Clare Parker. Australian Feminist Studies. Volume 33, Issue 95. 2018.
Introduction
South Australia’s sexual revolution came early. The state had a reputation for puritanism until the mid-1960s but rapidly embraced a much more permissive approach to social policy after 1965, when the long period of conservative governments under Tom Playford came to an end. The parliament’s first steps were to overturn restrictive liquor licensing and gambling laws that had already been abandoned in other states. It then turned to reforms that had not yet been undertaken by any of the other Australian parliaments: abortion, male homosexual activity, and, by 1975, the nation’s first Sex Discrimination Act.
The abortion and homosexual reforms are notable not only for being the first in Australia, but for preceding the peak of activism which is usually associated with the sexual revolution. The chronology is not perfectly neat, but the Acts of 1969 and 1972 sit at the very cusp of the emergence of groups such as Women’s Liberation in 1970 and the Gay Activists’ Alliance. The reforms came after the international publication of groundbreaking texts such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, and events such as the Stonewall Riots of 1969, but their influence in Australia had not yet extended to largescale public movements that used a more radical style of activism. The activism that did exist in South Australia at the time of the reforms tended to utilise the traditional style of direct conversation with parliamentarians. There has been debate amongst historians of Australian feminism about the nature of the evolution in activism (Lake 1999; Summers 2000, 327), but Germaine Greer’s (1970, 13) pithy observation in The Female Eunuch precisely identifies the cusp at which South Australia’s reforms sat: ‘Then genteel middle-class ladies clamoured for reform, now ungenteel middle-class women are calling for revolution’.
The new generation of feminist activists’ consciousness-raising activities led to the development of the ‘personal is political’ mantra and revealed, inter alia, that women’s problems must be addressed as a whole rather than as the problems of individual women (MacKinnon 1989, 95; Reid in this issue). This reconceptualization and politicisation of ‘the personal’ is what marks the shift between the two phases of activism identified by Greer. The experience of South Australia shows very clearly that ‘the personal’ had always played an important part in shaping the political agenda, but that before the rise of consciousness-raising activism it was overwhelmingly either linked to crime or tragedy (where revelations were unplanned rather than undertaken by design), or was entrenched in the power of the (masculine) state. Instead of activists choosing to discuss their abortions or come out of the closet, the issues were personified by the legal trials of individuals, stories of women with babies affected by thalidomide and the single, oft-reproduced photograph of murdered homosexual academic Dr George Duncan. Furthermore, the very process by which the laws were passed meant that the personal became political in the narrowest sense of the word—for every politician in the South Australian parliament. Both the abortion and homosexual reforms were decided by a free vote, releasing MPs from party discipline and permitting them to vote based on their personal beliefs. It was accepted implicitly that the politicians, almost all heterosexual men, had the right to use their life experiences to create laws that governed the bodies of women, and men who had sex with men. Public opinion and the law were both, therefore, shaped by very narrow conceptualisations of abortion and sexuality. This underscores the vital importance of the agency that was gained when activists began to make the personal political on their own terms.
The occasional revelation of the problem of illegal abortion by way of individuals struck by tragedy could never achieve the same impact as the feminist activists of the 1970s. In the same way, individual stories of men charged with homosexual offences or subject to blackmail or abuse—even death—could not address the problems suffered by homosexual men as a class. The individual accounts that did gain attention contributed significantly to the elevation of the issues into the public sphere and then onto the political agenda, but they shaped that agenda in a very particular way. When the problems of laws against abortion and homosexuality were personified only as occasional incidences of difficulties and suffering, the new laws were framed with the intention of eliminating those types of incidents. As Weeks (1989, 263) has observed of the British homosexuality reform of 1967, the new law had a ‘strong element of negative utilitarianism’ as it aimed to remove problems rather than ‘positively enhancing happiness’.
