Official surveillance stemmed from convict society, and has ebbed and flowed through our history. Australia, suggests Bongiorno, ‘had stronger traditions of protection and state activity with which to rationalise sexual engineering’, and the emphasis on growing the (white) population made for frequent resistance to birth control. Surveillance was also demanded to patrol interracial mixing, although, as Bongiorno shows, this was less one-dimensional than we may imagine. And until the 1970s Australia had particularly rigid censorship of pornography, a debate that has now been revived around Internet porn.

The Sex Lives of Australians is both a contemporary and a strangely old-fashioned book. The frankness with which it is written, and the progressive attitudes of the author, show how Australian historians have embraced what until recently would have been seen as radical, even improper. Bongiorno writes good narrative history, and the book is almost entirely unencumbered by contemporary debates about the complex meanings of ‘sex’, ‘gender’, and ‘sexuality’. This may be the only major book about sexuality in the last thirty years that does not feel it necessary to discuss Foucault.

The US Supreme Court once ruled that it could not define pornography, but knew it when it saw it, and this seems true of Bongiorno’s attitude towards sex. While there has been a considerable body of writing about sexuality in Australia, most of which Bongiorno has carefully read and assimilated, this is the first attempt to bring the story together from the arrival of the First Fleet to current debates on same-sex marriage, and it is an important contribution to social and cultural history.

While Bongiorno is very conscious of the racism that underlay sexual relations between the new settlers and the Indigenous population, he does not discuss Indigenous sexualities except insofar as they came in conflict with settler society. His chapters follow a strictly chronological order, so that The Sex Lives of Australians becomes another way of reading the history of Australia, one in which contraception, abortion, and homosexuality loom larger than elections and economic recession. Bongiorno is an Australian historian, and his discussions of sex are embedded in an understanding of the larger social and cultural shifts of the two centuries he is charting. Writing about sex is, of course, somewhat more complex than charting, say, the development of the pastoral industry; as Bongiorno observes: ‘It is usually in moments of disruption – the court case or the official inquiry – that we hear the common people speak of sex.’

Given these limits, he has written an informative and fascinating book. I would have liked more attention to fiction, films, art, and mass media, which both reflect and help shape the ways in which we imagine sexual possibilities, although Bongiorno does draw on a few authors to illustrate his analysis. But the richness of popular fiction – romances, detective stories, even comic books – for understanding how people imagined and managed their sexuality is largely ignored.

Bongiorno’s basic argument is that: ‘The rules on sex in Australia have affected the very substance of people’s lives, shaping and even deciding their chances of personal happiness, social acceptance and economic security … Even in fairly recent times, what governments, doctors and churches have done, or not done, has influenced whether people lived or died.’ This is evident in his discussions of the legal and social regulation of contraception, abortion, and homosexuality, which occupy a great deal of the book.

Even masturbation, it appears, was a major concern for much of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century, and a modern reader will be both amused and shocked by the attention given to controlling what at one point was termed ‘nervous and private diseases’. Bongiorno speculates that Australians were particularly concerned with masturbation; as late as the 1940s the Father and Son movement was preaching self-control, in part to better develop character.

If masturbation was particularly emphasised in Australia, so too was fear of homosexuality, at least among men. Bongiorno stresses that a largely male frontier society meant that close bonds between men were both encouraged and policed, and he quotes the historian Russel Ward who suggested that mateship was perhaps a ‘sublimated homosexual relationship’, often dealt with by regarding Indigenous women as fair game for men in the outback.

Like most historians of sexuality, whatever their own experience, Bongiorno devotes considerable space to homosexuality. From the nineteenth century on, studies of sex have tended to concentrate more on homo- than on heterosexuality, and indeed the latter concept was framed in contrast to the former. Bongiorno subscribes to the dominant liberal belief (which I, of course, share) that the way in which society treats sexual diversity is a measure of its overall humanity, but homosexuality also is a useful marker around his three underlying themes of pleasure, danger, and surveillance.

Oddly he has remarkably little to say about either transgender or theatrical drag, both of which have been important elements of Australian social life. The popularity of drag shows in the 1960s paved the way for two of Australia’s most famous theatrical productions: Dame Edna Everage and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). While other countries have similar traditions, in few has drag been so central a part of theatrical life.

Drag has been important in Australian life, and has recently been expressed within the lesbian community through the development of ‘drag kings’, but so too have various forms of transgenderism, around which there are complex and often very passionate debates involving medical and psychiatric interventions. Bongiorno might argue that this is more about gender than sex, but the close, if sometimes tense, relationship between transgenderism and homosexuality makes the omission rather striking.

There are other significant omissions: while Bongiorno places some emphasis on the history of contraception, there is no reference to Tony Abbott’s attempt, as health minister, to ban the post-conception pill RU486, which was overruled by a bipartisan coalition of parliamentarians. Nor is there any discussion of the ways in which Senator Brian Harradine used his power in the Senate during the Howard years to restrict AusAID support for family planning programs.

Indeed, the latter part of the book suffers somewhat from too narrow a focus on the minutiae of the women’s and gay movements, rather than on larger debates around sexuality in a period of global influences, new technologies, and increasing affluence. Bongiorno’s last chapter concentrates on the gay movement post-1972 and the impact of HIV/Aids. He is right that Australia’s response to the epidemic was better than our history might have led us to expect, but he offers no explanation for this. Unfortunately, the book segues from gay politics and Aids into a discussion of paedophilia, even though Bongiorno is clear that the great majority of cases are in fact heterosexual. It is striking that there is no discussion of the recent scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church around sexual abuse.

It might seem strange that a reviewer who has built a career writing about homosexual life and politics found the emphasis on gay life in the final chapter somewhat out of proportion, and wanted a more overall assessment of where Bongiorno thought sex fitted in twenty-first-century Australian life: in particular, whether the legacies of the sexual revolutions of the past few decades are likely to survive.

The strength of this book lies in the first seven chapters, which trace the evolution of sexuality from white settlement to the liberation movements of the early 1970s. I learnt a lot from the historical detail, and the book is well written and engaging.