Book Review: The Sex Lives of Australians

The Sex Lives of Australians

A History 

 

Author:                                Frank Bongiorno

Cover Design:                     Peter Long                              

Publisher:                            Black Inc Books             

Type:                                    TPB

Pages:                                   292 (+ index and end notes)       

Genre:                                  Non fiction

Published:                            2012

ISBN:                                    9781863957076

Source:                                 Independently purchased 

Sex has been a subject not often openly discussed in Australia. This book explores the history of sex in Australia.

The actual book has a nice cover and is of excellent quality production. There are eight double sided pages of black and white  pictures in the book.
I noticed absolutely no grammatical or punctuation errors while reading the book.
It would have been a cool gimmick to have had a male alternate cover.

An excellent forward by Michael Kirby, former justice of the high court of Australia opens the book. If we have to have the idiotic knights and dames thing in Australia we should at least choose people that would legitimise the system, people like Michael Kirby, a champion of justice and human rights.

The Introduction nicely explains whats in store and asks some interesting questions. It nicely sets the mind up for a fascinating journey of discovery into Australia's sexual history.

Be warned that the first chapter starts with an account of rape, this book may contain other "triggers" though it is a book about sex so i suppose that is fair warning enough.
This is not done in a gratuitous way but is an important first uncomfortable step into our history.
Its interesting to learn that 1830s homophobia used for political gain led to the Abolishment  of the convict system.

The second chapter opens with a case of domestic violence, and goes on to examine the Victorian era, quite fascinating.

The homosexual relation of Chinese gold rush miners is incredibly interesting.
Its amazing that the colonial authority found sex between consenting adult men somehow more offensive then child prostitution!

I am sure old Johnny Howard would be spinning on his head to learn that the Australian institution of "mateship" most probably involved loving, romantic, and sexual relationships between close males couples.
Add to that our most famous bushrangers, Ned Kelly and Moonlite were separately both of a queer disposition and said to have a stable male lover in their gang.

Our almost sacred notion of the sheerer, and jolly swagman may in reality have been quite gay.

The horrific view that it is not a women (or mans) right to decline sex, seems to be shockingly still held by Australia's current Prime Miniature.

The parts about contraception and how a women's health would suffer if her vagina wasn't regularly coated in semen is amazing. And goes to show that just because a view is commonly held by science today does not mean it wont be seen as ludicrous tomorrow.

 

Damn, a report in the Australian Medical Journal, in 1860, "proved" that Masturbation caused among other things spinal injury and eventual death! Go science!

Back in 1916 Melbourne the paradoxically named 'Truth' newspaper while drumming up homophobia, published concern over the frequency in which ANZAC soldiers visited the local 'gay' quarter for 'companionship'. It is also pointed out that some of the 3000,000 men who went to WW1 some had to be (and indeed were, as some later came out) homosexual men. By our current understanding we could assume roughly 10% of them, then we can add to that youthful experimentation, threat of death and ready availability had to have lead to some homosexual activity.

Again the Medical Journal of Australia printed a homophobic paper in 1925 showing some ANZACs returning from WW1 were suffering mental problems after having witnessed their male overs being killed in combat.

Now this comment puzzles me and is made and simply glossed over as if it were no shocking thing. A prominent doctor in the 1930s said "The pleasure of holding motions in the rectum, so often indulged in by children" was a leading cause of homosexuality. Now i know that's ridiculous but was this really a thing, did children really do that? I have never even heard of such a thing, and i am certainly not aware that i ever did that.

On a different note, I have always stood up against racism, i did Aboriginal Study in High School, however i did not realise that there had been purposeful attempts to "breed out: the colour from the Aboriginal people with the ultimate aim of eradicating the Aboriginal people, that is state sanctioned genocide!

In WW2 we learn that while the conditions were obviously not inductive to sexual relation of any kind, some of the Australian Diggers captured by the Japanese s, did form homosexual couples and we seen to seek out privacy.

We have other reports of many ANZACs having sexual relations within the military.

This chapter among other things seems to suggest heterosexual men should thank the homosexual for making oral sex acceptable for women to perform on their men. 

We learn of the atrocities performed on homosexuals by doctors, but also of the birth of true gay liberation. We celebrate Saturday the 24th and the first ever Mardi Gras.

This book deals with many things, apart from the obvious sex and Australian history we have; rape, Aboriginal culture, convicts, marriage, morality, medicine, the gold rush, immigration, homosexuality, prostitution, sexual roles, feminism, abortion, contraception, censorship, WW2, book burning, class, incest, religion, extremism, STD s, masturbation, ANZAC, race, sodomy, racism, sex education, circumcision, genital mutilation, science, victim blaming, death penalty, age of consent, women's suffrage, discrimination, sexology, fetishism, cars, propaganda, WW1, xenophobia, conscription, eugenics, paganism, bigotry, porn.and many, many other topics.

Some parts of the book are difficult to read, Australia's history is not always an easy or comfortable one. Other parts of the book made me laugh out loud. All in all its an enthralling read, this is not the history of Australia I learned in high school.That class made Australia's history sterile and boring, made me lose all interest in it for many years. I think we need to teach all of our history even the parts that make us cringe.

This book comes highly recommended, go buy it today.
To clarify the book is well written and not aimed at the scholar, it can easily be read by everyone, the difficulty comes from learning of our history and not the act of physically reading the book.