(2004)
David Coad suggests a paradox about masculinity Down Under. Australia historically has seemed a country of hypermasculinity embodied by hardened convicts, rugged pioneers, wild bushrangers and muscled bronzed lifesavers. Yet Coad argues that macho Australia has a queer underside. Moralists were horrified by unnatural practices of prisoners transported by Mother England to the Antipodes. With an unbalanced sex ratio at the frontier of empire, men could more readily find intimate companionship in the arms of mates than in the bosom of colonial women. Male-only sociability characterized traditional pub culture, and even outlaws engaged in queer conduct - one member of Ned Kelly’s bushranger gang ranged around dressed, ostensibly for disguise, as a woman. Coad comments: ‘What is curious about Australia’s adulation for the Ned Kelly gang is that it is directed toward a group of matey juveniles whose status as heterosexual models is questionable’. Real women, too, displayed gender bending, such as Eugenia Falleni, who so convincingly passed that she married a woman. The film Gallipoli championed potentially erotic male bonding among Diggers, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert took drag queens to the outback. Dame Edna Everage hardly requires comment.
Coad’s depiction of these milieux and individuals is insightful and entertaining. His comments occasionally become glib, as when he states that the voyeuristic practice of lashing convicts was ‘a sadistic scenario typical of Teutonic lovers of discipline in which the English have shown themselves to be particularly adept’. He more convincingly suggests that particular conditions presented by colonial Australia provided latitude for sexual behaviors that did not conform to the norm, and that ‘a major tension-point in the Oz bloke fantasy is the heterosexual imperative and necessary marginalization or repression of the homoerotic’. ‘Compulsory heterosexuality’ nevertheless hid, permitted or produced dissident sexual behaviors and attitudes. Coad’s examination of penal records in Tasmania (including touching stories of love between convict men), writing on Australian gender, movies and novels (such as the fiction of Patrick White) provide ample material to hypothesize about ‘gender troubles’. Historians of homosexuality may not be surprised by Coad’s assertions. Many mainstream Australians may nevertheless be shocked to be reminded of homoeroticism among blokes in the bush, though Sydney, in particular, now hosts a particularly ebullient gay and lesbian community.The incidence of homosexual connections seems high in Australian history, but Coad’s intention is not to quantify sodomy. He seeks to discover how Australian conditions engendered certain practices, and he implies that gender ambiguity is embedded in the Australian character. Mateship is so sacrosanct an institution that the current Prime Minister wanted it enshrined in a new preamble to the Australian constitution. Yet homoeroticism, says Coad, is a characteristic of Australian mateship. Unlike many other politicians, Prime Minister John Howard refuses to send a message of support to the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. For him, if not for Coad, the frolicking of costumed homosexuals is unrelated to the sacred bonds of mateship – Coad reads against conservative Australian historical scholarship and conservative political opinions. Recent years have added examples to Coad's catalogue of ‘queerness’ (in a very general sense). One of the present justices of Australia’s top court is openly homosexual, an articulate and much admired spokesman for human rights, though victim of an unsuccessful attempt several years ago, by a right-wing parliamentarian, to blacken his reputation by fabricated allegations of impropriety. Meanwhile, Australia's favorite cover boy, the swimmer Ian Thorpe, who says that he is heterosexual though he enjoys the attention of homosexuals, is comfortable enough to pose wearing pearl necklaces in an advertising campaign for jewelry. Those two examples bespeak a different approach towards sexuality than seen in many countries.Coad’s book deconstructs myths of Australian masculinity, but also underlines the rebellious or larrikin element in Australian life, and the irony in Australian self-imaging, a self-questioning of fantasies of the outback, the sheep station and the world of surfers. He discovers homoeroticism, homosociability and homosexual relations in founding myths and iconic characters, but also charts how Australians have played with notions of gender and sexuality in self-portrayals. Priscilla, thus, ‘offers a practical demonstration of a queer theorization on issues such as the performativity of gender and the formation of subjectivity’. He also shows how ‘in two hundred years Australia changed its reaction faced with the queer from one of suppression, or killing, to making queerness a commodity and a money-spinner, turning it in fact into a tourist attraction’. This readable and provocative book itself provides an appraisal of the performance of gender in Australia, a society that offers fascinating variations on, and perspectives into, sexuality in the ages of both colonialism and globalization.
Robert Aldrich
University of Sydney