Sam Wallman is a writer and illustrator based in Naarm / Melbourne, on unceded Wurunderji country. He is a member of Workers Art Collective and the Maritime Union of Australia. Sam is a committed unionist, having worked as an organiser for the United Workers Union, and a delegate on the shop floor prior to that. Over the last fifteen years, he has drawn for hundreds of trade unions and worker organisations around the world, and currently works out of an art studio in Melbourne’s Trades Hall, the oldest union hall in the world.
As a budding historian and an out and proud wharfie, Sam received a PFA small grant to conduct a public lecture of Max du Barry; a flamboyant and notorious drag queen and female impersonator in Melbourne’s underground queer scene from the 1940s through the 1960s. The lecture includes an analysis of how the freaks and punks of the queer scene age or not age, in the case of Max du Barry, who was killed in the hands of the police.
