opportunity to talk to people other than her teacher, who was Japanese himself.
But this was the nineteen thirties, so it was in some ways a dangerous time to be studying Japanese, and it brought her to the attention of security services. Can you tell us more about that.
That's right, yes, So in the early nineteen thirties, the relationship with Japan was not so bad and trade was booming between Australia and Japan. But by the time you get into the late nineteen thirties, of course, there's a lot of alarm in Australia about Japan's growing militarism, particularly after it had taken over Manchuria, and then there was
the invasion of China in nineteen thirty seven. So once you get into about thirty nine, by the time the Second World War breaks out in Europe, the security services are very alarmed about anybody with Japanese connections. And I even found when I went to the National Archives that there are little records of so they were keeping an eye on the classes that she was taking and on
her and rather bravely, I thought. At that point it became difficult for the Japanese language group to meet, and she actually opened her flat to her apartment and said, you know, if you want to come and meet in my apartment and talk Japanese here, you're welcome to do that.
So who was their teacher they would have had a Japanese teacher? Was that the person that our security services were concerned about? Do you think is that the reason that they had come to the attention of security services.
Well, I think anybody who had any sort of Japanese connection was being watched pretty closely. But yeah, her teacher was a man known as Moshi in Agaki. It was a sort of anglicizedation of his name. He had attracted a lot of attention from the security services. There are
great fat files on him in the archives. There's really no evidence that he was doing anything sinister, but he did have some connections to cultural agencies and so on in Japan, and so the Australian authorities first of all, they thought he was a spy, and then they started to think that he was deliberately being sent to teach Japanese badly, so that Australians wouldn't learn proper Japanese and this would weaken their position in their dealings with Japan,
which I think is a fairly remarkable assumption for them to have made.
Oh how fascinating. So when Monteo opened up her flat, did the teacher come to her flat to teach the classes?
I guess. So it's difficult to tell exactly who came, but it's likely that he came. He'd become a good friend of hers, and also he was married to an Australian and she was a good friend of his wife as well.
And was there any suggestion that the security services were following any of the students in the class.
Yes, I think there were certainly following some of them. I think, you know, in a slightly nineteen thirty sexist way, they were much more worried by the men than they were by the women. So there were a couple of other women teachers who were also taking the classes, and although they appear in the security records, they don't seem to have roused the same level of alarm as the men who were studying did.
Was Monty ever followed herself.
I couldn't see any records that she'd been followed.
How fascinating. That must have been so much fun to look for all those details in the records.
It was. It is extraordinary, you know. The things that aroused fear and alarm at that time were quite remarkable. Often very small and innocent things caused great alarm to the security services.
We'll be back soon. Do you hear what happened to Monty next? So stay with us. Apart from studying Japanese, she was also active in the secret gay party scene in Melbourne, and they're involved in drag parties as well. I'd love you to tell us everything you know about that.
Yes, so it is a fascinating part of Melbourne. History and of Australian history more generally. Monte's story was she had quite a few gay friends in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Of course they wouldn't have used the word
gay then, but that's the word we'd use now. And I think she found particularly that when her relationship with Debbie Sutton, the woman she had absolutely loved, broke up, she was really devastated and she couldn't talk about it to her family or to most of her friends because they didn't understand. But her male gay friends did understand. In one of her interviews, she said they really saved her life because she could talk to them about the
relationship and they knew where she was coming from. So at that point she became much more engaged in this sort of secret gay world in Melbourne, and she started attending house parties which were held just sort of out in the suburbs of Melbourne in big houses with gardens, usually at the weekend, and people could dress up. There was even a wedding between two of her male friends, and Monty was the best man, dressed up in her smart sort of tuxedo and boat high at this wedding.
So it is quite a fascinating bit of history.
And so tell us more about So they were drag parties, so the women were dressed as men, the men were dressed as women.
Yes, so they often involved dressing up. You know. It was just a free space where people could express their identity in the way that they wanted. It was of course very much hidden away because of course homosexuality was a crime at the time, so for the men it was very important to keep their sexual identity away from the prying eyes of media or you know, the police.
And Tessa, was there a particular part of Melbourne that was a hub for these queer parties.
