We’re open every day except Good Friday, 29 March. View our Easter opening hours here ›
The Sex Lives of Australians: A History by Frank Bongiorno
JUDGES' COMMENTS
This is an ambitious, lively and entertaining history of Australian attitudes towards sex and the changing nature of our sexual practices. It maps an ever-evolving sexual culture from the convict era to recent times. Bongiorno brilliantly demonstrates how much of the story relates to attempts by governments and churches to restrain and contain sexual practices. Anxiety about inter-racial sex, masturbation and homosexuality led to sustained campaigns at repression. The fall in the birth rate at the end of the nineteenth century led not to a campaign for Australians to engage in more sex but rather to calls to restrict the sale and promotion of birth control devices.
While one important argument is about repression, the other is how changing values in Australia since the sixties - encompassing gay rights and feminist movements - have resulted in a society in which sex is understood to be a natural part of life and heterosexuality is no longer conceived as the only ‘moral’ form of sexual behaviour. This bold and well-researched book informs us about the patterns of our sexual mores and tracks the emergence of a more tolerant and inclusive Australian culture.