The candid stories in North of the Border reveal how lesbians coped in the face of a hostile society – how they negotiated that time to find a belonging for themselves, as Faulkner puts it.



Mel, another woman in the book, lived with her girlfriend in Cairns in the sixties.



"They were living in a kind of clandestine relationship, the girlfriend would go out on dates with men but come home to Mel," explains Faulkner. In a technological mishap almost unfathomable to today's youth, they were caught out saying "I love you" to one another on a "party line", a public phone call where others could – and did – listen in.

"They got busted, and one night they had just come home from the drive in theatre and were getting ready to go to bed and there was a loud banging on the door."

It was two men they knew from work, drunk and angry.

"One started man-handling Mel's girlfriend and the other started berating her for not having enough beer in the fridge," says Faulkner. "She got really angry to see this other guy manhandling her girlfriend and she picked up a knife, and lost it, and the guys took off before she could hurt them."

After that, Mel and her partner decided they couldn't stay in Cairns – but instead of moving to the city, they took off to the Gulf of Carpentaria.



"The strange thing about Mel and her girlfriend was that they had to leave a bigger city to go to a very tiny town where they could actually live openly," says Faulkner.



"It sort of goes against the generalisations of LGBTIQ history, like you’ve got to go to the big smoke to come out... There’s little pockets of queer Queensland all over the place, in the strangest of places all of a sudden there’s a little rainbow flag."