39:1 (2001) 142-144
The triumphalist cover photograph taken from the gender-bending Australia film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) plus the provocative double entendre of the title, signal this study's preoccupation. A ‘queer reading of the real bloke as Oz fantasy', it draws on the central problematic of Australia's colonial history as a repressive penal settlement: convicts and transplanted Victorian institutions of control, followed by macho denizens of the outback where due to a ‘famine of females' men bonded as mates and women either became token men or were excluded altogether. Hypermasculinity, argues Coad, conflates with the landscape to provide a totalising national stereotype: ‘Historically Australia has been a queer sort of place full of big, butch, beefy bootmen, skipping kangaroos and blow flies. It still is.'
Coad nails to the mast his argument that gender equals trouble through analysis of the convict heritage, in particular its regimes of punishment. He examines the spectacle of public flogging and convict whipping, alluding to the sado-masochistic dramatisation of such rituals in In the Wake of the Bounty (1933). He draws on material from Australian archives, newspaper reports and convict diaries; noting among crimes such as theft and larceny, the varieties of punishment for sexual dissidence such as rape, buggery and sodomy, where boys became fancy girls for men, including hanging for crimes of bestiality. This richly illustrated overview of the punitive practices of the Australian judicial system is framed by the ‘rum, sodomy and the lash' view of Empire (countering Foucault's argument that in Europe by the 19 th century, discipline and surveillance replaced public punishment). This he argues, alluding to recent claims that the whipping of convicts was brutally disempowering, was ultimately conducive to same-sex practices.
Subsequent chapters rely less on archival documentation than on the overlap between the legends surrounding Australian outback heroes and larrikins whose courage and daring have been mapped onto the iconography of the ‘rebellious nation' and the facts, as far as they can be ascertained from contemporary accounts. Determined to prove that the queer wobble in Australian manhood was always potentially there (taking issue with Henry Lawson's definition of mateship as essentially heterosexual, consisting of ‘real men', bonded due to hardship and solitude), Coad recounts the exploits of the ex- or non-convict stereotypes, the bushranger, outlaw or ‘Wild Colonial Boys' (modelled on Bold Jack Donohoe). Claiming that the cult of mateship was often homoerotic, he revisits contested myths such as that Steve Hart member of the Kelly gang, was a transvestite, that Ned Kelly himself wore perfume, that Hart and Dan Kelly died in each other's arms. The extensive reworking of these legends of male folk heroes and their (sometimes) dissident sexualities in Australian films and novels, as Coad's discussion illustrates proves the centrality of the bushman myth to current images of Australianness. Even an icon- and epoch-making film like Peter Weir's Gallipoli can be located within the hypermasculinity paradigm: Coad convincingly draws on debates about the scenes of male nudity to suggest that the homoerotic potential is repressed or displaced into an evocation of male sensuality and innocence.
Coad's typology of queer practices in the outback includes cases of partially successful female-to-male impersonators and cross-dressers such as Ellen Tremayne, Eugenia Falleni and Eve Langley, women who can also be identified with the Australian bushman myth, and parodies of the stereotype of the rampantly sexual woman such as Barry Humphries' Edna Everage. But whereas his discussion of homoeroticism and homosocial desire in the outback critiques earlier analyses of the mateship phenomenon using the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, he makes only limited use of queer theories such as those of Judith Butler about gender as performance to frame his discussion of female transgression, thus reinforcing the impression of a gender imbalance in his approach as well as his material.
Gender Trouble Down Under shows that records of criminal cases of gender transgression constitute predominantly proof of outrage; on the other hand, as Coad demonstrates, in literary and cinematic versions of folk legends (or re-evaluations of the bushman myth such as Patrick White's in The Twyborn Affair (1979)) the subjectivity of the individual is constructed through reference to outback models and stereotypes. Coad recognises this discrepancy: the masquerade of masculinity to perform Australianness is often confused with the individual drives of manhood. But he is nevertheless lured by the hypothesis that homoeroticism in the outback was fuelled by love and passion not just sexual desire; one moving letter from a mutineer, executed on Norfolk Island in 1846, to his ‘Lover' hoping ‘that you wont fall in love with no other man when i am dead' is a solitary reminder of this possibility. The view that the outback was a place where finer feelings developed remains difficult to prove.
Coad constantly foregrounds in his study the utopian present moment, the Queer Nineties, a time of liberation for some, yet of an alarmingly feminised masculinity for others. Gay sexuality came into its own with the advent of the Sydney Carnival, the celebration of Aussie manhood through The Bootmen Tap Dancers in the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, and the apotheosis of the ‘outing of the outback' in the gender dramas of the film, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Coad's attribution to the convict past of troubled sexualities due to the crushing blows of Empire, bears weight in this decolonised context and Gender Trouble Down Under successfully locates gender issues centrally in the national iconography: but whether this compelling 'queered' interpretation of Australian history will become a mainstream one remains to be seen.
Janet Wilson
University College Northampton