The Paper Printed Their Addresses. It Took Thirty Eight Years to Say Sorry.

The permit was granted. The charges were dropped. The list is the part that did the damage, and the list is the part that is portable to now.

Told by Paige Turner · 1 September 2026

The bank has a float. The bank has had a float for years and there is a man in a polo shirt who is paid to book it, and every February he says the word community out loud in a meeting and nobody laughs. I have made my peace with it. What I have not made my peace with is the version of the story where the first one was a party that got a bit rowdy.

It was not a party. It was a permitted procession that was broken up, and then it was fifty three arrests, and then it was a newspaper printing where those people lived.

So, the question. When did a march in this country last become a criminal matter, and how did that end?

It ended with three apologies, spread across forty years, from three different institutions, and one of them was a newspaper.

24 June 1978

Lance Gowland organised a permit with New South Wales Police for a procession down Oxford Street ending at Hyde Park. That is not a detail, that is the whole architecture of what follows. This was not an unannounced action. Somebody went and asked, and was granted permission, and the permission is why the word unlawful in what came next deserves the sneer I am giving it.

Over five hundred people assembled at Taylor Square in the evening. By the time the front of it reached Kings Cross the crowd was around two thousand. It was broken up by police.

Fifty three people were arrested and taken to Darlinghurst Police Station. Around a hundred more followed the vans on foot to stand outside, which I would like noted, because the instinct to follow the van is the single most useful thing this community has ever developed and it is not taught anywhere.

One more thing about the permit before we go inside, because it is the pivot the whole night turns on. A procession with a permit is a lawful assembly. The people at the front of it were not doing anything at all until somebody with authority decided that they were, and the mechanism by which a lawful thing becomes an unlawful thing in the space of an evening is not written down anywhere that a person on the street can consult. That is not an accident of 1978. That is how public order law works, still, in every Australian jurisdiction, and it is why the permit is worth more attention than the batons.

What happened inside is where I stop being funny.

Peter Murphy, who has spoken about it publicly since, was taken away from the others and beaten badly enough that he began to convulse. Margaret Lyons was one of more than twenty women held in a single cell who could hear it happening. Those accounts are on the public record in their own words and I am reporting them as such rather than as a finding of any court, because there was never a court that examined it.

Everyone arrested was charged under the Summary Offences Act and bailed on the Sunday morning.

Three days later

The Sydney Morning Herald published the names, the addresses and the occupations of the people charged.

Not the names. The addresses.

In New South Wales in June 1978, male homosexuality was a crime. It stayed a crime until 22 May 1984, six years later. So a newspaper took fifty three people who had been arrested at a permitted march, and printed, for the general public, where each of them could be found and what they did for a living, in a jurisdiction where what they were was illegal.

Some of them lost their jobs. Some were threatened with losing them. Others were outed to their families, in one afternoon, by a broadsheet, with no warning and no ability to refuse.

The Herald's own words about this, thirty eight years later, are worth having in full because they are unusually plain for a corporate apology. In 1978, The Sydney Morning Herald reported the names, addresses and professions of people arrested during public protests to advance gay rights. The paper at the time was following the custom and practice of the day. We acknowledge and apologise for the hurt and suffering that reporting caused. It would never happen today.

That was published on 24 February 2016, signed by the editor-in-chief, Darren Goodsir. The paper also went and apologised to representatives of the 78ers in person, which costs more and is worth more, and I will say so.

I will give it this. Following the custom and practice of the day is an honest sentence, and honest is rarer than sorry. It says the paper did not think it was doing anything unusual, which is correct, and which is precisely the thing worth being frightened of. Nobody at that paper had to hate anybody. The list was simply what you printed.

The rest of 1978

If you think the arrests were a one-night misjudgement, the year does not support you.

On 26 June, three hundred people protested outside the closed court in Liverpool Street and seven were arrested. On 15 July, two thousand marched from Martin Place to Darlinghurst Police Station and fourteen were arrested. On 27 August, three hundred marched down Oxford Street to Taylor Square and Hyde Park and one hundred and four were arrested.

By the New South Wales Police Force's own reckoning, forty years later, there were nearly two hundred arrests across June, July and August 1978.

Most of the charges were eventually dropped. That is what the machine does. It does not need to convict you. It needs to arrest you, hold you, print you, and cost you your job, and then it can drop the charge and nothing has technically happened at all.

The instrument

I went and looked at the Act, because the Act is the receipt and everybody quotes it without opening it.

The Summary Offences Act 1970 is the New South Wales statute the 1978 charges were laid under. It was repealed by the Summary Offences (Repeal) Act 1979, number 62 of 1979. Section 3 of that repealing Act consists, in its entirety, of six words.

The Summary Offences Act 1970 is repealed.

That is what is on the New South Wales legislation register today, and you can read it in about four seconds, which is roughly forty seconds less than it took to arrest anybody under it.