In South Australia in 1969 and 1972 (as in Britain in 1967, when abortion was legalised in England, Wales and Scotland and homosexual acts made legal in England and Wales), there was therefore no sense that abortion could be construed as a positive for women as a class, or that homosexuality could be ordinary and acceptable, let alone an identity to engender pride. The text of the legislation and the contents of parliamentarians’ speeches did not acknowledge that the liberalising reforms could do anything other than remove the element of tragedy and make life safer for individual women who had (in the eyes of parliament) legitimate reasons to end a pregnancy, or for homosexual men who could either live in peace with what was considered to be their pitiful condition or come forward to be cured of it. It was only after these early reforms that activists began to make an impact with the strategy of demonstrating the more structural impacts of the law and by claiming rights, as well as the social stigma and discrimination that needed to be ended.
be ended. In this article, I analyse a series of public stories about abortion and male homosexuality that contributed to the elevation of the issues to the political agenda in South Australia. I then analyse the debates about the two pieces of legislation in the South Australian parliament to show how MPs invoked personal stories to justify their votes, revealing why the reclamation of ‘the personal’ was such a significant moment when activists later used such stories on their own terms rather than allowing them to be mediated by others for their own ends. A number of the early cases of publicity are not local to the state, but they are important for two reasons. They all received publicity in South Australia, where British affairs remained influential for most of the twentieth century. They also contributed directly to the British reforms of 1967, which in turn served as the precedent for the South Australian Acts. Without the British laws and the factors that shaped them, it is questionable whether the state’s parliament would have passed its own laws in the same form.
Histories of campaigns in the 1960s, during the transitional phase between the old and new styles of activism in both Australia and Britain, offer valuable insight to understand how the evolution occurred, and what its impact was on the law reforms that resulted (Hindell and Simms 1971; Blewett 1975; Caine 1997; Pugh 2000; Willett 2000, 2011; Gleeson 2008; Parker 2014). There is substantially more literature available on women’s activism during the pre-reform period than there is on homosexual activism, primarily because homosexuality was still overwhelmingly a private matter at the time and there was not yet a public movement for homosexuals that was composed of homosexuals. As Weeks (1989, 243) has noted, even the laws that decriminalised male homosexual activity were designed to keep the ‘problem’ behind closed doors. Hodge (2014), Reeves (1992, 1994) and Parker and Sendziuk (2011) have all traced the development of public consciousness about homosexuality in South Australia before reform. This article builds on these works to show how the element of personal tragedy permeated the evolving awareness of homosexuality as a political issue, just as it did with abortion.
The relatively limited analyses of the use of free votes, or conscience votes, in Westminster-style parliamentary systems largely neglect gender or sexuality as a lens, instead favouring demographic factors such as religion and sometimes age or region (Warhurst and Merrill 1982; Jones 1995; Cowley 1998; Jensen 2008; Pringle 2008; Warhurst 2008). The (heterosexual) masculine hegemony of parliament and the emerging role of women within the institution has been considered in some detail by political scientists (Tremblay 2003; Crawford and Pini 2010, 2011; Galea and Chappell 2015; see also Acker 1990), but it has only been integrated with analysis of conscience votes by Broughton and Palmieri (1999) whose study of the Australian federal parliament’s debates on a euthanasia Bill in 1996 focuses chiefly on the differences in style and frequency of contributions between male and female MPs. These works all examine a period when there were, or were beginning to be, significant numbers of women in parliament to permit such analyses. In this article I examine the earlier period and show how conscience votes permitted the dominance of personal experiences and narratives of the (heterosexual) men who were least affected by the laws, a point not developed in the otherwise thorough analyses of reforms in this era (Hindell and Simms 1971; Reeves 1992, 1994; Parker and Sendziuk 2011; Parker 2014).
Crime and Tragedy: Onto the Political Agenda
South Australia’s long-term path to liberalising its laws governing sexual behaviour was not, for the most part, unique to the state. The opening up of public discourse about sex and sexuality was a phenomenon that evolved gradually across much of the Western world, and enabled the topics to reach the political agenda. Events such as the Great Depression and World War II disrupted earlier patterns of family life for some sectors of society and led to new types of public discussion about sexual behaviour (Broomhill 1978; Darian-Smith 1990; Lake 1995; Bongiorno 2010). Nonetheless, traditional values were still strongly favoured and in Australia post-war concerns about the decline of the birth-rate and the appeal to ‘populate or perish’ reinforced the importance of the nuclear family as a way of preserving and perpetuating Australian national identity (Siedlecky and Wyndham 1990).
