The Architect of Sydney's Gay Scene

Ask anyone where gay Sydney lives today and they'll point to two places: Oxford Street and Newtown. That's no accident — one woman opened the early queer venues that anchored both as gay villages, long before it was safe to try.

Long after closing time, the police would come. Sometimes the men they took away were drag performers still in heels; sometimes they were patrons of Capriccio's, an Oxford Street nightclub whose neon sign had become a beacon for a Sydney that was not, officially, supposed to exist. The owner of that beacon was a former Australian speed-skating champion in a sharp suit, with a thick wad of cash for bail. Her name was Dawn O'Donnell, and for nearly four decades she built — quietly, ruthlessly, and almost entirely off the historical record — the empire of bars and clubs that made Sydney into the gay capital of the southern hemisphere.

She has been called many things since her death from ovarian cancer in 2007 ^[2]: "the godmother of the Golden Mile," "the convent girl who became queen of Oxford Street," and, in the title of Fiona Cunningham-Reid's 2014 documentary about her, Croc-A-Dyke Dundee ^[1]. But "architect" may fit best. Two of her venues are still operating and still gay today — the Imperial and the Newtown Hotel, both now heritage-listed as founding queer landmarks. The rest are gone but remembered as the true cradle of gay Sydney: Capriccio's, Jools, Patches, Flo's Palace, Ruby Red's. She was also behind more hedonistic ventures along the Golden Mile — the still-trading Tool Shed sex shop, and the KKK bathhouse^[1].

Dawn O'Donnell was born in Paddington in 1927 ^[2], into an Irish-Australian family that, by her own account, found her uncontrollable. She was sent to St Vincent's College at Potts Point, run by the Sisters of Charity, "to become a lady." She would later quip that the project had failed.

What it gave her instead was ice. By 18 she was the Australian women's speed skating champion. She turned professional, taught skating at the Sydney Glaciarium, and then sailed for Europe, where she performed in Puss in Boots on Ice in London and the Circus on Ice in Paris. In Paris she began her first serious relationship with a woman — a dancer at the Folies Bergère — an affair that lasted until a training injury ended her skating career and sent her, abruptly closeted, back to Sydney.

She married a butcher named Des Irwin to please her dying nan ^[1]. The marriage was brief, but the butcher shop she ran in Double Bay was not. A parking lot in Ultimo followed. By the late 1960s she had the capital, the connections, and the calculated patience to do what almost no one else in Sydney would: invest in venues that catered openly to homosexuals at a time when male homosexuality was still a criminal offence in New South Wales.

In 1969, with co-investor Marjorie Hathaway, she opened Capriccio's on Oxford Street — one of the strip's earliest openly gay venues, arriving before Oxford Street was anything like the Oxford Street people picture now. Capriccio's became famous for its drag shows and drew international visitors — eventually celebrities — into a stretch of Sydney that until then had been distinguished mainly by army-surplus stores and cheap rents. With Ivy's Birdcage opening in the same window, the "Golden Mile" was suddenly a real place.

Then came Jools, opened on Crown Street in 1973 with the French restaurateur Roger-Claude Teyssedre. Dawn described the lavish theatre restaurant featuring drag shows and a mixed gay and straight clientele as her favourite venue. The Supremes, Eartha Kitt and the Village People all played its floor. Patches, Flo's Palace, and Ruby Red's — Sydney's first dedicated lesbian bar — followed. Ruby Red's is where, in the late 1970s, Dawn met Aniek Baten, the Dutch-born woman she would marry in Amsterdam in 1977, twenty-four years before the Netherlands legalised same-sex marriage. They both wore white.

Dawn didn't invent gay nightlife from nothing — she scouted it. She travelled regularly to Los Angeles and San Francisco through the 1970s and 80s. She was curious about what was happening in the world of gay subcultures. 

