It’s a humid autumn morning and I can’t take my eyes off the beads of sweat rolling down Michael Yabsley’s brow. Sitting in his eclectic apartment in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, the former Liberal firebrand and antiques collector pours me a steaming cup of English Breakfast. He offers a melting moment to go with the tea, which is served in an elegant white porcelain cup and saucer. “Store-bought,” he says sheepishly, referring to the biscuit.
These knick-knacks are the remaining vestiges of a former life spent in the bucolic Southern Highlands, little more than an hour’s drive south of Sydney. For 20 years, Yabsley called Wombat Hollow home, a splendid country cottage surrounded by holiday cabins and a rustic, corrugated-iron-clad function centre, all nestled in a pretty garden he lovingly tended with his then-wife, Susie, before their split in 2019 after 36 years of marriage.
Public acceptance has grown as Yabsley has aged, but gay and lesbian people in public life, let alone the conservative bastions of business and politics, are still relatively rare. The first outwardly gay politician in either federal or state parliament was former senator and Greens leader Bob Brown, a GP who declared his illegal, same-sex relationship in a newspaper interview in 1976, years before entering Tasmania’s state parliament in 1983.
Not everyone from his past life has come along for the ride. “One woman I have known for many years presumed that I would no longer be voting conservative,” says Yabsley, confirming that his political inclination has not changed – why would it? “People can say some of the silliest things.” Others have simply backed away quietly. “There are people I’ve known for 40 years, people who were very, very close to me, who have suddenly disappeared from my life.
Homosexuality, while not only illegal at the time, was well and truly “demonised” in his family. “It was not unusual for a family to have a ‘confirmed bachelor’ in it, whom the rest of the family would say was ‘different’, though I never really understood what they meant,” he says. “I just knew I didn’t want to be that person, to be the outsider, the one without family, the one the others talked about.
After high school and a year as an exchange student in South Africa, university beckoned. Yabsley went to Canberra in 1976 to study political science, moving onto campus at John XXIII Catholic College at the Australian National University. In the shadow of the Whitlam government’s dismissal, it was “a time for celebration” for the young Liberal.
bencubby hornery GoodWeekendMag The silly thing is, everyone knows but it gets harder &harder to come out. But ‘everyone knows’ and ‘no action’ is the past Good to see Mr Yabsley step up. Better late than never particularly for the young trying to make their way into the world as who they really are - unscarred
hornery GoodWeekendMag As A train 'platform sign' thief
hornery GoodWeekendMag Well illegal till 84 but I wouldn't say your era was anything like the 50s early 60s etc Darlinghurst had a thriving gay community in late 70s 80s and in my Newtown of the early 80s we had numerous openly gay neighbours and friends. Still wish you all the happiness in the world.
hornery GoodWeekendMag