Until the 1960s, abortion and homosexuality were usually only discussed publicly in the context of scandals and criminal trials. Most often the publicity given to such events merely served to reinforce the undesirability of the activities, but two court cases in Britain led to important legal and political changes: the Bourne case in 1938 which clarified the common law position on abortion, and the 1954 trial of Peter Wildeblood and Lord Montagu on homosexual offences that led to an enquiry into the law published in 1957 as the Wolfenden Report. The understanding of abortion established in Bourne and the findings of Wolfenden helped to shape Britain’s Abortion Act and Sexual Offences Act which were both passed in 1967. The influence of British law in Australia was substantial, and the two Acts formed the basis of the South Australian reforms of 1969 and 1972. These cases revealed the personal lives of individuals and showed the hardships caused by the criminal nature of abortion and male homosexual activity.
In 1938, Dr Aleck Bourne performed an abortion on a fourteen-year-old girl who was pregnant as the result of being raped, and admitted to the procedure so that a test case could be brought in the hopes of clarifying the existing law. He had been seeking for some years an appropriate case with which to test the law, and although the girl’s father told Bourne that he did not want the case to be made public, the police found out when the girl was questioned about the rape and Bourne took the opportunity to explain what he had done (Manchester Guardian, 2 July 1938). The girl remained anonymous, but it appears that she had not consented for her story to be used in this way. By definition she had not consented to the act of intercourse that led to her pregnancy. Her story was a tragic one, and though the case was met with some sympathy inside and outside the court—Bourne was found not guilty, and press coverage was far from exclusively critical—the girl’s abortion became public on the doctor’s terms, rather than on her own.
Likewise, the scandal of Wildeblood and Montagu only became public in 1954 because they were arrested. Their case came at a time when the police were actively seeking to prosecute men for homosexual offences, but Lord Montagu’s position in the British Establishment meant that the trial was considered far more newsworthy and scandalous than other cases. Wildeblood took the almost unprecedented step of admitting to being a homosexual during the course of the trial, but this was not in any way comparable with the self-affirming act of coming out that began to emerge some fifteen years later (Wildeblood 1955, 77). As with the unnamed girl at the centre of the Bourne case, the men’s lives helped to shape public, political and legal understanding of the impact of criminality on women and homosexual men, but their stories were not told with their consent.
The first significant change in tone regarding abortion occurred as a result of the thalidomide tragedy. News broke in late 1961 that the drug, given to women as a sedative and treatment for morning sickness, had been linked to serious fetal abnormalities including shortened limbs and a range of internal malformations which proved to be fatal in about half the known cases. The thalidomide cases, along with the rubella epidemic of the mid-1960s, began to establish the idea that abortion might be acceptable in certain circumstances (Reagan 2010; Gleeson 2011; Parker 2012). That disability might be a permissible reason for terminating a pregnancy was controversial, and even more so because in the absence of reliable pre-natal screening it was essentially a guess as to whether the fetus had been affected by the drug. Nonetheless, the stories of a number of women who had taken thalidomide helped to break down the connotation of abortion as something that could never be countenanced in respectable society.
The stories that gained greatest prominence were those of American woman Sherri Finkbine, who travelled to Sweden to have an abortion she was not allowed in the US, and the Belgian Vandeputte family who had murdered their week-old disabled child. As I have shown elsewhere, both were presented as respectable, middle-class families, and Mrs Finkbine invoked God in defence of her decision. South Australian newspapers featured these stories, and also published articles about two women, Mrs Hornsby from Britain and Mrs Wootton from Sydney, who had given birth to children affected by the drug. Neither endorsed abortion or mercy killings, but Mrs Wootton told the Sunday Mail that although she loved her son, she was not certain how she would have felt had she known he was disabled before his birth (Parker 2012, Sunday Mail, 4 August 1962; Advertiser, 8 November 1962).
Once again, publicity was given to the lives of people who did not choose to enter a debate on abortion. None of the women or families featured in the press chose to associate themselves with a public position on abortion or mercy killing. The Vandeputtes were arrested, and the topic was raised incidentally in the course of interviews with Mrs Hornsby and Mrs Wootton about their disabled children. Even the Finkbines, whose situation was most explicitly about abortion, explained that they had decided to allow publicity in order to warn other women about the risks of taking thalidomide (Sunday Mail, 28 July 1962). These stories were embodiments of a tragedy: the disastrous drug that had been found to cause serious birth defects.