The main parties that Monte seems to have gone to were at a private house called Lavender Lodge, which was Inferntry Gully, so out of the city center. Quite a big house apparently where they had these weekend house parties.
Ah okay, And for those not from Melbourne, that's the base of the Dandenong Rangers. Very interesting. Now take us forward to World War Two because Monte's knowledge of Japanese became quite useful during the war, didn't it.
Yes, So during the war she was recruited to be a warden at the intern camp that was set up in Tatura in rural Victoria to house Japanese civilians enemy aliens as they were called then. It was a huge camp. It also had sections which held other enemy aliens, Italians and Germans and so on, but Monty was in the Japanese section. She seems to have been had mainly to
teach the children of Japanese internees. But in fact, the slight difficulty was that I think the authorities probably overestimated how much Japanese she knew, so she'd studied very hard, but her Japanese was not really good enough to teach classes to native Japanese speakers, so she ended up more, you know, taking the children on outings and generally kind of looking after the welfare of the Japanese civilians who
were interned in these camps. And I think one of the important things to remember is that when you talk about Japanese being in turn during the war, many of them were not Japanese as we would understand it today, because Taiwanese and Koreans were treated as Japanese because they
were part of the Japanese Empire. And then there were also quite a number of Australian and other women married to Japanese men, including some Aboriginal Australian women, and they and their children were also all in turn during the war.
And Monte continued teaching after the war, didn't she.
Yeah, So after the war she moved on to something that was perhaps not entirely different, but in a very different setting. She went to work in Bonnagilla, which was the reception center set up for new migrants who came immediately after the war. Many of these were refugees, displaced people from Central Europe, and she really enjoyed working there. She found the atmosphere completely different, of course, from the
rather repressive atmosphere of working in an internment camp. Although conditions in Bonagilla and also Summer's Camp, which was another reception center that she worked in, the conditions there were not great. It was fairly tough for most of the migrants. It was just such a relief, you know, to have got out of the dangerous situation that they'd been in Europe.
And Monty made very good friends with a number of the people that she taught in these reception centers and went on being friends with them for the rest of her life.
She must have absolutely loved being a teacher, because she continued teaching for decades more, didn't she.
Well, the interesting thing is that she was ambivalent about teaching. She really didn't like conventional school teaching. In fact, sometimes you know in her interviews she would say she hated it. She didn't like having to discipline people, and I don't think she liked being disciplined herself. But she enjoyed teaching adults,
and she enjoyed teaching in more relaxed settings. So she had loved teaching the theater children before the First World War, and later on in her life she went on to teach in an English school in the New Hebrides Vanuatu as we would say today, And again that was a very small school. She ran the entire school and she could make her own kind of happy teaching atmosphere, and she loved teaching there as well. She was already in her seventies by that time, so that was quite remarkable in itself.
And then she continued into her eighties.
Yes, so she went back to Japan in her eighties and taught English in Japan for several months.
And then beyond there. What did she do after that?
Beyond that, she was still teaching, you know, private classes. She taught Japanese private classes, certainly into her nineties, possibly into her hundreds, I'm not quite sure about that. And she also taught some English language classes for foreigners living in Melbourne, including some Japanese people. And in addition to that, she became quite an active host for foreign students coming
to Australia. And as Australia gradually started to open up more to Asia, we had the Colombo Scheme and students from Japan, Indonesia and other parts of Asia started coming to Australia. Monty was very active in hosting and helping them.
And she actually received an award from the Japanese government for all the work that she'd done over the years, didn't she Yes.
She received an award that she was extremely proud of for her role as a sort of informal ambassador in a way between Australia and Japan.
Now take us forward to the take us to the nineteen eighties and the controversy that we mentioned at the beginning when she was when she was appointed as a roving ambassador for Brisbane Expo eighty eight. It's also bizarre it's actually a little bit hard to believe. But could you take us through the events of nineteen eighty five.
Yes, So there she was. She was one hundred and three, and she was this marvelous old lady who had a great memory, was a great speaker. She had been involved in the Expo one hundred years earlier, and she had this great connection to Japan. And this was the time when Queensland was busy developing ties economic ties with Japan, encouraging Japanese investment in tourism and real estate and so on. So she looked like the perfect person to a roving
ambassador for Brisbane's Expo eighty eight. And she was invited to do that, and she was delighted and very happy to accept. But then there was a little controversy because shortly before she'd been issued this invitation, she'd already given an interview to a gay magazine where she talked about her relationships with women, and particularly the fact that she'd had this great love affair with Debbie in the nineteen twenties.
