Month: December 2025

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This essay is the fourth in a series tracing how fandom evolved from storytelling into activism. In earlier chapters, I explored early fandoms as community, speculative fiction as ethics, and storytelling as humanitarian inspiration. Now, I honour my mentor and friend Diane Marchant not only for what she imagined, but for the legacy she built.

She took traditional science fiction fandom, and rebuilt it as an extended family. She helped to shape the Star Trek fan phenomenon, and beyond that, the modern-day media fandom community.

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In 1978, TV Times magazine sent a reporter to interview Diane Marchant at her home after I had written to them suggesting that she was an important personage worthy of their attention. She spoke, in part, of how her family background had led to her becoming involved with the Star Trek Welcommittee (STW) and ultimately with Australian fans including Austrek. The STW was a US-wide fan support network and information exchange that Diane expanded to encompass the rest of the world. She was spreading the word about Star Trek to fans across Australia and many other nations.

Diane’s interview was perhaps most poignant when she spoke about her personal family tragedy that had led her to become involved in fandom. The loss of her sister (believed to be named Sandra) and her quiet family home – where she and her mother Jessie mourned in solitary silence – led her to becoming attached to a TV program that gave her hope for the future.

The interview came at an early time of Australian Star Trek fandom, but Diane was already approaching the age of forty. Diane did not disclose much about her early life, and nothing is known about her father. Although many fan friends remember Diane mentioning the passing of her sister, nobody remembers having ever been told any other details, including her name. However, a wedding notice in Melbourne’s “Age” newspaper on Monday 20 Oct 1947 reports that two nieces of the bride – named Diane and Sandra Marchant – served as flower girl and train bearer at a Melbourne wedding. If this is our Diane, she would have been seven years old, and it seems plausible from the context of the note that these two girls were sisters (*and that her sister’s name was therefore Sandra). It is also possible that Diane again served as a flower girl at another family wedding (in country New South Wales) in 1953 when she was thirteen. Both these wedding notices use the less common spelling of the name “Diane” (as opposed to “Dianne” which is more common in Australia), which suggests that the age and name in these reports both fit our Diane. Both events also imply that as a child she belonged within a healthily extended biological family, but by the time Diane became known in fandom, this appears to have shrunk to just Diane and her mother.

This is not to say that Diane was lonely – she had friends and made many more through fandom. One of her oldest (childhood) friends was Judith Giarusso, who remained friends with Diane up through fandom and for all their lives. As Diane was receiving palliative care in hospital towards the end of her life, one of Judith’s granddaughters visited her from Tasmania.

Diane spent her early adult life as a primary school teacher, and even used Star Trek as inspiration to encourage her students to write stories. By the time she became involved in fandom in the mid-to-late 1970s, she had already left teaching forever. This was the result of a back injury during a school excursion, when she had tried to help some students alight from a broken-down train carriage in between train stations. She told me she recalled standing on the train tracks and reaching up to lift a child who was standing in the carriage above her head – when she felt a sudden and sharp stab of pain in her lower back. She spent much of her subsequent life on a pension, battling chronic back pain, and she tried hard to live a productive life regardless. Star Trek became a new avenue for her creativity, leadership skills, and community building.

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Fandom is not a recent invention. Long before it took on its modern meaning of cultural nerdiness, it functioned as a space where people gathered to form extended family communities, imagine utopias, and practice the ethics that those imaginary worlds required. In temples, churches, forums, town centres, convention halls, schools, living rooms, and eventually in modern fan circles, fans built community across the generations – from the ancient Romans being fanboys of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, to recent US citizens cosplaying cowboys and creating the gun-happy, wild-western ethos of their modern culture.

Diane plugged into that old fan practice of enthusing, including, and reaching out to extend welcome. She helped fans across Australia (and around the world) to network by letter in the pre-Internet age. She helped clubs to form and solidify their activities, and she assisted fans to join those clubs.

Edwina Harvey in New South Wales recalled Diane in the Australian Science Fiction Bullsheet #50:

“Julie Townsend and I were in high-school when we wrote to the Welcommittee mentioned in one of James Blish’s Star Trek novelizations. Diane wrote back to us with names and addresses of other Aus. Star Trek fans who had contacted her (including Susan Batho, or Sue Clarke as she was back then.) We formed ASTREX, where I began writing fanfic and learning other fannish skills, predominantly from Sue. I wonder if my life would have been so rewarding if Diane Marchant hadn’t been the catalyst that lead me into fandom. Edwina. Rob Jan writes: Diane was one of the people responsible for me encountering fandom and was an influential lady…”

My own recollections include meeting Diane at a Star Trek film Marathon, and later having to ring a mysterious “D. Marchant” from the Welcommittee – only to discover that they were the same lady! She gave the club Austrek a great deal of moral and material support, including purchasing over 100 postal stamps for us to mail out the first club newsletter.

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“Shut up…we’re by no means setting a precedent.”
– Diane Marchant’s opening words in “A Fragment Out of Time”, 1974.

Fan fiction has been a fundamental component of fandom, from oral myths to collections of stories compiled into legends or sacred texts, or other forms of art, craft, song and dance. Many indigenous and ancient cultures continued their fanfic traditions where oral stories got retold and rebooted every generation by troubadours, griots and town criers. Beyond the epics of Homer or the fanfic of Shakespeare, what we now label ‘fic’ became a form of truth-telling; where audiences of populist culture rewrote endings, queer fans reimagined futures, overlooked minority fans recast themselves into a world of diversity and equality, and differently-abled fans crafted heroes who moved through the world with dignity.