The impact of thalidomide helped to spur on the process of abortion law reform, which occurred about five years later in the UK and another two years after that in South Australia. There was, however, a much more abrupt catalyst for South Australia’s homosexual law reform. The 1972 death of legal academic Dr George Duncan dominated newspaper front pages for months. Duncan had been pushed into the River Torrens in central Adelaide by several men (strongly suspected, but never proven, to be police officers), along a stretch of the river known to be a homosexual beat. The story first reached the front page of the Adelaide Advertiser because of the suspicion of police involvement, and it continued to occupy the attention of the media as salacious details emerged. A month after Duncan’s death, the Advertiser reported that an autopsy had revealed the deceased to be a ‘passive homosexual’ (Advertiser, 8 June 1972). It was announced the following week that the state government had guaranteed immunity ‘from any prosecution for any personal activities as a homosexual’ to any witnesses who came forward with information about the murder (Advertiser, 12 June 1972), and homosexuality immediately began to be more widely discussed in the local media (Parker and Sendziuk 2011). Three weeks later, Liberal and Country League politician Murray Hill introduced into parliament a Bill to liberalise the law. Duncan’s murder epitomises the case of a personal story contributing so centrally to political debate without the agency of the person involved.
The murder of Dr Duncan and the subsequent revelations about his sexuality undoubtedly initiated homosexual law reform in South Australia. A personal story of this nature is not always necessary; none existed in the British reform of 1967 which was characterised by the ‘patronizing tolerance’ of members of the elite inside and outside parliament rather than any direct motive (Altman 1971, 130). Nonetheless, there was no suggestion that reform was on the agenda prior to Duncan’s death. Indeed, it is clear that there was no early appetite for legalisation. In 1965, as Attorney-General, Don Dunstan had suggested to his colleagues that a Bill might be put forward to legalise homosexual acts as part of his desire for wide-ranging changes to civil rights legislation. He later recalled in his autobiography that his idea was rejected on the basis that the public were not ready for such a reform. Dunstan suggested that it was, rather, his colleagues who were not ready for the reform, but it is likely that both were true—after all, even Britain had not liberalised the law at that stage (Dunstan 1981, 126-127).
Another push for decriminalisation in Australia in the 1960s demonstrates the vital role of the Duncan murder and, more broadly, the importance of being able to ground the argument down from the abstract by demonstrating the impact of the law on an individual. In July 1969, a Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) was founded in Canberra. The group was not formed by homosexuals, and, as Graham Willett has noted, its largely middle-class professional membership and focus on legal reform show that it was essentially a civil liberties group. Indeed, the idea for the group arose during a conversation about abortion law reform (Records of the HLRS 1969; Willett 2011, 2). Homosexual law reform was not achieved in the ACT until 1976, and Willett (2011, 12) has argued that the group was unable to agitate successfully for reform not because of hostility towards homosexuality, but because ‘in the end, it lacked the capacity to overcome the relative insignificance of the issue to those who alone had the power to change the law.’ In contrast, Duncan’s death served to alert South Australian politicians, and wider society, to the significance of the issue.
It is important to acknowledge that there had been a small number of autonomous personal stories in the media very shortly before the reform, and that there existed a small activist presence in Adelaide at the time of the legislation. The two Bills did not entirely precede the new style of campaigning, but those campaigns were not yet developed enough to significantly affect the process in South Australia (Australian, 19 September 1970; Advertiser, 12 May 1971). The existing activist groups chiefly exerted pressure on parliamentarians to pass the Bills once they had already been proposed. The Abortion Law Reform Association of South Australia (ALRASA) was formed on the initiative of some members of the Humanist Society and held its inaugural meeting in September 1968, the month after architect of the abortion Bill Robin Millhouse had first cautiously expressed support for reform (Humanist Post, vol. 6 no. 7, 1968; Advertiser, 12 August 1968). ALRASA member Blewett (1975, 384) later wrote that the group’s role was ‘to educate public opinion to provide both community reassurance and a groundswell of opinion so that the MPs would feel neither isolated nor too radical in voting for the Bill’. The group had a strong but not exclusively female membership and was headed by a woman, but it was—like the HLRS in Canberra—a middle-class group that largely favoured a measured style of campaigning in which it systematically responded to anti-abortion claims with statistical data and considered in detail the moral arguments around the issue (Report of the Select Committee 1968-69, 94).
