The Sex Lives of Australians by Frank Bongiorno

Author:Frank Bongiorno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2012-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

War and Peace

Before the Revolution

Historians sometimes divide the period between World War II and the 1960s into two phases. The war and postwar years are seen as times of rapid and far-reaching change, which are then followed by the overwhelming moral and political conservatism of the Menzies era. In the history of sex, the 1950s slip into an interregnum between the relative openness of the war years and the sixties ‘sexual revolution’. This chapter will treat the period in a more unified way, stressing mid-century continuity. Images of the asexual fifties as a kind of ersatz Victorian era will be treated as simplistic and exaggerated.1

Sex in the Services

At first, it all looked much like 1914. An expeditionary force again went off to the Middle East and similar problems with VD emerged as in World War I. The military authorities’ efforts to deal with it this time, however, were better organised and less punitive, and infection rates were lower.2 The army supervised brothels and provided men with condoms and ointments. Blue-light depots were set up at camps while all units had to provide a prophylactic ablution centre. Medical officers delivered lectures on the dangers of infection – standing orders required a talk within ten days of a recruit’s arrival in camp – and the army’s education journal, Salt, carried frank advice about VD.3 It has sometimes been hinted that these improvements, as well as the availability of sulphonamides and later penicillin, increased the amount of sexual activity in and around the armed forces. Yet more than half the respondents to a 1980s survey ‘had little or no extra-marital sex while in the army’.4 Sex was a topic for much contemplation and discussion – but less action. In the Pacific theatre especially, busyness and isolation were major barriers and infection rates accordingly low. Disgust and racial contempt might also have acted as deterrents: one soldier recalled wishing that ‘the New Guinea women would turn white and not smell’.5 In a postwar novel, when a soldier arrives in New Guinea he is advised that if he runs into any local women, he will ‘need a scrubbing brush and a piece of soap’. When the new hand replies that ‘all cats are grey in the dark’, he is put right: ‘These sheilas aren’t. Not if you can smell they aren’t.’6 But infection occurred among troops serving in Borneo who admitted to ‘contact with Indonesian, Chinese or half-caste girls of good appearance’.7

Australians who fell into the hands of Japanese were more concerned with food than sex; malnutrition, overwork and fear undermined the libido. Finding themselves unable to achieve erection as captivity wore on, some prisoners worried that they had become permanently impotent.8 Nonetheless, a warrant officer later recalled that ‘certain couples were known to be going to particular spots and indulging in homosexuality’. Some blamed this behaviour on prisoners’ rice diet.9 But one doctor more plausibly claimed after the war that ‘sexual perversion was rare’ among the men, which he attributed partly to ‘[t]he

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