Fanfic changed literature forever – from the Gospels collected as oral myths becoming established dogma, to Robin Hood stories empowering burglars to rob from the rich and give to themselves (the poor), or tales of Australia’s legendary drop bears scaring tourists. But medieval Europe had its own reboot that reshaped its community culture — the legends of Dark Age conflict and survival during eras of plague and pestilence, instead became the stories of Camelot, Arthur, and the code of chivalry. Knights pledged fealty not only to kings, but to ideals of love, loyalty, and sacrifice. The concept of courtly love — a knight’s devotion to a noble lady — became a cultural script, shaping literature, art, and social norms across centuries.

Troubadours and poets like Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France remixed these myths into serialized romances, complete with quests, emotional arcs, and fan-favorite pairings. These were unauthorized continuations, alternate perspectives, and moral expansions of Arthurian canon. C.S. Lewis even called it “a religion of love”. Robin Hood stories became more romantic – Maid Marion was introduced to become the romantic lead; the Sheriff of Nottingham became the villain in the Robin Hood romance tradition.

In our lifetime, Diane did the same thing to Star Trek.

The first Star Trek fanzine, Spockanalia, was published in 1967, and this led to an explosion of paper fanzines containing Star Trek fan fiction. Australia’s first fanzine, Terran Times, began in 1969. Diane began contributing stories and artwork to this and many overseas fanzines. But her biggest single contribution to fan fiction culture was arguably a ‘slash’ story called, “A Fragment Out of Time”, which she submitted to an adult fanzine, Grup, in 1974. It featured two unnamed lovers who later turned out to be Kirk and Spock. The story’s opening line about not setting a precedent was both ironic and indicative of the idea that she had not expected it to actually be published, but she had likely written it to join a series of underground, hand-written fan stories containing adult material that were circulating covertly among fans. This may explain why she never to my knowledge talked about the story or slash to me or to anyone I knew. Maybe she was shy, maybe she was embarrassed, or perhaps she was fearful that her local Catholic church might find out she had written a naughty story – or even worse, that Paramount or Gene Roddenberry might in some way censure her for doing so. They never did.

Perhaps as a way of lessening her fears or embarassment or guilt, Diane later wrote a series of vignettes called “Fragments’ which we published in our “SPOCK” fanzine for school children; this series being about a sexual relationship between Spock and Christine Chapel (they were her favourite pairing, and accordingly she loved both Amok Time and Plato’s Stepchildren).

Ultimately, Star Trek as a television series that had commercially failed – getting cancelled and forgotten after three years – was popularised and resurrected because legions of fans were reading and writing fan stories about the Kirk-Spock relationship and similar material. A billion dollar Star Trek franchise was born, in part because Diane had pioneered a form of fan fiction that can now be found in fandom everywhere: from Sherlock Holmes to Harry Potter. It is hoped that one day, the franchise will recognise the contribution of fans.

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Diane eventually resigned from the Star Trek Welcommittee after Gene’s death, because she felt the magic had lessened. Instead, she became active in her local church, forming a local “Welcomming Committee” to help new congregants.

The last time I saw Diane, she was sick in the hospital; and as I left, Diane flashed me a friendly smile and gave me the Vulcan salute – wishing me to, “Live Long and Prosper” even though she knew she would do neither. I will never forget her cheeky farewell grin as she sat on her bed and smiled at me (with her Vulcan salute) as I left through the door.

On behalf of her fan friends, I was able to give a fan eulogy at her funeral, where I read aloud (with Betsi’s permission) a poem from fan author Betsi Ashton, including the following words:

She had dared to dream
Of a world where hate
And nationalism were barred.
Where the countries of Earth
Were linked as states,
And minds were no longer scarred.

She had searched through
The cloudless skies, at night
Beyond the edge of the world,
And her mind leaped out
In a boundless flight,
To mingle where stars are hurled.

If only we all had such a wondrous view of the universe around us, and such positive aspirations for the future.

It will soon be twenty years since her departure, and the utopian future she envisaged seems possibly even further away now than it was during her lifetime. But I see Diane’s legacy continue:

• Austrek has lived long and prospered.
• Members who met their spouses in the club, continue to raise their now-adult families.
• People whose lives were saved by the club – its social networking, its support, its existence as extended family – continue to survive and succeed.
• Authors who began with writing fan fiction and who ultimately graduated to other, professional writing, continue to be thankful for the start that fandom gave them.
• Fans who told Diane that they were inspired to become doctors, teachers, nurses (or astronauts!) continue to live productive, fulfilling lives and contribute to the future around them.
• Austrek continues to inspire and excite, encouraging people to form new friendships and explore their own strange, new worlds.

I recall one fan from the early days of Austrek. She had medical difficulties and had been estranged by her family, so Star Trek fandom served as one of her newly-adopted extended families. We helped ensure she got eye surgery when needed, and although she became legally blind and moved interstate, she continued to be involved in fandom and its activities. When she recently passed away, a bequest was donated to Austrek in her memory – serving to demonstrate that even after fifty years, the importance of fandom as extended family continues to resonate in people’s lives. Diane helped to lay that foundation.

Edwina Harvey can have the last word:

“With Jacqueline Lichtenburg, Diane formed the Star Trek Welcommittee in 1972. She worked tirelessly at answering the many thousands of enquiries from Star Trek fans and putting them in contact with each other. She became known for the wacky story lines she would come out with when workshopping with other writers. Susan Batho relates: “I met Diane in 1972 at Syncon 72, and we took over a panel on Star Trek and tossed around story ideas for nearly 6 hours…And we were firm friends thereafter…And for the record: she wrote the first published K/S story in GRUP. She made a difference in many peoples’ lives and will be remembered. Live long and prosper, Diane.”

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Portions of this were reworked and republished on 15 March 2026 to add material and clarify some biographical information about Diane.

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©2025 Geoff Allshorn. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.