The South Australian branch of CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution) did slightly pre-date the push for decriminalising homosexuality, but law reform was not its chief interest and in any case the speed of developments from Duncan’s death to the introduction of Hill’s Bill meant that the group had little time to use its influence. The branch was established in late 1971 and in its early months functioned largely as a social organisation (though members did not make a point of coming out). The group was in the initial stages of developing a public profile when the news of Duncan’s murder broke. (CAMP Ephemera 1972; Reeves 1992, 22-25). A delegation from CAMP met with the premier’s Press Secretary, Peter Ward, just days after Hill announced that he would be introducing a Bill. Ward advised the group that the Labor government wanted the Bill to pass and suggested that CAMP should focus its campaigning efforts on members of the Upper House where the Liberal and Country League held a large majority (Reeves 1992, 43). CAMP members were inexperienced lobbyists and sought advice from Jill Blewett of ALRASA on how best to influence politicians. The group began a letter-writing campaign to MPs, sent copies of literature on homosexuality and invited them to a public forum (CAMP correspondence 1972).
It is clear that activists played an important role in the passage of both reforms, but their efforts were primarily along the lines of conventional political lobbying rather than drawing on personal identity and experience to influence lawmakers. More radical activist groups did begin to emerge in South Australia towards the end of each parliamentary process: the Women’s Liberation Movement got underway in Adelaide during the final stages of the abortion Bill, and the inaugural meeting of Gay Liberation was held while the homosexuality Bill was working its way through parliament (Kinder 1980, 31-32; Magarey 2009, 184-192; Advertiser, 24 August 1972). These groups did not therefore play any meaningful role in placing the issues on the political agenda, but (mainly in the case of the homosexuality reform) they may still have helped in the ongoing efforts to win votes in parliament.
The Political Turns Personal: Into the Statute Books
The Bill to decriminalise abortion was introduced into parliament on 3 December 1968 by Liberal and Country League (LCL) Attorney-General Robin Millhouse, and was immediately referred to a Select Committee so that the issue could be thoroughly investigated before MPs were asked to vote. The Bill was based very closely on the British Abortion Act of 1967 but ended up with two differences that made the eventual South Australian Criminal Law Consolidation Act Amendment Act that passed in December 1969 slightly more conservative. Both Acts retained the crime of abortion but made the procedure lawful when it was performed with the consent of two doctors on one of a number of prescribed grounds, such as risk of significant disability to the fetus, or the physical or mental health of the mother. The South Australian Act did not include the controversial ‘social clause’ of the British legislation, which permitted doctors to take into account the effect another child might have on existing children in the woman’s family. The South Australian parliament also voted to add a two-month residency clause in an attempt to ensure that women would not travel from interstate to take advantage of the liberal law. The Act unambiguously endorsed the power of parliament and the medical profession to control the circumstances in which a woman could have her pregnancy ended (Gleeson 2011; Parker 2014).
The homosexuality reform—properly called the Criminal Law Consolidation Act Amendment Act—passed in October 1972. The original draft of the Bill drew on the language of the British Act, which in turn had its origins in the Wolfenden Report of 1957, to make lawful any homosexual acts that occurred between two consenting adult males in private. However, an amendment was passed that retained homosexual acts as an offence, but enabled the claims of consent and privacy to be used as a defence. This meant that men could still be arrested and taken to court, and reversed the fundamental legal principle whereby the burden of proof rests on the prosecution. The law was amended again after the 1975 election when a significantly younger, more progressive —and more female—parliament was elected (Magarey 2012, 70-75). The 1975 Act ensured that homosexual acts were properly decriminalised, and entirely removed the emphasis on the private sphere that was entrenched in the British and first South Australian Acts (Gleeson 2008). This mirrors the development of consciousness-raising during the early 1970s and the beginning of the shift away from the idea that homosexuality was a shameful practice that should be kept away from the public sphere.
