Queer Heritage Sydney
A public record of LGBTIQ lives examined by the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes.
Between 1970 and 2010, dozens of gay and transgender people were killed in and around Sydney in what are now recognised as hate crime deaths. Many of these deaths were dismissed at the time — by police, by courts, by the press — as accidents, suicides, or robberies.
In December 2023, Justice John Sackar delivered a landmark report documenting 30 of these deaths as Category A or B hate crimes. He called the pattern "a profound stain on the history of this State" and noted the ongoing absence of accountability.
This project builds an open, public record of those lives — the people behind the cases, the places where they died, the investigations that failed them, and the recommendations that must now be fulfilled.
This is a live research project. Records are added and corrected as research progresses. Every case you see here has been verified against primary sources.
Source and methodology
All case records are drawn primarily from the SCOI report volumes and cross-referenced against coronial records, Trove newspaper archives, parliamentary Hansard, and community sources. Referencing follows the Australian Government Style Manual (author–date system).
Cases where families have requested limited information, or where community verification is incomplete, may be held back from public display even if research is complete. Paul Rath (1977) is one such case — included in the SCOI Category A list but not yet published here.
Data is published under CC-BY 4.0. Journalism is copyright Anna Roberts. Code is MIT. See LICENSING.md for the full licence map.