
‘She said, he said’
Let’s consider what has been saidJuly 2012
Arts & Letters
'The Sex Lives of Australians' by Frank Bongiorno
Thankless work, but someone had to do it: Frank Bongiorno has written a history of the sex lives of Australians. Blessedly, our intimacies usually remain private. Guessing about others’ is fruitless, whatever the apparent evidence of happiness, misery or children. Bongiorno has concentrated instead on the enlistment of and interference with sexual behaviour for supposedly higher causes, not only moral but political. Legislation was generated, and so was panic: fear of racial contamination (Chinese hawkers with their “vice and vegetables”), falling birth rates, the dubious morality of factory girls, masturbation and other contributors to national degeneracy. Bongiorno proceeds by exemplary anecdotes strung along a chronological line, or, as Michael Kirby writes in his introduction: “a cornucopia of sexual tales from history”. Bongiorno himself promises that the work will be a “nuanced, contested and uneven history”.
Beginning in colonial Australia, he notes that “within the constraints of a patriarchal society, women too made their choices, and they used their sexuality as a source of power”. Men long outnumbered women, but many preferred their own company: “hard-living single males wandered the country … providing Australian masculinity with a complexion still recognisable”. The “unnaturalness” of sodomy helped to end convict transportation. The age of consent was raised “to protect young girls … in a way rape laws could not”. More intense policing led to the “development of a male homosexual subculture and identity”. In the 1950s, bodgies and widgies took their place in a line of young “folk devils” that stretched back to the larrikin. As Bongiorno approaches the present, changes tumble upon one another: legalisation of abortion, unionisation of prostitutes, magazine advice on “how to give perfect fellatio”, the rise of AIDS. Bongiorno perhaps touches too many bases, but always punctiliously and intelligently.
The Sex Lives of Australians has a dry, rationed wit, but is little leavened by ribaldry. Where is the Truth headline about a political luminary’s death, ‘Snedden Died on the Job’? Where is the gentle rebuke of the audience member who interjected as Katharine Prichard extolled the pleasures of congress in the Soviet Union? (“It’s pretty good here, too, missus.”) There is not much of the joy of sex; rather, Bongiorno is led to its miseries: enforced celibacy, brutal ‘cures’ for homosexuality, bestiality, technical ignorance, shame. The epigraph might have been James McAuley’s disdainful “Our loves are processes / Upon foam-rubber beds”, yet the book claims the sex reformer and holy fool William Chidley as a hero. Bongiorno salutes “the status he gave to sexual joy as the key to the gates of heaven on earth”.
‘She said, he said’
Let’s consider what has been saidIts own reward: ‘The Virtues’
Topping February’s streaming highlights is a four-part series examining trauma and addiction, propelled by Stephen Graham’s affecting performance‘Fragile Monsters’ by Catherine Menon
Memories of the Malayan Emergency resurface when a mathematician returns to her home country, in the British author’s debut novelIn light of recent events
Track your vaccine with Australia Post‘Fragile Monsters’ by Catherine Menon
Memories of the Malayan Emergency resurface when a mathematician returns to her home country, in the British author’s debut novel‘TIWI’ at the National Gallery of Victoria
A must-see exhibition of Tiwi art from Bathurst and Melville islands, in which historical and contemporary media and imagery fuse‘Jack’ by Marilynne Robinson
History and suffering matter in the latest instalment of the American author’s Gilead novels‘The Dry’ directed by Robert Connolly
Eric Bana stars as a troubled investigator dragged back to his home town in a sombre Australian thrillerIts own reward: ‘The Virtues’
Topping February’s streaming highlights is a four-part series examining trauma and addiction, propelled by Stephen Graham’s affecting performanceCelebrity misinformation
The Foo Fighters’ AIDS denialism should be on the recordSmall glories: ‘Minari’
Childhood memories are suffused with an adult’s insight in Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical filmTumbled Pie
On Eddie McGuire, racism and ‘doing better’
Comments