Coming to Australia via Britain, his father, a Polish Jew, had Anglicised their family name as Zions; when he moved to England in 1919, Norman changed this name by deed poll to Haire, allegedly because the original Polish name meant ‘hare’; perhaps he thought the spelling ‘Haire’ had a classier look. He was a big, tall man – throughout his life obesity was a recurring concern – who had originally wanted to be an actor, an ambition which his parents dismissed as unacceptable. Instead, he settled for Medicine at Sydney University, but there was always something of the performer about him. He was hardly good-looking, but his speaking voice commanded attention: indeed, Enid Lyons, who once opposed him in an ABC debate on ‘population unlimited’, thought his voice was the most beautiful she had ever heard.

It was audacious for this Jewish colonial outsider to put up his nameplate in Harley Street, but Haire was never lacking in nerve. From the early 1920s he became one of England’s leading advocates of birth control. Havelock Ellis, who had spent some psychologically crucial years of his youth in Australia, served as a rather reluctant mentor, introducing him to Magnus Hirschfeld, the openly homosexual director of the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Haire had soon established himself as an influential sexologist on the world scene, and in 1929 was instrumental in organising the successful London Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform. By this time he was enjoying the trappings of wealth. His house, with its elaborate Chinese interiors, showed his high camp tendencies (he described his bedroom as ‘perfect harlotry’), while with his Rolls Royce, complete with chauffeur, he risked being seen as the nose-thumbing parvenu. In the 1930s he consolidated his social status by acquiring his country estate, Nettleden. However, on the outbreak of World War II he forsook England for Australia, where he was to write a remarkably progressive column on sexual issues for Woman magazine. In 1946, suffering from ill health and in reduced circumstances, he returned to England. He died in 1952, leaving his library and papers to Sydney University, together with a substantial bequest for the study of sexology.

It is clear that such an interesting character and such an important, international career deserved more in the way of biography than the short article accorded him in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Diana Wyndham and, appropriately, Sydney University Press, have come to the rescue. Wyndham, who had enjoyed a Norman Haire Fellowship funded from the bequest, has been an assiduous researcher, trying to fill in some of the notable gaps in the evidence, as, astonishingly, his executors, according to Wyndham, took it upon themselves to ignore his will and destroy his papers, on the grounds that his correspondence with a ‘number of distinguished persons’ might have caused embarrassment if it had fallen into ‘the wrong hands’. Wyndham, however, herself provides evidence that some papers did in fact survive, though the Fisher Library in the 1970s authorised a further cull, which included ‘duplicates’, presumably books which the Library already had in its collection. By this time Haire’s library had been effectively broken up and dispersed. This is not a happy archival story.

Haire was a controversial figure within the ‘sex reform’ movement and beyond. Both Marie Stopes in England and Margaret Sanger in America felt that he did not always sufficiently acknowledge their contribution, while Ellis seemed to accord his younger colleague only a grudging respect, and there was a whiff of anti-Semitism to his description of Haire as being ‘a little too Jewish’ (did he mean pushy?). Wyndham does her best to give us Haire’s side of these sometimes petty rivalries, but occasionally there is some strain evident in her determined defence of Haire’s reputation. His practice of what was called ‘rejuvenation’, which was particularly profitable, is a case in point. ‘Juvenescence’ had been pioneered by Eugen Steinach, who believed that vasectomy, in stopping the reproductive function, would allow hormones to be redirected to reducing or reversing senility. Haire adopted Steinach’s method, and among his well-known patients was the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, who was obsessed with the link he perceived between sexual potency and creativity. Bearing in mind that Haire later conceded that the procedures used in rejuvenation were ‘of little practical value’, Wyndham devotes some fifteen laborious pages to the Yeats case, struggling to argue that the operation and treatment nevertheless benefited Yeats, if only through Haire’s advice on diet and, more generally, the placebo effect. This might be relevant to a biography of Yeats, but it does not really help Haire: one is left with the suspicion that he might have been a bit too eager to seize the financial rewards which rejuvenation offered.

So, too, Wyndham seems uncertain how to deal with Haire’s eugenicist views, which persisted through World War II and were evident in the 1944 population debate, when he said that it was the ‘quality’ not the ‘quantity’ of children produced that counted. In his trail-blazing The Sex Lives of Australians: A History (2012), Frank Bongiorno points out that in 1927 Haire argued that, if contraception and abortion failed to prevent the unfit from reproducing, ‘defective babies’ should be examined by a board of medical experts to determine whether the infant lived or died. Wyndham does not make this kind of chilling detail available to us.

Norman Haire and the Study of Sex is one of those books – increasingly common these days – which could have done with a good editor. Wyndham has Norman’s father applying for Australian citizenship in 1870, when ‘Australia’, let alone Australian citizenship, did not exist. Haire’s ‘partner’, Willem van de Hagt, is casually mentioned on page 228, but only on page 297 do we learn that he was administrator of the Rotterdam Zoo and also Haire’s ‘contraceptive supplier’. Any attempt to explain their apparently secretive relationship is saved up for the conclusion. These and other examples of carelessness or inconsistency left me with the feeling that the text was still in need of a final edit.

Wyndham does, however, show us Haire at his best in bringing scientific understanding and, indeed, common sense to a range of sexual issues. He insisted that birth control should be discussed openly. Similarly, the taboo against sex education had to be broken. Women had a right to the sexual satisfaction men took for granted; Haire did not shrink from stressing the importance of the female orgasm. He dismissed the widespread belief among medicos that masturbation was somehow unhealthy as lacking any scientific basis. He was an eloquent proponent of a new sexual morality which would erode the old disabling myths about sexuality.

Wyndham also highlights the suspicion with which Australian authorities treated Haire during the war. British sources had made the unlikely suggestion that he was a secret member of the Communist Party. An Australian detective, pursuing Haire, thought he looked Jewish and ‘decidedly foreign’. Politicians were appalled that the ABC had invited him to participate in the population debate. To his credit, Charles Moses, the ABC general manager, fended off the demands that Haire be banned from the national broadcaster.

Diana Wyndham has done well to bring Norman Haire, our own celebrity sexologist, to our attention.