The overwhelming feeling you take away from Fiona Cunningham-Reid’s profile on Dawn O’Donnell the Australian lesbian businesswoman who was partly responsible for making Sydney such a gay destination, was the fact that she was a thoroughly unpleasant person.  This very fierce silver-haired butch dyke initially made quite a lot of money through real estate investments which ranged from parking lots to brothels, and so at time when homosexuality was a still criminal offence and there was nowhere for gay man and women to socialize, she opened her first small gay bar. As all her friends were quick to point out that although she appeared to bask in her role as a saviour of the LGBT community then, and later, she never did any of this for any high altruistic reasons, but always purely as a way of making a great deal of money.

Dawn was shrewd enough to recognize the full potential of this market which had to remain underground because of the law, and so she soon opened a whole string of other venues including a lesbian bath house and a few nightclubs and theaters.  Capriccio’s on Sydney’s main Oxford Street became famous for its elaborate drag show, whilst her cabaret club called Jools attracted international acts including the likes of The Supremes and The Village People.

In fact throughout the whole 70’s and 80’s Dawn was on a roll turning over property after property and building clubs with scant attention to safety rules, or in fact any laws in fact.  Several people joked about the way she just ducked and dived through the period and that a few of her premises burned down to the ground when it suited her to liquidate. The rumors about her ruthless business practices are still very much alive today with some people interviewed on camera saying that there was even talk about her being a murderer too.

The consensus from the few friends who were interviewed for this documentary was that for the bulk of her life Dawn was always in the right place at the right …. such as being involved with the creation of Sydney’s highly successful Mardi Gras, but they also quickly added that she should never ever be considered a gay icon or even an activist.  In fact when things didn’t go her way, like when she fell out with the Mardi Gras organizers, she just set up in opposition so that she wouldn’t lose out.

Cunningham-Reid had been working on this project for the past twenty years so had got to interview Dawn herself a couple of times which is just as well as she struggled to find many others to talk about her in depth on camera. The filmmaker knew from the start that woman had a great deal of enemies in the community, but even she must have shocked how the story played out at the end. When multi-millionaire Dawn died of cancer in her 70’s in 2007, she didn’t leave her wife of 30 years a single cent.  O’Donnell had left her entire estate to different charities rather than to her partner who had actually nursed her through the last years of her life.

This hour-long documentary will no doubt appeal to people who lived through this era in Sydney, but it will have little to interest anyone else.