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The Trials of Eric Mareo

Epilogue

page 161

Epilogue

At the Time OF Mareo's death, Freda Stark was living in London, working at New Zealand House and moving in Chelsea gay and lesbian circles.1 In 1970 she returned to New Zealand to enjoy, in addition to her previous incarnations as Star Witness and Fever of the Fleet, one final public role: New Zealand gay and lesbian 'icon'.

But for this to be possible the myth that she and Thelma were publicly recognised as 'lesbians' during the trials needed to be perpetuated. Obviously a lesbian who was 'out' in New Zealand during the 1930s would be a more interesting, or at least courageous, figure than one who wasn't. Accordingly, a TVNZ One Tonight show about Stark's attendance at a performance of a play in 1997 about her life claimed that '[a]fter public humiliation over her lesbian relationship, she vowed to never again take the stage',2 and following her death in 1999, writer and film maker Peter Wells claimed in his obituary that 'Freda outed herself as a lesbian during the trial'.3 A few years earlier, in an article about Wells's documentary The Mighty Civic, the Women's Weekly reported that

[a]t a time when homosexuality was rarely discussed, and then only in whispers, Freda was upfront about her sexuality.

'I walked proud,' she says. 'Some people could be shocked at anything, but they respected my feelings.'

After her photograph was published in the newspaper she was recognised whenever she went out. 'I would go into a shop and people would follow me in to see what I was buying. It wasn't so much because I was a lesbian, but that I was involved in a murder case. It was something for people to talk about.'4

More authoritatively, the entry on Stark in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography states that '[d]uring the trial the page 162relationship between Thelma and Freda became public'.5

Although Stark did make the significant admission to the Women's Weekly that people were less interested in her imputed lesbianism than her involvement in the trial, it is possible that she was unaware that she had distorted the truth both during and after the trials. Given the extraordinary pressures on her during them, she probably had to convince herself that she was telling the truth. Stark may not have spent the last sixty-three years of her life living with the awful knowledge that she had destroyed a friend's life and nearly sent him the gallows. Like Mareo, perhaps, she may have been something of a fantasist. Indeed, how could she not have been, given what she went through?

Similarly, while it defies common sense that Stark could have been both publicly recognised as a lesbian and trusted as a witness of unimpeachable virtue, it is nevertheless understandable that the gay and lesbian community should have turned her into an 'icon', to use Wells's description. The inaccuracies of Stark's testimony were in part due to the homophobia that has made it important to celebrate the lives of all gay men and lesbians who lived during those decades. Perhaps, then, it is ironically appropriate that some members of this community should be responsible in a very small way for continuing to perpetuate what we think is an injustice to Eric Mareo's memory. A persecuted social group is capable of small injustices, just as the society that nearly killed Mareo was also the one that produced the splendid but now largely forgotten cast of nonconformists, eccentrics and adversaries of prejudice that tenaciously defended him. In many ways the trials of Eric Mareo reflect the ways in which New Zealand was, and maybe still is, a society that epitomises both the strengths and weaknesses of middle-class, puritan values.