Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures told the true story of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme's murder of Pauline's mother.
Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures told the true story of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme's murder of Pauline's mother.
In this extract from Okay, Boomer, a book about the 1960s in New Zealand, author Joanne Drayton explains how homosexuality was seen as a perverse crime - a view reinforced by society's reaction to two senseless killings.
The dynamite decade of the 1960s left my nuclear family unexploded. Its pyrotechnics came later. The revolutions that were taking place globally in fashion, recreational drugs, clubs and counter-culture; human rights and street protests; consumerism; festivals; and alternative communities — these passed us by.
The most inflammatory thing at our family Christmas in 1962 were the crackers on the dining-room table waiting to be pulled; the most intoxicating, the thimblefuls of sweet sherry judiciously poured out. Christmas gatherings were intergenerational — no one even knew about the generation gap. We met in our family units at my Aunty Doris and Uncle Reg's place in St Albans, Christchurch, and become a clan.
I am the 4-year-old girl in the light blue sleeveless dress with a white lace ruff, sitting slightly separated from the group and eyeballing the presents. The outfit I am wearing is sensible, with just a dash of prettiness in my hair and around my neck. I can grow up to be a teacher, nurse or a secretary.
My world is sublimely simple. Embedded in my consciousness already is the fact that boys and girls become men and women, and then they marry. Women who marry leave the workforce to look after their husbands and children. My parents talk in hushed tones about the women who fail to find a mate. These unfortunates, called spinsters, live on shelves, and their whole existence is a sad, dusty waiting. Like fans at a footy match, they watch — they witness others playing the game, but never handle a ball themselves.
My brother is the adorable little sailor boy sitting on our father Malcolm's knee, looking into the camera. His costume evokes tots of rum on the high seas, and a world of uncharted adventure.
My brother, Guy, can grow up to be anything. Bachelors fare better than spinsters in discussions around our meal table. Like spinsters, they are observers. There is still a lot of looking and waiting, but far less blame. By not marrying then procreating they fail to make their proper contribution to society. But this can also be admired; viewed with a degree of envy — and this by most married men.
Drayton as a little girl (front) with her family. Photo / Supplied
Bachelors do not live on shelves, but swim with the rest of us in the mainstream. They are just that little bit slipperier, faster, freer — they are the ones that got away.
Christchurch was a conservative place when this photograph was taken. The natural order of things was binary, and the prospect of marriage, for most, a fait accompli. But there was a section of the population who were much more of an anathema, even, than spinsters or bachelors.
These were "camp" or "queer" men, and women living in or seeking homosexual relationships. Inverts, as they were known, were almost never mentioned in polite society.
The word "lesbian" punched its way into people's consciousness following the Parker–Hulme murder in Christchurch, in 1954. This sensational case involved matricide and two teenage killers who were allegedly in a lesbian relationship.
Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme on their way to court in 1954. Photo / Christchurch Star file photo
On June 22, 1954, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme took Honora Parker, Pauline's mother, up to Victoria Park, on the Cashmere Hills, and beat her to death with a brick. This forged an almost unbreakable bond between lesbianism and murder. The Parker–Hulme case became Christchurch's own homegrown cautionary tale.
Anxiety about lesbianism and homosexuality surged throughout the country during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1954, the Mazengarb Report terrorised families like mine with stories of "sex gangs" and teenage "orgies" carried out in private homes while parents were out. Children and young people were metamorphosing into juvenile delinquents, and indulging in unnatural sexual behaviour.
Fear of the menace of this explosion of deviant behaviour culminated a decade later in the tragic episode of Charles Arthur Allan Aberhart (known as Allan), a drapery store manager from Blenheim, who travelled down to Christchurch to holiday with a friend. He had recently been jailed for the sexual "assault" of a willing male partner. All homosexual connection was outlawed at this time in New Zealand.
Allan Aberhart was fatally attacked by a group of teens in Christchurch's Hagley Park in January 1964. His assailants walked free from court. Photo / Supplied
Aberhart's three-month stay in prison meant he had a criminal record and was on the police register of sexual offenders.
Immediately after he arrived in Christchurch, on a long, stiflingly hot evening in January 1964, Aberhart drove along Armagh St to the entrance of Hagley Park. He went into the expansive grounds and visited the men's toilets near Little Lake Victoria — a well-known cottaging (pick-up) site.
