Oz Asia Festival. Adelaide Town Hall. 31 Oct 2025
It was an epic autobiographical spectacular and it was for one night only.
What a night.
The Town Hall was packed to the proverbial.
The stage was loaded with fabulous musicians beneath a giant screen.
The audience was braced and expectant. Love was in the air. Lots of love.
The subject of this mass attendance and cherishing spirit was one William Yang.
A simple photographer.
A Chinese Australian from the flyspeck town of Dimbulah on Queensland’s Atherton Tableland.
But how this gentle gay man has carved a swathe of respect and admiration throughout his country, something which perchance amazed even he, not to mention the conservative few of his remote home-town where he learned from the schoolyard that he was a “Ching Chong Chinaman”. His older brother confirmed that this was indeed so, and he had to “get used to it”.
Yang, now celebrating 80 years of life, tells of his childhood movement to the big smoke, the worst time of his life at high school in Cairns, of his wonderful Aunt Bessie and the uncle who was murdered. Of his discovery of the camera as the passport to social inclusion in the years which followed. Therein was the discovery of his own homosexuality and the gay world of Sydney, the homoerotic visages of lifesavers and Bondi Beach, the fun gay saunas and of Sydney’s drag world and the evolution of the Mardi Gras. He snapped it all.
As he did here. Many Adelaideans will recall William Yang's presence creating an on-the-spot photo record in Adelaide for lively Arts Festivals of the 80s - which sadly he did not mention. What he did cover, however, was the raucous self-identification of the Sydney gay scene back in the day. He also was part of the boho cultural world of Martin Sharpe, in whose affluent domicile he lived and worked for years. He had a darkroom at Sharp's place. He recorded everyone on film, mostly black and white. Photographing people became a raison d’etre and showing the beauty of the young male form.
He adopted Taoism and went to China where he finally felt a sense of second home, despite never having mastered the language.
He had a vibrant artistic circle—among them Brett Whiteley, Jenny Kee and the out-there chic folk. And he photographed them.
He was there for the gruelling passage to death of a dear one during the AIDS epidemic. He learned of the grace of death.
He studied himself, as well as others, and a series of self-portraits track this sense of self—sometimes in the vast dry inland, and finally, arms outstretched beneath a stormy seascape sky.
It has been an interesting life with substance enough to fill a series of photo diary performances, a genre he may call his own. Not everyone is gratified by homoerotic portraiture, but no one any longer finds it surprising.
This particular Australian gay man has quietly delivered it as a form of human essence with images profound, incidental and exuberant.
As his works displayed on the screen in the Town Hall, Ensemble Lumen played an array of extremely agreeable compositions by Elena Kats-Chernin. They complemented and oft highlighted the images, evoking moods and sometimes a sense of place. Periodic percussive use of coconut shells imparted a lovely light quasi-Oriental touch. In itself the music was an engrossing pleasure very interestingly enhanced by the Auslan interpreters who translated not only Yang’s words but the spirit and tempo of the music.
And so it was, a sentimental voyage for Oz Asia from a beloved artist, an Asian Aussie, perchance the apotheosis of the festival itself.
Samela Harris
When: 31 Oct
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
