| Book Review | Labour History, 85 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

David Coad, Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities, Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, Valenciennes, 2002. pp. + 199. $44.95 paper;

Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001. pp. ix + 301. $38.45 paper.

The titles of these books might suggest that here are two takes on the same question. In fact they inhabit quite different universes and explore quite different historical material. Coad focuses on the male of the Australian outback — the tradition of convicts and the Kelly gang, of bushmen and the Bulletin legend, and in more recent times the outback of Crocodile Dundee and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Crotty turns his attention by contrast to the city and the culture of the urban middle class. Both are interested in definitions of masculinity, but Coad looks at the question through a 'queer' looking glass, while Crotty is firmly heterosexual in his questioning, and gives little attention to femininity or women. Coad does introduce women — so long as they are lesbian or cross-dressers. The two historians' methodologies are quite different. Coad opens his book with two pages of 'oz lingo' explaining to the uninitiated the meanings of 'barbie' and 'blowie' and 'donah' and 'dinkum' and much of his writing draws on this lingo in a throw-away informality. Crotty begins his book with a careful discussion of gender theory and while he also defines words, they are rather different in character — 'contested terms' such as 'hegemonic masculinity', and 'militarism'. His writing is always deliberate, measured and with a close attention to the formal conventions of academic history.

Yet for all their differences these two books together raise an issue which has been central to gender studies since the re-emergence of feminist writing in the early 1970s. That issue is the relation between ideal types (sometimes called images, mythologies, stereotypes, or cultural constructs) and behaviour. In the early years of feminist history when the formative power of the 'stereotype' was a given, attention centred on delineating ideal types. To objectify stereotypes was to assist in freeing people from them and thus history-writing became part of the feminist process. It was rather harder to look at the lives of women as women or men as men in their particular experience, and when this was done the relation between the ideal and the actual often became problematic.

Within this dialogue, Coad accepts as given that there is an Australian masculine ideal type which has been created by a series of outback legends. He then sets out to examine the sites where these legends were established and discovers evidence of queer behaviour. His conclusion interestingly is not that the legend has inaccurately represented past behaviour, but that the legend itself has always contained a strongly subliminal homosexual cross-dressing element which has been repressed and only fully 'came out' with Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. This conclusion is unconvincing. I cannot find evidence that the Australian male legend as a legend was other than heterosexual. However the suggestion, implicit in the evidence presented by Coad, that the sites where the legend was created had strong homosexual aspects is far more interesting. After all convict Tasmania, the bushrangers' and bushmen's outback, even the trenches of Gallipoli (which surprisingly get barely any attention here) were places with a huge imbalance of men to women and where one might expect it difficult to sustain heterosexual relations. So the suggestion is intriguing. But Coad does not really deliver. He hunts, and not surprisingly finds, homosexual behaviour. But his evidence consists either of isolated anecdotal examples drawn from court records, or even more questionable, suggestions drawn from later representations of those sites as in, to take one example, the 'prominent shape' in Errol Flynn's trousers in a film about the 'Bounty'! Too often the author's assumptions take the place of evidence. Coad assumes that when men flogged other men this was a homoerotic encounter and would have been received as such by other convict spectators. He tells us of 'the vast amount of sexual and gender trouble produced by the penal system' without finding any way beyond anecdote to establish this case in a systematic and numerically-based way. Coad opens up a really interesting question, but the answers in actual behaviour are frustratingly unsatisfactory.

Crotty is infinitely more careful in his methodology than Coad. He makes no huge claims for his work. He explicitly says that he is only dealing with cultural constructs, not behaviour, that he is only treating the urban middle class and that masculine ideals were always contested. His argument is that middle-class models of masculinity moved from a primarily religious and moral definition in the 1870s to a more physical and ultimately militarist one by the time of the Great War. The drivers for this were Social Darwinism, the fear of urban effeteness and an emerging nationalism. Crotty explores this theme through a number of middle-class institutions: the Australian public school, juvenile literature, especially boys adventure stories, and youth movements of which the Boy Scouts were the pre-war highpoint. The argument is well delivered and contains a good deal of rich information. The research is thorough and the exposition is clear and mature.

However, the essential argument is not really original or new. As Crotty acknowledges, the changes he discusses in definitions of masculinity occurred right throughout the Anglo-Saxon world in response to similar pressures, and these changes and their institutional contexts have been well documented. Books by Bruce Haley (1978) and John Mangan (1981) on the public school or John Springhall on youth movements (1977) essentially presented similar arguments. Crotty's contribution is to apply these ideas to Australia.

We also are left with our question of the relationship of ideal and behaviour. Crotty may say that he is only dealing with ideals, not behaviours, but in using the term 'hegemonic masculinity' he implies that this model of masculinity was determinative in boys' lives. While acknowledging that constructs can be contested he never explores the contestations. There are two that need exploration. The first is that throughout this period the middle class continued to push a moralistic ideal of manhood through the feminist and temperance crusades. Both are barely mentioned in this book, and Marilyn Lake's suggestion of the attack by middle-class women on anti-domestic ideals of manhood is summarily dismissed. Feminism and temperance did provide an alternative highly moralistic model which Crotty needed to confront in more detail. More significant was the informal model of male behaviour which continued to exist in the oral culture — the hard drinking larrikin tradition, much of it working class in origin, but one which undoubtedly continued to influence middle-class men. In the Great War (an acknowledged climax to this generation of men-making) Australian soldiers, middle class as well as working class, did not always behave with the restraint and obedience promulgated by the ideal described by Crotty. They won notoriety for their drunken hi-jinks alongside the praise for their battlefield valour.

Both these books are to be welcomed. Coad's may be loose but it contains a highly interesting idea well worth further exploration. Crotty's, though less novel, does document an important revolution in masculine ideals within an Australian context. But the challenge of showing precisely how male ideals translated into behaviour remains one which bedevils historians of gender.


Encyclopedia of New Zealand	JOCK PHILLIPS

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