AUSTRALIAN
HUMANITIES REVIEW
May 2003
Camp Excess
and Queer Histories of Oz
A Review of
Robert Reynolds’ From Camp to Queer:
Remaking the Australian Homosexual and David Coad’s Gender Trouble Down
Under: Australian Masculinities
Robert
Reynolds’ From Camp to Queer and David Coad’s Gender Trouble Down
Under both cast long and searching glances, complete with raised eyebrows,
over different parts of Australia’s queer history. Coad takes us on the longer
journey, providing an intriguing take on Australian masculinities from our
convict past to our queer nineties. Reynolds begins with the sixties, with his
focus on gay and lesbian political movements, but finishes also with
considerations of queer and its contribution to the discussion of the making and
what he describes as the remaking of the Australian Homosexual. Queer history,
inside and outside the academy, deserves the contributions of both these
volumes and there is great benefit to be derived from the work of the two
authors. These benefits take the form of stories that haven’t been told and
stories told differently (in different versions and from different
perspectives). There is great benefit provided in the critical and theoretical
frames used in discussing both the process of history and the experiences of
sex, sexuality and sexual politics in Australia’s history. Reading these books
together, my concerns largely centre on two interrelated questions: what is it
that provokes the looking back in each book and how does each look back? What
most intrigued me about these books is the way in which the process of looking
back queerly and at queer history necessitates a kind of camp excess for both
authors. This is a good thing and a bad thing, academically and politically.
When one glances back, even at queer history and with the critical and
theoretical apparatus available to scholars of gender, sex and sexuality, one’s
glance is partial and particular.
David
Coad’s research and scholarship is thorough and detailed. More than this,
however, the material he considers is engrossing. Legal records, press
material, photographs, films and other kinds of source material provide
gripping, exhilarating and confronting history. This is even more the case when
Coad draws attention to the similarities and disjunctions between the distant
and recent history. The discussion of Mark ‘Chopper’ Reid within discussions of
bushranger myths is as unsettling as it is deft. The sheer density of his
material is also encouraging — the queering of masculinity has always been part
of Australian experience and (this is the encouraging bit) it seems that it
always will be. There is much in all of this that warns us against taking
masculinity too seriously and/or not seriously enough. Looking into the parts
of history where masculinity, in its homosocial figuring, is exceeded and
cannot be contained within heteronormative bounds is precisely the kind of
glancing that unsettles and encourages. In discussing the material and what to
make of it theoretically and politically, Coad is camp in style, casting
critiques as the grand dame, Edna, casts gladioli over her audience. It is when
this style substitutes for clarity of argument that I have trouble with the
text. This is clearest in the epilogue, where Coad considers the terrifying work
of Bly and Biddulph. His analysis that what lies not too far beneath the work
of the men’s movement is an essentialism seems spot on to me, but what of more
disruptive rather than dismissive ways of dealing with these powerful
reproductions of masculine myth? The same kind of effect is produced in
discussion of Weir and Williamson’s Gallipoli, where I was left with the sense
that only if Archy and Frank had kissed or fucked would there have been any
effective disruption to formations of masculinity. As a sixteen year old, I was
moved to tears along with most of a suburban theatre audience when Archy was
shot at the end of the film. Archy’s still-running, shot-through body closes
the film in freeze-frame. We are not
handed any neat, easy way out from the anguish and loss experienced within the
film’ eroticised male dyad. The challenge not to be impacted by this homoerotic
homosociality would have unsettled many in suburban Australia. Is there an
assumption about what makes the erotic and what forms its challenge or
disruption in Coad’s analysis? Can disruption to heterosexual and safely
homosocial masculinity only be produced by ‘penetration’? Coad seems to step
too close, for my comfort, to a notion that there is somewhere outside the
power of hegemonic masculinity and that he knows where this is. Is it not these
figurings of masculinity that queerness must negotiate, caught in a double bind
of longing and desire, alongside submission and oppression? This is a question
that moments like the coming out of Ian Roberts (touched on by Coad) raise for
the queering of Australian masculinity and is also the kind of question to
which we may be left with more ambivalent responses. It is a difficult, perhaps
impossible task to debunk the myths of masculinity so ingrained in our culture
over a long historical period, while not reproducing others. On the whole, Coad
navigates this problematic well. The camp style and the risk it produces go
hand in hand but in this case, coupled with thorough and gripping scholarship, they
produce a very valuable queer history.
David
McInnes
School of
Humanities
University
of Western Sydney