Rex Master's Role Model

Joining the Boy Scouts at the age of seven, Rex Masters loved the tests and challenges, the friendship and camaraderie. And scouting liked him. Rising through its various ranks, he impressed so much that the Scouts offered him employment when he left school and he devoted the next 40 years of his life to the organisation.

Called up for compulsory National Service at Pukapunyal at 18, he there discovered himself sexually. However, in 1950's Australia almost all gays remained closeted, with few jobs available to 'deviants' and the semi-religious Boy Scouts, a particularly unwelcoming workplace. Nominated to represent Australia at a Scout Jamboree in Austria in 1961, he continued on to London for the opening of Baden-Powell House in London, the new headquarters of the British Scout Movement, and at that function, met the Queen, after which he spent 18 months on a working holiday in Europe.

On returning to Australia he worked for the Youth Affairs Council of Australia by day, and by night, as Manager of the Pink Panther Sex Shop, revelling in the new found
Rex Masters came along at exactly the right time for the Cairns gay community, a community at the time in desperate need of new leadership with Ted Kelk dead, Pat O'Hara winding down after years of activism, and much of the younger members of their team disillusioned by the division and self-interest introduced into the community by their successor. Rex's long and varied work history gifted him with exactly the right talents to build on the recent gay law reform, and he guided the local LGBT+ community on a path from barely tolerated minority, to legitimate and respected member group of the wider Cairns