That same evening, a band of six youths left their homes determined to beat up a homosexual.
They ranged in age from 15 to 17 years old. One of the youngest acted as bait. He approached several men before he struck up a conversation with Aberhart, who was clearly interested in sex. The situation escalated when the rest of the group materialised from the shadows.
Suddenly Aberhart was surrounded by an angry gang of juveniles. He tried to calm the group by offering to buy them cups of coffee. When this failed to rescue the situation, he yelled for help. His cries were heard by a man walking a dog, who was later a witness in court. This would-be Samaritan believed Aberhart was up to no good in the toilets and deserved what he got.
Aberhart, who was physically attacked by at least two of the teenagers, died at the scene.
When the case came to trial on May 5, 1964, it was evident from Aberhart's injuries that he had been restrained and beaten. The autopsy report revealed that he had bruises to the face, a broken nose and a small fracture at the base of the skull. The cranial break was due in part to a medical complication.
Aberhart was born with an unusually thin skull around the eye sockets, and blows that might not have been fatal to someone else were sufficient to kill him. He died of a massive brain haemorrhage.
An all-male jury found the six youths not guilty of manslaughter, and they were released without conviction. Almost exactly 10 years after the Parker–Hulme murder there was no cautionary note sounded for young people as there had been with the earlier case. The underlying message was that you could go out intentionally looking to beat up a homosexual man, and if you accidentally killed him you could walk away free.
This subtext should have disturbed people, but there was almost no protest. Monte Holcroft, writing for the Listener, was one of the few who spoke out. His point was that "an alleged homosexuality has been felt to be an offence which mitigates a crime. And the crime itself came out of an unhealthy concern about sexual deviation." A precedent had been set. Where homosexuals were concerned, the civic population could act as vigilantes and get away with it.
Not only did the court sanction "queer-bashing", but its long arm — the police — intensified its enforcement of the laws against homosexuality. During the 1960s there were more police entrapments than ever before. Known offenders and sites of same-sex encounters, such as the men's toilets near Little Lake Victoria in Hagley Park, became the target of deliberate stings as homosexual men were set up by police decoys to break the law.
According to social historian and LGBTQI commentator Chris Brickell, police took a more active role and went to greater lengths to prosecute adult men for consensual encounters. The number of convictions for homosexual offending increased, reaching their zenith during the mid-60s.
While the permissive 1960s relaxed many social strictures, this decade saw an increasingly systematic and draconian approach to identifying and punishing homosexuals.
But a stint in one of the country's penal institutions could be avoided, in many instances, by taking a "cure". Medical practitioners were the new "get out of jail free card", but, of course, nothing is ever free. While the "universal church" views homosexuality as a sin, and the authorities as a crime, the medical profession pathologised it as a sickness, or a sexual deviation, that could be treated.
The post-World War II medicalisation of homosexuality meant a range of treatments were commonplace in the 1960s. The pressure to try them was intense, especially when they were offered by authorities instead of a fine or imprisonment. Many people's sense of their own self-loathing went so deep that they actually sought treatment as a matter of personal choice.
Psychoanalysis and the sleep-inducing drug Pentothal were regarded as potential remedies.
Aversion therapy, during which the patient was shown repulsive images and medically made to feel nauseous when having homoerotic thoughts, was also used. The outcome of this treatment was to establish a strong link between homosexual thoughts and physical repulsion. But perhaps the most infamous therapy was ECT (or electroconvulsive therapy), generally known as shock treatment.
Sylvia Kamphaug was just one of many young women incarcerated in a mental institution and exposed to shock and drug treatments. In 1959 she was sent to Ashburn Hall in Dunedin for a cure: she was 15 years old. The word "lesbian" was never mentioned. Sylvia was there because she refused to be feminine. Her sickness was that she liked girls and wore men's clothes. On her arrival at Ashburn Hall, she was stripped of her ordinary clothes, and for the duration of her stay there she wore a dress that looked like a sack.
One of Sylvia's jobs at Ashburn Hall was to wheel ECT patients into the theatre for treatment.
Sylvia watched as medical staff attached electrodes to the patient's head, before a bolt of electricity arched the patient's body in a hideous rigor. ECT treatment passed a current of electricity through the brain, which caused a grand-mal seizure. The effects were catastrophic. Sylvia would wheel the patient away in a semi-comatose state, "dribbling". She noted a dramatic change in patients' behaviour after ECT. They were very "subservient" and passive, and often did not say anything for days on end.