With the exception of several Independents, all members of the South Australian parliaments of 1969 and 1972 belonged to either the Labor Party or the Liberal and Country League (shortly to become the Liberal Party). The parties were delineated along economic lines, as they still are, and the work of parliament was overwhelmingly concerned with economic and regulatory matters. It is very likely that most of the MPs had never before considered issues such as abortion and homosexuality in any detail at all. As Lausberg (2016, 250-251) notes, ‘[i]deological splits between parties divided men into camps with different beliefs and little or no need for them to consider the status of women’. During the debates, opponents of reform argued that these issues that affected women —and homosexuals—were not important enough for the parliament to spend time considering. In response to Attorney-General Robin Millhouse’s assertion that the Government ‘had a duty to bring before … this Parliament matters of importance and controversy in the community’ (Hansard 1969, 3706), Labor MP Des Corcoran suggested that abortion was not something that needed to be discussed. He asserted that ‘this question had never occurred to me personally as being one of great concern to anyone’, that ‘there was nothing in this area that demanded legislative action’ and that it ‘is not a measure which will advance the State in any way. We are not talking about something that Parliament normally looks at—some State control; it is a social measure.’ (Hansard 1969, 2326-2328). Corcoran was one of the Catholics in parliament and took the lead in opposing the abortion reform. His arguments demonstrate that this was not the type of issue that MPs were used to debating, but crucially they also show that opponents could not—or would not—consider how abortion might contribute positively to the lives of half the citizens of the state.
MPs were granted a free vote on both Bills. The free vote, also known as a conscience vote, has typically been used to free party members from adhering to a formal line on social issues that would otherwise fracture the party (Warhurst 2008). The Labor Party has tended to have a socially conservative faction dominated by Catholics as well as a more progressive wing, while the Liberal Party has divided along the lines of social conservatism and small-l liberals or libertarians. In free votes on social issues, therefore, there can be considerable crossover between the parties, though Labor members are typically more likely to support progressive reforms of this type.
The free vote meant that each MP could decide how to vote on his (or very occasionally her) own terms. While educating themselves on the content of the Bills and the history and context of the issues, members also had to decide on what basis they would vote. The responsibility of decision-making associated with free votes has been a matter of debate for centuries. Would they take the view, espoused famously by Burke (1774), that a representative is elected to use his own judgment rather than being a delegate for his constituents’ views? Or would they opt to gauge the preferred view of the voters who elected them? Would they attempt to balance the two in some way? If they were to use their own judgment, in whole or in part, on what would that judgment be based? Would it be influenced by their religious beliefs, or based on their views about the role of the criminal law? Would it be influenced by personal encounters with women who had or wanted abortions, or men who were homosexual? Finally, to what extent would they publicly articulate the basis of their views, and therefore justify their decision on how they chose to vote? For MPs, especially low-profile backbenchers who were accustomed to following the party view and rarely spoke in debates, these were chances to reveal their personal approach to representative politics as well as their views on the specific issues.
Many politicians cited public opinion in their speeches, suggesting that they were looking beyond their own personal beliefs when deciding how to vote on the reforms. Millhouse noted that opinion polls showed widespread support for abortion in certain circumstances (Hansard 1968, 2920). Labor MP Samuel Lawn mentioned correspondence from his constituents as well as an opinion poll and concluded that all supported reform (Hansard 1969, 2334), but Lloyd Hughes, who opposed the Bill, cited petitions that shared his view and thought that ‘the people of South Australia [showed] complete distaste for [this] legislation’ (Hansard 1969, 2342). Almost all politicians, whether they supported or opposed the reforms, reported that their views corresponded with those of their electorate or the state. It remains a matter for speculation as to whether MPs reached their final position because it matched what they heard of public opinion, or whether they selectively quoted the opinions that matched the positions they already held. Labor’s Don Hopgood made the Burkean argument that it was his duty to follow his own conscience rather than public opinion—but nonetheless noted that polls showed majority support for decriminalising homosexuality (Hansard 1972, 2200).
The use of religious arguments was one of the common ways that MPs discussed their stance on abortion and homosexuality. However, there existed a complex relationship between politicians’ faith, their position on the Bills, and their willingness to cite their religion as justification for their vote. They were perfectly within their rights not to explain their full reasoning, or not to defend their use of personal faith, but this complexity reveals one of the key points of dispute about the role and function of free votes on ‘moral’ issues (Jones 1995; Jensen 2008). Some MPs openly invoked their religious beliefs to explain their position: Allan Burdon argued that legal abortion would be ‘a step backwards and … against the principles of Christianity’ (Hansard 1969, 2408) and Arthur Whyte suggested that legalising homosexual activity would ‘rewrite the law of God’ and noted that St Paul had objected to homosexuals (Hansard 1972, 940). Others chose not to frame their discussion in explicitly religious terms but nonetheless used arguments that were consistent with those of the Church to which they were known to belong. In the abortion debates, Des Corcoran, a Catholic, did not mention his own beliefs but repeatedly argued for the rights of the unborn child and asserted that abortion constituted murder (Hansard 1969, 2330; see also 2345-2346). Some members argued that homosexuality was unnatural and violated accepted standards of morality, without explaining the basis for the morality or naturalness against which homosexuality was being judged. (Hansard 1972, 1078, 1799, 2213).
