International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
Australia has traditionally been depicted as ‘man’s country’. Iconic figures from the nation’s history have always been white males—the convict, the free settler, the bushman, the Anzac soldier, the surf lifesaver, the sportsman and the suburban provider. Australian art, television programming, films, literature, museums, public statues and parades all continue to code Australia as ‘male’.
There is substantial social reality underlying this imaging. Males predominated among the early British settlers, causing population imbalances that were most marked in rural areas, and men also dominated activities associated with nation-building, such as gold-seeking, exploring, land-clearing and fighting. Feminist history has recently highlighted the extent of women’s contributions, but public memory and much academic history still privileges the masculine contribution.
This masculine pre-eminence, however, should not suggest consensus. The convict origins and intensely working-class nature of the Australian colonies generated an immediate divide between bond and free conceptions of masculinity, while the nation’s relatively open, liberal and dynamic nature has allowed challenges and challengers to flourish. The nature of Australian masculinity and its dominance has always been contested.
In the early colonial period, from 1788 through to the mid-nineteenth century, free settlers attempted to elevate more refined, genteel and distinctly middle-class notions of masculinity over those of the convicts, emancipists and Indigenous people. Convict mores emphasising physical hardiness and aggression were regarded with scorn, while the emancipists were viewed as scarcely better as their characters remained forever tarnished. Indigenous Australians were regarded as barbarous savages and then as a dying ‘other’ who were not part of the new nation that emerged in 1901. Never fully incorporated into the nation until the 1960s, their masculinity was not part of the dominant image.
Also worth considering with regard to the early colonial period, yet largely unacknowledged by Australian historians, is that both modern and traditional understandings of sexuality and gender were transferred to the colonies, where they continued to compete, often with extra intensity because of both colonial social mobility and the predominance of lower-class males in the colonies. The divide between heterosexuality and homosexuality and the idea of separate gender spheres became ascendant in Australia as elsewhere, but only after a long struggle against older and less rigid gender and sexual patterns.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, middle-class and working-class masculinities appear to have moved closer together, without the distance that separated British classes. Late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury innovations such as universal secular education and compulsory military training, aided by the growth of pedagogic juvenile literature and youth groups such as the Boy Scouts, sought to defin e masculini ty w little or no reference to class. Parallel to this development was the emergence of a nationalist artistic and literary imagery that celebrated and romanticised rugged and egalitarian masculinity, predominantly through the figure of the bushman, despite the fact that almost all Australians live in towns and cities.
Male privilege, however, was challenged in the 1890s through a vigorous women’s movement. Women won the franchise, and masculine dominance was weakened by female assertiveness in areas such as divorce law reform and birth control. There are also counter-currents that remain largely ignored, such as questioning of the socio-sexual nature of male mateship and close male bonding in rural areas, suggesting that homoeroticism is a more prominent part of Australian masculinity than usually supposed. In the first half of the twentieth century Australian masculinity was more deliberately socially engineered, particularly in regard to service to the nation. This is clear in the creation of a dominant heterosexual masculinity through the Anzac legend, the Citizens’ Military Forces, strong gendering in education and a variety of measures directed at ensuring the eugenic and social health of the nation. Australian involvement in the First and Second World Wars, and deliberate government adoption of military male imagery, supported by organisations such as the Returned Servicemen’s League, helped to create the dominant twentiethcentury male image of a tough reliable patriot who stuck by his ‘mates’ or male comrades. In the early decades of the twentieth century, time for leisure accompanied work and family life, and once more masculine imaging came to the fore, through sports such as football and cricket, and through a new Australian fascination with the beach, which spawned another icon, the male lifesaver.
As well as their civic responsibilities, men also had the duty of working and providing for wives and families. Women were not part of the national projection: they were primarily home-makers, wives and mothers, a role that was not seriously challenged until after the 1940s.
The demographics of Australia altered after the 1940s, from essentially British origins to encompass millions of migrants from Continental Europe and, from the 1970s, from Asia. In the 1960s and 1970s dissident social movements such as second wave feminism and gay liberation began to undermine the dominant masculinity. Women entered the workforce in greater numbers, took control of their own fertility, and demanded a voice in politics, changing forever the male preserve. While unreconstructed males, fond of ‘footy’, pub culture and submissive wives, can still be found, over the last thirty years there has been a major realignment of gender and sexual identities that has left a less dominant singular masculinity and moved towards recognising multiple masculinities, inclusive of multicultural values and more liberated attitudes in family life and relationships.
The male imagery associated with Australian bush legend is still evident in the media personas of Paul Hogan or Russell Crowe, but is now countered by women such as Kylie Minogue, Cate Blanchett and Elle McPherson. Sydney’s gay and lesbian Mardi Gras, meanwhile, attracts a larger crowd than its Anzac Day marches, if not the same level of national veneration, and homosexual law reform in Australia has been largely completed. Australian masculinity is now multifaceted and a long way not only from its British convict and settler origins, but also from the hegemonic masculine formations in the first half of the twentieth century.
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