Since the late-nineteenth century, statisticians, historians and demographers - some of them based at the Australian National University - have contributed to our understanding of the history of birth control in Australia. Nonetheless, there remain large gaps in the historical treatment of this topic, and there is no Australian equivalent of the kinds of interdisciplinary research recently undertaken in Britain by Hera Cook, Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter. This paper will draw on the presenter's recently published general history, The Sex Lives of Australians: A History (Black Inc., Melbourne, 2012), to reflect on the relationship between birth control and sexuality in Australian history. It will examine existing Australian research, discuss some of the connections social historians are making between birth control and broader patterns of sexual culture, and also suggest some areas of future investigation for Australian historians.
Frank Bongiorno is a graduate of the History Program in the Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, and currently Associate Professor in the School of History, ANU. Before taking up his current position, he was Senior Lecturer in Australian History at King's College London. He has also held appointments at Griffith University and the University of New England. In 1997-8, he was Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at Cambridge. In addition to The Sex Lives of Australians (2012), he is the author of The People's Party: Victorian Labor and the Radical Tradition 1875-1914 (1996) and co-author of A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (2011).