Some MPs spoke openly of their faith in order to reassure colleagues that their views were not based on their religious views. These reassurances had mixed results. Arthur Whyte, who invoked God in his speech on homosexuality, had commenced his remarks on abortion by stating that ‘any decision I make on this legislation will having nothing to do with the fact that I follow the teachings of the Catholic Church’ (Hansard 1969, 2995). As he went on to oppose the reform without articulating any substantive argument beyond a general suggestion that abortion was not a suitable choice, it is difficult to take his claim at face value. But others clearly meant what they said. Catholic Labor MP Joe Jennings spoke about his lifetime opposition to abortion, but declared that since being a member of parliament ‘I have realized that many people in the community have views different from mine and that I cannot ram my religious convictions down their throat’ (Hansard 1969, 2462; see also 2334). His Catholic colleague Len King argued that homosexuality was ‘intrinsically evil’ but that ‘in our plural society … it is no longer possible to say that the State is competent to lay down moral norms to be followed’ (Hansard 1972, 2213-2215).
Although only a small number of MPs argued that religion should not be a basis for the criminal law, even fewer noted the problem inherent in a male-dominated parliament making laws that controlled women’s bodies and lives by handing power to the maledominated medical profession. Unsurprisingly for the era, none identified the heterosexual hegemony of the parliament during debates on homosexuality. Just three women sat in each of the parliaments of 1969 and 1972 (the same three; none lost their seat in the intervening election of 1970). None gave a speech on the homosexuality Bill, so all that can be known is that the one female Labor MP, Molly Byrne, voted for it and the two LCL members, Jessie Cooper and Joyce Steele, opposed it. Cooper did not vote on the abortion Bill, though her brief speech suggested that she was concerned about the dangers posed by illegal abortion (Hansard 1969, 3514).
The contributions of Byrne and Steele were far more illuminating. Steele was one of the very few MPs to argue that men had dominated decision-making about abortion (Hansard 1969, 2338-2340). She also endorsed the controversial ‘social clause’ in the Bill, which would allow a doctor to take into account the distress that continuing the pregnancy would cause to the woman in the context of her home life and any existing children. Steele’s support for the doctor-as-gatekeeper model of abortion reform suggests that she still saw a role for men in the decision-making process, but this was by far the dominant conceptualisation of legal abortion at the time (Sheldon 1997). Moving beyond it would have been exceptionally radical, something Mrs Steele, MP for the highly respectable seat of Burnside and member of the exclusive Queen Adelaide Club, was not. Molly Byrne was more conservative on the specific grounds for abortion, but, as might be expected from a Labor MP, her speech highlighted the injustice that unlawful abortion posed for poor women who could not afford to travel interstate to see a private doctor. Most significantly, there was one element of her speech that was unique amongst all MPs. She referred to a number of women who had approached her for advice on where they could get an abortion. She made this point in passing and did not emphasise it as a major reason for her views on the proposed law, but it was very obviously an experience not shared by any of her male colleagues (Hansard 1969, 2422).
The parliament of 1972 did include at least one MP who was not heterosexual. Don Dunstan, the Labor premier, was at the time married and would later marry another woman, but had also had relationships with men. Hodge (2011) has shown how Dunstan played an important role in gathering support for the reform behind the scenes, but he did not take the lead in campaigning in parliament. This is not particularly surprising as Cabinet members traditionally maintained some distance from free votes on private members’ Bills in an effort to show that the proposed reform was not associated with the government (Dunstan Collection 1972). Dunstan supported the reform, and it is possible that this might have been informed by his sexuality, but he held a firm and genuine political belief in civil liberties and freedom of expression and his position on homosexual law reform was consistent with this. Despite what is now known about the sexuality of Dunstan and at least one other male MP who sat in the same parliament (whose same-sex relationships were post-parliamentary and not public), it is most important to note that, as far as we can know, the parliament was considered exclusively heterosexual. MP Stan Evans quipped that the title of a book on homosexuality, One in Twenty, meant that statistically the 47-member Parliament included two homosexuals, but there is no evidence that he genuinely suspected any of his colleagues were gay (Hansard 1972, 2210). Members expressed pity for homosexual men and argued that criminality was not helpful, but they did not at any stage note the absence of homosexual men from the legislative body which controlled their physical bodies, let alone suggest that this absence was undesirable.