Sorry, just to clarify, was this the first time that she had ever come out as a lesbian.
Yes, so that in the first article, which appeared just before she was appointed. She did come out, but they didn't identify her by name. There was a photograph of her with the article, so I guess her friends knew who it was, but she wasn't identified by name. But then, just after she was appointed as the roving as, she came out with another interview where she was named and as you can imagine, the Joe Biagi Petersen government was appalled. Joe was not known for his friendliness to gay people.
In fact, he was quite rapidly homophobic, and so there was quite a kerfuffle. In the end, they decided not to cancel her appointment because that would probably have looked even worse, but it certainly caused a good deal of controversy and was the subject of some newspaper articles and so on at the time.
Tell us more about the controversy. She became known as the world's oldest lesbian. That was the first thing that happened, and she has been known that way ever since. Really that sort of a monika. That's stark, hasn't it.
Yes, that's right, and it's a name that she was a bit ambivalent about. So she chose to come out. By this time, she had a lot of younger gay friends were very much active, you know, in the gay rights movement of the nineteen seventies and eighties, and this had been an eye opener for her. She loved their company and she wanted to talk about her own experiences, but she also didn't like being labeled. On a number of occasions, she said she didn't really like being labeled
lesbian because she just didn't like labels in general. And she didn't want to talk too much to the media about her private life because she'd grown up in an age when that was really regarded as not being the proper thing to do. You know, you could talk to your friends about it, but you didn't want to go into the details of your private sexual life with the media and in public.
Now, there's a great quote from the I mean, there were obviously lots of newspaper reports about this whole controversy, but there's a particularly good quote from a Sydney Morning Herald story about it. Can you tell us about that one?
So there was a headline in one of the articles which said something along the lines of Sir Joe wishes his roving ambassador could be a little less gay. So clearly you know, people were quite amused by this whole event, and you know, I felt as I was reading it, reading about it, that I would have loved to have seen Sir Joe's face when he heard the news.
Now, now Monty did go on to attend the eighty eight Expert, didn't she?
Yes, she did. By that time. Of course she was really very old and she had had a few health issues, although her health had been pretty remarkable, but she attended. She had a very good woman friend whom she was living with at the time, Margaret Taylor, who went along
with her and helped her. She went to the expo twice, and she also made a final trip to Japan, you know, in very old age, again accompanied by Margaret, where she talked about she had just published her memoirs and she talked about her memoirs to Japanese audiences.
Was that after Expoadia because she was one of one hundred and five years old at the time of Expo eighty eight, So did she go to Japan after that?
So it was around the same time, Yes, when she was one hundred and five.
Obviously she held Japan very dear to her heart.
Yes, yes, she loved Japan and one of the really important things was that she had reconnected with some of the people who had been interned in Tatua Camp during the war, and for them, I think it was very important to reconnect with her. It was sort of an act of reconciliation in a way between Australia and Japan at a time when you know, Australia's connections with Asia and particularly with Japan were starting to flourish.
Amazing And how would you like Monty to be remembered, Oh.
I think she should be remembered as a remarkable woman. Not always a conventionally good woman. She could be quite naughty at times. She told her story in her own inimitable way, and sometimes it wasn't exactly the way that it's recorded in the official records. But she was such
a character. She was so open to new ideas and new influences, and that was the thing that she really stressed, particularly in her old age, how important it is not to be afraid of people who are different or of the outside world, but to engage and listen to others. And that was what she did right the way through her life, and I think that's what made her life such a rich life and such an interesting one to follow for a historian.
And your book is now Tessa a Secretive Century Monty Punchen's Australia, Congratulations and things. Thanks for sharing the story with us today.
Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
Thanks for listening. This has been In Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters, written and hosted by me Jen Kelly, edited by Harry Hughes and produced by John Tyburton. You can find all the stories and photos associated with our episodes at haroldsun dot com dot au slash ibaw. If you've enjoyed this podcast, we'd love you to leave a five star rating on Apple Podcasts.
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