In Croc-A-Dyke Dundee ^[1], Brenton Williams recounts Dawn visiting him in Los Angeles and asking to be taken to a leather bar. Brenton disguised her in leathers and took her to Larry's, a men-only bar in LA. The bar's owner, apparently reading her as a man, spent the evening flirting with her — knees pressed together at the bar — with no idea who he was actually chatting up. Dawn, by all accounts, let him keep guessing.

Australia in the 1970s did not extend hospitality licences to women easily, and certainly not to women running gay venues that the vice squad raided routinely. Dawn moved through that world with the help of partners — Teyssedre, and from 1979 the controversial Sydney businessman Abe Saffron, who joined her and Teyssedre in the ownership of Patchs. From that base the group expanded into the run of clubs that anchored Oxford Street through the 1980s. Dawn rarely discussed the arrangement publicly. Her staff remember her as the operator who was always present, who hired the door staff and the drag queens herself, who paid the bills out of a handbag.

What she did with the cover she had was extraordinary. She bailed gay men and drag queens out of police custody so they could return to her stage the same night. She gave room and rent to performers when no other landlord in Sydney would.

By the early 1980s, Oxford Street was crowded and the rents were rising. Dawn moved west — and did in Newtown and Erskineville roughly what she'd done on Oxford Street a decade earlier. She bought the Newtown Hotel and the Imperial Hotel in nearby Erskineville and transformed both into the inner west's first openly gay pubs ^[1], seeding a second precinct from scratch rather than joining one already forming.

The Imperial — its stage, its tiled bar, its glittering stairwell — would soon belong to global cinema: in 1994, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert opened with scenes filmed inside it. Director Stephan Elliott has said the film was inspired by "Dawn's world." ^[3]

The accidental export was enormous. Priscilla became one of the most successful Australian films ever made. The Imperial became a pilgrimage site. The Newtown Hotel made Erskineville a second gay precinct that rivalled the Mile. Most of Australia learned what a drag bar looked like by way of a set Dawn had built.

The 1980s and early 1990s were also the AIDS crisis, and Dawn's empire was disproportionately a community of patrons, performers and staff in its path. She moved into AIDS fundraising and into Sydney's Mardi Gras, which had begun in 1978 as a protest and was, by the late 1980s, an unprecedented street parade. She supported it for years — then, as Mardi Gras matured into a corporate spectacle, she became one of its most public critics. The street, she felt, had become a stage for sponsors. The people she had bailed out were no longer the ones building the floats.

Dawn O'Donnell died on 10 June 2007. She was 79. Her wife Aniek told the documentary makers that the woman the press described as "a cutthroat businesswoman" was "actually a pussycat really." The drag performer David Williams (drag name Beatrice) said it more plainly: "she invented the idea of Oxford Street" ^[4], helping to make Sydney one of the gay capitals of the world from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s.

Tributes ran in The Sydney Morning Herald under headlines that called her a leading lady. Mardi Gras dimmed the lights. The Imperial reopened, closed, reopened again. The Newtown changed hands. Capriccio's, Jools, Patches, Flo's and Ruby Red's are gone, their addresses rented to bookshops and chain cafés; in 2024 the City of Sydney began moves to heritage-list a string of Oxford Street's former queer venues — most of them once on her books ^[5,6].

Dawn O'Donnell did not just own bars. She built the conditions under which they could be built — on Oxford Street first, then all over again in Newtown — in a city that, at the start, would have preferred she didn't. That, more than any single venue, is what makes architect the honest word.

1. Croc-A-Dyke Dundee: The Legend of Dawn O’Donnell, Fiona Cunningham-Reid (dir.), 2014.
2. Dawn O’Donnell (1927–2007), Royal Australian Historical Society (Women’s History Month profile).
3. A leading lady of Sydney’s gay club scene, The Sydney Morning Herald, 13 June 2007.
4. Gay Sydney says goodbye to the one who made it so, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 June 2007.
5. Pride and preservation: The Imperial Hotel listed on the NSW State Heritage Register, NSW Government, 5 April 2025.
6. Proposed LGBTIQA+ heritage listings in the Oxford Street area, City of Sydney.