Frank BongiornoBesprekingen

As other reviewers have suggested, this one falls into the easily mocked gap between journalism and historiography. In short: it's entertaining (though that might rely on the fact that I'm old enough to remember some of the decade under discussion), broad (politics, economics, culture, and environment all get a look in), and the parts don't add up to much. This is obviously intentional; Bongiorno avoids telling any kind of over-arching story, but he writes small scale stories so well that I'm sure he could have done so. Instead, he structures the book thematically, which allows for some nice juxtapositions (the America's Cup and the floating of the currency)--but doesn't allow for any sense that time was passing. The '80s end up looking rather static. He also avoids too much discussion of how he sees the decade compared to other historians, but when he does mention their disagreements, he's clear and concise. Perhaps he can public a long essay interpreting the decade; for now, he's done a very nice job of describing it.

As an Australian, I opened “The Sex Lives of Australians” with great interest, if only to discover what on earth my neighbours were up to at 3am the other morning. I didn’t get a specific answer on that but I did find out a lot more about the sex lives of my countrymen and women.

It seems, for example, that sodomy played a far bigger role in the shaping of Australian than one could possibly mention, and it’s good to see that cross-dressing was a part of European-Australian life from the get-go. And the reference to European Australian history is intended; the sexual history of Australian Aboriginal people is not given an airing.

As you can imagine, early male immigrants to Australia got around the scarcity of women in a variety of interesting ways and it’s interesting to note that many early contraception pioneers were rather eugenic in their outlook.

William Chidley, Australia’s answer to Havelock Ellis, also is mentioned throughout. Chidley meant well but the delivery of his ideas could have been improved, at least to the point where he wasn’t thrown into a psychiatric hospital. Bongiorno also cites a sad letter from Chidley to Ellis, asking Ellis to be his friend.