LITMIR.BIZ

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      The women who apply to become the hero’s wife are modest and virtuous. If they do not wear chastity belts, it is because they are of such virtue that they will never need them. They are described, in a childish kind of innocence, as being “as good a collection of fresh-faced little dolls as you’d ever get at the sheep-dog trials in Gunnyganoo”.

      Women tended then to be put on pedestals. Sweet, innocent little souls, they were obliged to endure rather than be eager to enjoy the sexual fevers of their men – even if those men were, as they were without exception expected to be, their husbands. Their role was to accept sex as a necessary evil associated with a wife’s conjugal duty and, of course, with motherhood. As Lady Alice Hillingdon (1857-1940) wrote in her Journal in 1912:“I am happy now that George calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As it is, I now endure but two calls a week, and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England.”

      Not everyone agreed that women were such virtuous creatures.

      George Jean Nathan came right out and said in Bedside Esquire of 1940 that women have “sweet faces and foul minds.” What is more, he said that “Women’s minds are less clean than men’s”.

      Courtship does not even hint at such disturbing possibilities.

      That was because few “decent” people openly concurred in Nathan’s view.

      Anyway, in the matter of sex, society demanded that the minds of men and women both be clean. If women were typically assumed to have minds much the “cleaner” of the two, men should nevertheless lead a speckless, sex-free life too.

      That meant, among other things, that they should respect women’s purity and not be “dirty” towards them in words or actions. Above all, of course, they should not let their fantasies extend to making physical love to them whether in real life or in imagination.

      Tea and Empathy illustrates what was regarded as “proper” - even in everyday situations in which a husband and wife were the leading actors.

      Formally, the average man did “observe the decencies” towards women, although Courtship acknowledged that he could have “impure” thoughts and Jenny Squires was described in rather risqué terms as having “eyes warm with promise that her husband’s nights will be as full of joy as his days.”

      That was a society in which a gentleman raised his hat respectfully to a lady on every possible occasion. He studiously avoided the use of rude words in her presence.

      It was very different from, for example, Shakespeare’s London as it was in reality. Pauline Kiernan tells us that, in the Great Bard’s time, “men and women spoke freely about sex with one another and…women actively instigated talk about it. Plays by Shakespeare’s fellow writers all have female characters talking about fucking, pricks, cunts, ejaculation and buggery.

      There was certainly no concession, then, to any notion of a “female sensibility” which might have taken offence at the vulgar puns of the plays.

      By contrast, the average man in Courtship was studiously, even tediously careful in the words he used in the presence of almost any woman - even barmaids in public bars who could anyway be tough if any “gent” got out of line. His conduct and intentions towards women were expected to be “honorable” at all times.

      Most men tried to live up to such expectations; although “bounders” like Flashman in Thomas Hughes’ Victorian novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays could always lurk somewhere as disgusting exceptions.

      In that context, the women in “Burke’s Creek” even more than the men may be compared to characters in The Saturday Evening Post of the period. The Post and its famous illustrator, Norman Rockwell, depicted a society that was Christian, patriotic, hard-working and virtuous.

      Perhaps rather nervously, we might suggest that men may have been motivated less by a desire to honour the “little lady” than to keep her under their control. Among themselves, men like David Strang in my book Haverleigh used a vivid range of four-letter words - and four-letter thoughts - which might be seen as part of a secret-society code to create and reinforce male bonding. Women were excluded. They didn’t know the words and weren’t allowed to hear them. To tell them what they were and what they meant would be not so much too shocking as too much a violation of the code.

      Sanctimoniously, women were not actually forbidden to use the words. Rather they were seen as being so sweet and pure that they would never dream of uttering such words anyway; and their purity must never be soiled by the sight of such words in print or the sound of them in conversation.

      In this context, the honour and courtesy shown the woman and the acknowledgement of her delicate sensitivities were closely linked with a family home, a well-kept garden and a white picket fence. Except for the men on their boys’ nights out, members of such families were not foul-mouthed. They did not tell dirty stories, seek out carnal pleasures or have carnal thoughts. Christian marriage was a sex-free zone. Blondie might live with Dagwood and bear his children but we could never imagine that he ever said, thought or did anything “naughty” with her or that she would ever concur, except as part of her conjugal duty, in doing anything “naughty” with him.

      So the text of Courtship contains no hint of four-letter words. They have no place in a story about a society as uncontaminated as that in the Australian bush before the 1960s.

      The same applies to Sleep Deeply, Father. The characters belong to a more prosperous, urban Australian family. The references to the daughter’s apparently adulterous fling offer no details of what precisely she may have done. Any such detail was – if at all - only for more scandalous news sheets and not for family magazines. Again, there are no four-letter words – even spoken in anger.

      Obscenity Trials

      Another of my stories contrasts with Courtship. It contains four-letter and other rude words for the act of intercourse and male and female genitalia. The man has a cock; the woman a honey pot. They take pleasure in having a fuck - and we, the readers, are invited to observe, approve and enjoy.

      Tender Loving Care is unashamedly erotic in a way that some other stories are not – or are less. Because of that, it is remarkable in demonstrating the extent to which it has left behind the standards insisted upon in the obscenity trials earlier in the 20^th Century.

      The family, the white-picket fence and Dagwood and Blondie characterized the deeply rooted protocol of their time. Legislation and common-law trials gave that protocol full authority. Trials said in effect that “if it’s dirty, you shouldn’t want to read about it and writers and publishers should not inflict it on you - and you, the man responsible for maintaining high standards of decency in your household, should not inflict it on your ‘women and servants’.

      Towards the end of the Second World War, Max Harris and his literary publication Angry Penguins were, notoriously, tried as part of the process intended to keep books, magazines and newspapers published or circulated in Australia clean.

      An avant-garde literary whiz kid of his time and place, Harris was seen to threaten standards of public decency. He was charged in Adelaide, South Australia, with publishing obscene material in the hoax poems of a non-existent poet, Ern Malley. One report of the case in September 1944 observed: “Detective Vogelesang, for the prosecution, insisted that Night Piece was obscene because: ‘Apparently someone is shining a torch in the dark, visiting through the park gates. To my mind they were going there for some disapproved motive ... I have found that people who go into parks at night go there for immoral purposes’.

      “He also found the word ‘incestuous’ indecent in Perspective Lovesong, admitting ‘I don't know what incestuous means.’"

      Harris was subjected to extensive cross-examination by the Crown, called upon to explain the poetry, line by agonising line, sometimes one word at a time. Harris was asked to explain Ern Malley's references to Shakespeare and the contexts whence they were derived. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, reigned high in the Adelaide Police Court.

      But,

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