The Peter Allan Memorial Address was/is held each year in conjunction with the Annual General Meeting to commemorate the long-time GLWA member and benefactor, the Rev. Peter Allan. As with many volunteer organisations, some of our best intentions fall victim to the pressures of achieving a lot with very little and so the address has not been held in every year. HOWEVER the role that Rev. Allan played in the development of GLWA is nevertheless vital and so we remember him here on our website.
In 1993 a rather unusual volunteer joined GLWA and helped us with planning our future. He was Peter Allan, an Anglican priest who had been for years involved in the human rights movement. He was known to some of us a member of the Concerned Christians group established in the early 1980s to protest against some of the excesses of the Bjelke-Peterson era in Queensland. With them he took part in many street marches and other protests.
Peter studied for the priesthood in the early seventies and served the church first in the diocese of the Northern Territory where he saw first hand the plight of the Aboriginal people. Later when he served in parishes in Brisbane he turned his fine analytical mind to the support of unionists, the poor, the battlers and of other homosexual people like himself. He was described as a man that would not put up with bullshit. He saw bullshit, especially religious bullshit, as part of peoples oppression.
Peter joined GLWA in the late eighties and got involved in our future planning. He was particularly helpful in keeping us focussed on developing links with the gay and lesbian community and in improving our standing in the wider community. It was also he who first suggested that we produce a "professional" annual report and have prominent speakers at our annual general meeting.
However we were not able to have the benefit of his incisive mind for long. In late 1994 Peter died from AIDS related diseases. His funeral at St Mary's Church at Kangaroo Point, which Peter had programmed himself, was an unusual affair; not least because of the inclusion of the song "The Red Flag", written by Irishman Jim Connell in 1889 and most commonly associated with the communist workers movement in Russia.
In his will Peter left one-third of his estate to GLWA. To honour Peter's contribution we established a special fund to take this money in the hope that it would form the basis for purchasing a community centre at some time in the future. In the mean time it has already provided us with the reserves to promote and guarantee the maintenance of premises to house the GLWA counselling service.
