The Sex Lives of Australians: A History by Frank Bongiorno

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Ex library copy with external stickers. Strong protective plastic covering. Pages are sunned. Book is clean and binding intact.

Cross-dressing colonists, effeminate bushrangers and women shortages. This is the first comprehensive history of sex in Australia from Botany Bay to the present day.

In this highly readable social history, Frank Bongiorno uses vivid examples to chart the changing sex lives of Australians. He shows how a predominantly male penal colony created a rough and ready culture. The scarcity of women made for strange bedfellows, and the female minority was both powerful and vulnerable.

Then came the Victorian era, in which fears of sodomy helped bring an end to the transportation of convicts. Tracing the story to the present, Bongiorno shows how the quest for respectability always has another side to it and how the contraceptive pill changed so much.

Along the way, he deals with some intriguing questions - were the Kelly gang gay? why did the law ignore lesbianism for so long? - and introduces some remarkable characters, both reformers and radicals.

This is a thought-provoking story of sex in Australia. With a foreword by Michael Kirby, AC CMG