Does Australia Have a Queer Literary Canon?

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In our age of streaming and TikTok, it may be hard to imagine that books once served as the primary gateway into the world of queer awakening. Readers of a certain age probably have, like I do, vivid memories of first reading about queer desire and how it set off a thrilling flare of recognition. The power of these literary experiences should not be underestimated; for some readers, it will change the course of their lives.

Happily, we are today also living through a time of rich and varied representation in books. From literary novels to memoir to sci-fi and beyond, the narrating of queer lives and all its complexity has been legitimised and made mainstream. This is something to celebrate and preserve.

Australia has had a long and varied history of publishing into what I’ll describe as a queer space (though for over one hundred and fifty years it had no such classification). As revealed in Robert Dessaix’s Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing, a landmark collection of local writing spanning over a century, early settler-colonial literature in the form of poems, diaries and the occasional novel regularly alluded to same-sex desire. Select writing from around the turn of the century from Francis Adams, John le Gay Brereton and Bernard O’Dowd celebrated emotionally intense same-sex friendships, as well as the growing possibilities of alternative sexual experiences in elite parts of society (see Rosa Praed’s Affinities for one such example).

But this exploration, such as it was in our nascent local publishing industry, remained highly coded, subtle, ambiguous. Notions of sex and gender were synonymous back then, and homosexuality as a behaviour remained literally unnameable despite there being a prominent gay and lesbian subculture in several major cities. Alas, Australia had no Oscar Wilde (at least until Eve Langley changed her name by deed poll), and certainly no Radclyffe Hall.

This attitude prevailed for the first half of the twentieth century. It was only when writers such as Patrick White, Martin Boyd and Kenneth McKenzie began to consider homosexual relationships as simply another variety of human relationships that the expansion of a queer literary imagination and the place it occupied in the wider publishing landscape began in earnest. (It is notable that women writers are largely absent from this mid-century movement, though Langley and Henry Handel Richardson do both figure at this time with works that examine lesbian desire, albeit in a stifled, unfulfilled way.)

Of course it is important to remember that censors were never far away from the manuscript pages, and we had to wait until the 1970s for Australian states and territories to start to repeal anti-homosexuality laws. With these legislative and social changes came a shift in the depiction of queer experience in our literature. It was foregrounded, and the implicit became explicit. This period saw the publication of one of the more well-known Frank Moorhouse titles, The Americans, Baby, and Elizabeth Riley’s All That False Instruction.

I hope this series starts a long and ongoing conversation about queer writing and reading in Australia.

The 1980s and 1990s saw another shift in the position of queerness in mainstream publishing: it became, finally, the leading signifier in the character’s sense of self and purpose. A swathe of texts was released during these transformative decades, notably Elizabeth Jolley’s Palomino, Moorhouse’s The Everlasting Secret Family, Dennis Altman’s The Comfort of Men, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask and Peter Stirling’s trans masculine memoir So Different.

Dessaix’s anthology was published in 1993, shortly after Sumner Locke Elliott’s Fairyland, his ‘coming-out’ final novel, was released. It was auspicious timing: only two years later, Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas and Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrove would be published, changing the landscape of Australian queer literature forever.

KYD’s Queer Critics Series seeks to explore this important history of queer writing and publishing, examining how these groundbreaking texts have paved the way for better, fairer representations of queer writers in our national literature. These books also serve as a reminder that the unedifying debate around trans people’s rights continues to inflict real and lasting damage across the whole community.

In podcast episodes, we’ll talk to queer literary critics about an Australian book that has had a profound impact on their identity and their own writing, as well as how they view the legacy of these seminal texts in the broader literary canon. You can also read each of these critics’ excellent companion pieces to the podcast episodes each week in Kill Your Darlings magazine. Subscribe/listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen to your podcasts. Or right here!

I hope this series starts a long and ongoing conversation about queer writing and reading in Australia, and encourages readers to seek out these books and others which have elevated the experiences of queer characters, real and imagined, and liberated many possibilities of what constitutes love, desire and romantic relationships in the twenty-first century.

I thank the Cultural Fund, the philanthropic arm of the Copyright Agency, for supporting this project. And I thank you for taking the time to read, listen and engage with the series. Please enjoy.