19th-century gay Australian love story

What do a secret love story, Australian history, and the upcoming Olympic games have in common? Gay love, of course! With plans for the 2032 Olympics to be hosted (in part) by the Brisbane suburb of Herston, it’s as good a time as any to talk about how the place got its name.

Robert Herbert, the first-ever premier of the state of Queensland, wasn’t actually Australian, since the country was still under British rule at the time. The UK-born Herbert was given the newly-created post of premier at the age of just 28, after serving for some time as the private secretary to George Bowen, the state’s first governor.

By 1859, Herbert was fully in charge and got to appoint his own underlings, including an attorney general named John Bramston, a friend of Herbert’s from Oxford who became much more. In college, the two lodged together, though we don’t know precisely when their romantic relationship began. We do know, however, that they remained together for a period of years, shunning all other society in favor of nights spent at their country home.

This home was a north Queensland farmhouse which they dubbed “Herston,” after a combination of both their names. Like many queer, upper-class couples of the time, their relationship was something of an open secret.

While the UK’s notorious anti-sodomy laws made it impossible for the two to identify as anything other than bachelor roommates, modern scholars have identified in Herbert’s private correspondence plenty of instances of the premier saying the quiet part out loud. When questioned about marriage, Herbert told his sister in a letter that the idea would only bring wretchedness to him. He was quite happy, it seems, living out his life with Bramston in privacy and contentment, until their split leading up to Bramston’s marriage to a woman in 1872.

Herbert himself never married, and once explained in a letter that: “A man or woman should not if it can be helped exchange a serene and happy existence for a life entirely different, and possibly not suited to previous tastes and habits.”

During a time when queerness was so erased as to not even prompt speculation around two men living together, there was nothing about Herbert’s life with Bramston that seemed to interfere with his political life, or indeed his knighthood later on.