Professor Frank Bongiorno on The Sex Lives of Australians

The Canberra Times

Professor Frank Bongiorno, then at the School of History at ANU, speaks about the book which earned him a spot on the shortlist for the Australian History Prize in the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Awards: The Sex Lives of Australians.

Transcript

00:00I think that in some ways one of the impulses, I guess, behind the book was the ubiquity of sexuality in our culture.

00:08I mean, so many of the issues in politics even are very much centred on issues of gender and sexuality.

00:14There'd never been an attempt to write kind of a book-length study of sexuality in Australia since the first European settlement in 1788.

00:23And so it really came out of, I guess, an interest in social and cultural history

00:27and a hunch, I suppose, that there were some great stories to be told.

00:31I mean, I think there are some aspects of Australian history that, if not entirely distinct to Australia, are relatively unusual.

00:38I mean, the extraordinary imbalanced sex ratio of the 19th century with so many more men than women,

00:44particularly in rural areas, you know, right into the 20th century

00:48and indeed the way in which that kind of strange sex ratio keeps recurring.

00:53You know, one thinks of things like post-World War II migration and schemes like the Snowy Mountain Scheme,

00:59which are effectively all-male worlds.

01:01And look at our mining communities, you know, the fly-in, fly-out communities today

01:05where there are many more men than women.

01:07And so I think that if we want to understand the texture of sexuality in Australia,

01:11if we want to understand things like mateship,

01:14those sorts of characteristics of Australia are really important.

01:17They're not entirely, you know, peculiar to Australia,

01:21but certainly they've been very extreme in certain times in Australian history.

01:25And I found that fascinating to look at the ways in which those kinds of patterns kept recurring.

01:30And, you know, I think they give a real texture to sexual relations between men and women,

01:34to sexual relations, I think, between men.

01:36And, you know, I've certainly found those aspects, you know,

01:42very distinctive, I think, to Australian experience.

01:45The nation that gave the world the Barry McKenzie films

01:48also gave it Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

01:51Robert Helpman was graceful before Shane Warne.

01:54Peter Allen, the grandson of a Tenterfield saddler,

01:57was an internationally famous gay celebrity

01:59who went to Rio but still called Australia home.

02:06who was a company who is a member of the Royalty Young

02:13in the UK and conditioner,

02:14who was not the same as a member of the Royalty Young

02:16in the UK from Australia.

02:16He was a close friend from the Royalty Young

02:19to the Royalty Young.

02:20He was a close friend of two years as a member of the Royalty Young

02:21about the Royalty Young.

02:22This has been a mois in the UK.

02:24I think that there's been a longosed number of people

02:25that have been 19, and a long of the miałty Young

02:27after they've been able to have a quite long episode

02:29of tecnologia with the Royalty Young.

02:31So I think that here's a long time

02:33for the Royalty Young because of a 34 years

02:34after they've been very difficult to get out.

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