Medically, the patients experienced memory loss, slurred speech and major confusion about who and where they were.
Sylvia's job of wheeling patients into the ECT room was a strategy to try to reform her without undergoing ECT treatment herself. Medical staff hoped the threat would be enough. But when Sylvia did not behave appropriately, or acted out, she was restrained and given an oral sedative. The message was clear to her. If she did not conform, she would be incarcerated for a very long time.
Although Sylvia's stay at Ashburn Hall was relatively short, many men and women were held in institutions against their will — or, more sadly — with their grateful compliance, for long periods of time. Others were admitted on a regular basis, for shorter stays. The effect for most of them was that they struggled to cope with the trauma of what they had experienced in mental institutions for the rest of their lives. And, of course, most kept on transgressing, and when they were caught it was prison and punishment rather than treatment and "cure".
In the 1960s, homosexual men and women were not a politicised group. The term "gay", which had been used in relation to homosexual men for nearly a hundred years in the United States, would not become common currency until the Gay Liberation Movement used it in the 1970s. "Drag queen", "queer", "camp" and "bull dyke" — also not new terms — were still largely locked in the parlance of their subcultures. Words like "homophobic" did not exist, because homophobia was normal. Nor were expressions such as 'in the closet', 'coming out' and 'straight' (as opposed to 'gay') in common usage.
In the straight world, gay people had no vocabulary to describe themselves or their life experiences.
The language which would communicate a 'queer' way of life had not been collected together and politicised yet.
An event at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, New York, at the end of the decade, changed everything. On the evening of 28 June 1969, after an early-morning raid of the inn by the New York Police Department, its patrons decided to resist police harassment and brutality by demonstrating. For four nights, gay men and adolescents confronted the police in an attempt to stand their ground and stop the routine raiding and closing-down of gay clubs. This was the beginning of resistance. The beginning of a political organisation that would challenge homophobia and spread its message of equality for all sexual orientations around the globe. The movement would not properly arrive in New Zealand until 1972, when a group of young activists spent a few hours one evening writing a Gay Liberation Manifesto.
Author Joanne Drayton who features in a new book about the 1960s in New Zealand, Okay, Boomer.
The word "homosexual" wasn't mentioned at our Christmas dinner table in 1962, nor during our family visit to Christchurch Airport in 1964 — the year that Allan Aberhart died. In 1964 I am 6 years old, and my mother, Patricia, who is trying to restrain the runaway me, knows what lesbians are, because she attended Christchurch Girls' High School with Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker.
By the 1960s, however, the sensation of matricide, a teenage crush and killing are still there, but any details about lesbianism have been muted in a sound-box of silence.
Children like me, who would ultimately identify themselves as lesbian, know more about unicorns than homosexuals. You might never see a unicorn, but at least you can read about them in storybooks. There is no acknowledgement in polite middle-class families of a queer world. There are no role models; no successful gay relationships to identify with. Lesbians are murderers, or mad, and homosexual men, deserving victims. No language exists to understand how you feel, or to talk about it with anyone else.
Homosexuality would become for many of us, not one, but three things — a sin, a crime and a sickness; and marriage was the white noise of normality.
• Allan Aberhart's conviction was formally expunged under the Criminal Records (Expungement of Convictions for Historical Homosexual Offences) Act 2018. Secretary for Justice Andrew Kibblewhite found that the "conduct for which Mr Aberhart was convicted, if it was engaged in today, would not constitute an offence".
Joanne Drayton is a New York Times bestselling author. She wrote The Search for Anne Perry about Juliet Hulme who, in 1954, along with Pauline Parker, murdered Parker's mother in Christchurch. On Hulme's release from prison, she moved to Scotland, changed her name to Anne Perry and became a bestselling crime fiction writer. Peter Jackson made the film Heavenly Creatures about the case in 1994. In 2007, Drayton was awarded a National Library Fellowship, and in 2017, the prestigious Logan Fellowship at the Carey Institute in upstate New York. In 2019, her book Hudson and Halls: The Food of Love - about Kiwi TV chefs Peter Hudson and David Halls - was the winner of the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-fiction at the New Zealand Book Awards.
Okay, Boomer by Ian Chapman.
Okay, Boomer By Ian Chapman Published by Bateman Books RRP $39.99 Available now
