The Sex Lives Of Australians

DESPITE the eye-catching title and the arresting bare bum on the cover, this is a serious book.

DESPITE the eye-catching title and the arresting bare bum on the cover, this is a serious book.

And it's a serious subject, no matter how much our cultural reticence to discuss sex in public makes us want to trivialise it.

This book is an account of the sex lives of Australians since the settlement of Europeans here in 1788 and the effects that has had on our vision of ourselves as a people.

One of the defining features of that settlement, given that it was just about the ultimate in macho adventure, was the predominance of men in the gender breakdown.

This simple fact resonates through the years; and the actions and attitudes towards the expression of a basically human sexual life under unnatural conditions gave rise to such different outcomes as mateship and the White Australian Policy.

The inability to control conception meant an entire set of behaviours and moral values which we struggle with today, while we are still wrestling with the same attitudes towards sexuality outside the male/ female domestic bond seen in every generation of Australians.

This is an engaging book to read. It is written in a lively and engaging manner, only briefly falling into the dry academic style of delivery which betrays the author's day job as an associate professor of history at the ANU. His knowledge of the field is encyclopaedic and the hundreds of anecdotes used are both educational and entertaining.

The Sex Lives Of Australians
Frank Bongiorno
Black Inc, $32.95