I want to be careful about what that repeal means, because it is routinely oversold. The 1970 Act was a broad public order statute and it was disliked for reasons that went well beyond us. It was not repealed as an apology to the 78ers and nobody has ever claimed it was. What is true, and is enough, is that the specific legal instrument used to arrest fifty three people at a permitted march in June 1978 was gone from the statute book by the following year.

The arrests outlived the law that authorised them by about eleven months. The consequences of the list outlived it by decades.

Three apologies, thirty eight and forty years late

Here is the ledger, and the order matters.

The newspaper went first. 24 February 2016.

The parliament went second. On 25 February 2016, members of the Legislative Assembly formally apologised. Bruce Notley-Smith, then the member for Coogee, said this. For the mistreatment they suffered that evening, as a member of this Parliament who oversaw the events of that night, I apologise and I say sorry.

Read that construction again. He is apologising as a member of the institution that made the law and oversaw the force, not as a man who was there. It is the correct grammar for an institutional apology and it is the grammar that took thirty eight years to find.

The police went last. On 9 August 2018, at the Sydney Police Centre, Commissioner Michael Fuller said he was truly sorry for the way the LGBTQI community was treated in 1978, said he was personally sorry, and said the actions of police, and society, and the laws behind them at the time were wrong.

Forty years and forty six days after the vans left Taylor Square.

The five things, separated

Established fact. A permit was obtained for the 24 June 1978 procession. Over five hundred assembled at Taylor Square and the crowd reached around two thousand. Fifty three people were arrested and taken to Darlinghurst. Charges were laid under the Summary Offences Act and most were later dropped. The Sydney Morning Herald published names, addresses and occupations three days later. Further arrests followed through 1978, totalling nearly two hundred by the police force's own account. The Herald apologised on 24 February 2016, the New South Wales Parliament on 25 February 2016, and the NSW Police Force on 9 August 2018. Male homosexuality remained criminal in NSW until 1984.

Reported first-hand accounts, from the people themselves. The assault on Peter Murphy in custody. The women held in a single cell hearing it. These are published testimony, given by named participants under their own names, and they have never been contradicted by any institution. They have also never been tested in any proceeding, and I am not going to upgrade them to a finding just because I believe them.

Contested. Whether the permit was revoked before the march was broken up. You will read that it was, in a lot of places. I could not establish it from anything I trust, so I have not asserted it, and the difference between a permit that was revoked and a permit that was ignored is not decorative, it is the entire legal question.

Historical interpretation. That 24 June 1978 is the origin point of Australian queer public life. Reasonable, widely held, and slightly too neat for me.

My interpretation, clearly labelled. The parliament and the police force were doing what parliaments and police forces do, and I expect it. The newspaper is the one that should keep you up. A newspaper is not an instrument of the state. Nobody ordered it to print those addresses. It printed them because printing the addresses of arrested persons was the format, and a format will carry a community off a cliff more efficiently than any policy ever written, because nobody in the building has to decide anything.

Unknown. How many of the fifty three lost work, housing or family and never said so. The number does not exist. It was never collected, and the people it happened to had every reason on earth not to volunteer.

Why the list is the precedent, not the batons

Everybody remembers the police. Almost nobody argues about the police, either, which is how you know it is not the live question.

Look at what each institution actually had to do to cause harm on 24 June 1978. The force had to deploy officers, break up a permitted procession, physically arrest fifty three adults, transport them, hold them overnight and process charges. That is expensive, visible, contested, and it produced the counter-marches within forty eight hours.

The newspaper had to typeset a list.

The list did not require a decision. It did not require a commander, a briefing, a warrant or a single officer willing to put hands on anybody. It required a subeditor doing the thing the paper always did with arrested persons, on deadline, at low cost, reaching every household in the city on the same morning. And it reached the two audiences that mattered, employers and families, without either of them having to seek it out.

That asymmetry is the whole lesson and it is the reason this piece is about a masthead rather than a truncheon. Violence has a budget and leaves bruises somebody can photograph. Publication has neither. A community can survive being hit. Being indexed is harder, because there is nothing to point at afterwards and no single person to hold to it.

What now

The 78ers are in their seventies and eighties. Several are dead. The three apologies are on the record and they are not coming back for a second draft.

What survives is the mechanism, which is the only part that is portable. A permitted gathering becomes an unlawful one at the discretion of the people policing it. The charge does not have to stick. The list does the work. And the list is not produced by malice, it is produced by whoever currently owns the format, which in 1978 was a broadsheet subeditor and in 2026 is a platform, a livestream, a face-matching hobbyist and a screenshot.

If you are in Sydney and want to know what is actually left on Oxford Street, as opposed to what the tourism copy says is left, our Sydney guide counts it honestly.

And if you want the one line to remember out of all of it, it is not from the police and it is not from the parliament. It is from the paper. The paper at the time was following the custom and practice of the day.

Everyone who did this was following the custom and practice of the day. That is not a defence. That is the confession.