Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 [Review] Serving in Silence? Australian LGBT Servicemen and Women
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In his article from 2007, ‘Anzac: The Sacred and the Secular’, Graham Seal explores the status of the Anzac as a ‘talismanic mythology [that is] powerfully associated with dominant concepts of nation and cultural identity (Journal of Australian Studies 31, no. 91, 135). In the story of Australia, the Anzac is courageous, resilient, cheerful and bound together with his comrades in a comforting, homosocial brotherhood. He is also, as the myth would have it, white, male, heterosexual and wholly sacrosanct. Thankfully, this has not prevented historians and others from taking aim at the pernicious homogeneity of the Anzac stereotype. Recent work by Yorick Smaal, for example, exposed the intricate worlds and identities of men who desired other men in Australia during World War II. Smaal begins his monograph by recalling the reaction to an attempt by a group of veterans to lay a wreath at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne in 1982. It was a gesture that was meant to acknowledge queer men and women who had served and died during World War II. It was ultimately prevented however, because, according to Bruce Ruxton, the President of Victoria’s Returned and Services League, it denigrated Anzac Day. Ruxton went on to comment that he ‘could not remember a single poofter from World War Two’ (Y. Smaal, Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939–45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War (2015), 172). It is curious to note just how much mileage this unfortunate denial has. Fast forward to 2015, and to an incident highlighted in the Introduction to Serving in Silence?, when the Defence LGBTI Information Service arranged to lay rainbow wreaths on Anzac Day. Their actions were ridiculed by a comment left by a reader of Gay News Network who remarked that ‘There were no gay Anzacs … There weren’t any homosexuals … Keep your fantasies in house and stop defaming the Australian Army’ (7).'  (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Historical Studies vol. 50 no. 3 2019 17146167 2019 periodical issue

    'We present our third issue of Australian Historical Studies for 2019. Here we bring together a cluster of articles exploring Aboriginal history, together with exciting new work on the Rum Rebellion and, following an emerging tradition in the journal, an important contemporary exploration of the history profession. The first article, by Shino Konishi, reflects on the ramifications of Patrick Wolfe's exposition of settler colonialism on Indigenous studies. Konishi explains how recent scholarship has moved past the logic of elimination to find more nuanced, subtle and productive ways to explore Indigenous resistance. She reflects on how this shift has altered her practice as an Indigenous woman and a historian of Aboriginal–settler encounter.' (Editorial introduction)

    2019
    pg. 393
Last amended 19 Aug 2019 11:39:47
393 [Review] Serving in Silence? Australian LGBT Servicemen and Womensmall AustLit logo Australian Historical Studies
Review of:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X