Several MPs spoke of conversations they had with gay men, showing how their views had been shaped by personal interactions in their lives. Murray Hill, who introduced the Bill, recounted a conversation with a ‘pitiful, frustrated’ homosexual man who wanted to live his life in peace, and Dunstan described men he knew from his time as secretary of Actors’ Equity who experienced ‘the misery, the harm, the hurt and the injustice’ of the law (Hansard 1972, 1953-1955). These are comparable to Molly Byrne’s discussion of women asking her for advice on abortion, and also to stories told by Samuel Lawn and Cyril Hutchens during the abortion debates. Lawn recounted how, when visiting his parents’ grave one day, he had witnessed the funeral of a 42-year-old woman who had died after an illegal abortion. Hutchens recalled living near an abortionist during the Great Depression and seeing how many women ‘placed their lives in jeopardy’ because they ‘feared bringing into the world a child that they could not properly support’ (Hansard 1969, 2234-2238). These stories bear a striking resemblance to those that became public in the lead-up to reform. They are almost all tragic, and the subjects had not chosen to reveal their experiences. They have then been mediated by politicians who incorporated these other people’s stories into their own narratives for supporting law reform. They therefore encapsulate the two characteristics of ‘the personal’ in the era before the refrain took hold: they lacked agency, and they were utilised by predominantly heterosexual men who already held positions of power. It was precisely these (mis)uses of women’s stories that activists in the Women’s Liberation Movement reclaimed just a year or two later when their consciousness-raising strategy argued against shame and sought to claim their rights (Kinder 1980; see Reid in this issue). Their deliberate politicisation of ‘the personal’ was fundamentally different to the way MPs brought women and gay men’s lives into the political area without any suggestion that they had considered the rights of the individuals whose stories they told. The invocation of personal lives and experiences by activists, in a conscious move towards politicising the personal in the broader political sphere, marked a highly significant move away from the earlier, paternalistic style of governance demonstrated by MPs in the first wave of reforms.
Conclusion
Weeks (1989, 268) has suggested that the main effect of Britain’s suite of sex and relationship law reforms in the late 1960s ‘lay not so much in what they achieved themselves, as in the spaces they created through which more radical pressures were able to emerge’. This stands equally true in South Australia. Legalising abortion and decriminalising homosexuality were highly significant steps that removed the threat of prosecution in most circumstances, but they did not alone transform the lives of women or homosexual men. The shame, stigma and inequality associated with abortion and homosexuality still remained. The reforms helped to create a space from which more radical activism could emerge, arguably hastened in South Australia by the necessarily rapid mobilisation of activists once the abortion and homosexuality reform Bills had been introduced into parliament. In time, this contributed to further legislation such as the landmark Sex Discrimination Act (1975), greater representation in parliament, and a growing awareness of oppression and stigma in the public and political arenas.
South Australia’s reforms occurred at a fascinating time, just as the new mode of activism was emerging but before it had any noticeable effect in the legislature. The state’s experience of abortion and homosexual law reform reveals the vital importance of the activist movement that chose to politicise the personal on its own terms, and has application well beyond the state borders. While personal stories in the public arena remained tragic, criminal or mediated by the institution of parliament, the legislative reforms they helped to shape could not move beyond the same limited conceptualisation of the issues. Later reforms—those that came once consciousness-raising activism had made an impact on the political discourse—did not necessarily begin to reveal an immediate change in style, but without the shift in campaigning they would have continued to be shaped by the same narratives of the 1960s and earlier.
The new campaigns moved the passive to the active, the individual to the class, and began, very slowly, to encroach on the tacit acceptance of the right of straight men to impose laws on their own terms. Women brought their shared fight into the public arena, rather than allowing a woman’s plight to be made public. Men who had sex with men began to declare their love and their gay identity instead of having a shameful act revealed. They chose to tell their own stories instead of letting them be told.