The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia by Michelle Arrow (review)

Decades, it seems, are a popular subject among Australian historians just now. First there was Frank Bongiorno’s excellent The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia; now comes Michelle Arrow’s equally admirable The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia. Despite this similarity in conception, however, and notwithstanding that they share a broadly political focus, these are two quite different books. While Bongiorno’s is a general history of the 1980s, ranging widely across politics, the economy, and social and cultural change, Arrow takes a more limited approach, zeroing in on an aspect of Australia’s 1970s she considers under-emphasised in previous writing on this decade.

The book’s main argument revolves around the feminist cry that the personal is political. Arrow contends that the 1970s was “the era when the personal became political” and, as a result, “the decade that shaped modern Australia” (back cover). Australia’s political life and wider culture, in this analysis, were remade by the breaking down in these years of the boundary that separated private from public life. As Arrow shows, this change was driven by the ideas and actions of two movements for social and political change in particular: the women’s movement and the gay and lesbian movement.

Arrow unpacks this transformation and its impacts in a series of lively chapters that focus largely on key episodes and events. She begins in the 1960s, with a chapter that is almost a prelude to the rest of the book, setting out the remarkably rapid shift that took place in the last years of that decade from an emphasis on progressive, liberal reform and “toleration” to “the radical politics of liberation” (12). She ends in the 1980s, as economic deregulation and new market ideologies began to threaten the developments of the preceding years. Throughout, she focuses “on the moments where women and sexual minorities have asserted their rights in relation to the nation, and the state” (11).

In Chapter 2 Arrow uses several incidents – including the 1973 Women’s Commission, the creation of Cleo magazine, the establishment of women’s refuges by feminist women and the sacking of Peter Bonsall-Boone after he publicly came out on television – to explore how the idea of the personal as political altered Australians’ understandings of sexuality and gender, and also of citizenship. Chapter 3 turns to the ways in which the women’s movement was incorporated into government after the election of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister in 1972, considering particularly the experiences of Elizabeth Reid as “the world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a national leader” (92). International Women’s Year in 1975 is the focus of Chapter 4, as Arrow reveals this as “both a high and low point for the women’s movement in Australia” (12), bringing increased awareness and a celebration of women’s contributions across the country, but also disclosing and intensifying discord among feminists. In Chapter 5 Arrow excavates the remarkable story of the Royal Commission on Human Relationships. Having begun the book with her experiences in the archives of this unusual inquiry, she takes it as a touchstone, and in this chapter makes a convincing case for its significance within the wider transformation she traces. Chapter 6 centres on the Government of Malcolm Fraser, particularly its approach to women’s policy and the impact of his election as Prime Minister on the Royal Commission and its outcomes. Titled “Backlash,” Chapter 7 deals with the emergence of anti-feminist and conservative religious groups, while also covering “the resurgence in gay and lesbian activism” that took place in the same period (12). Finally, Arrow concludes her story with a reflection on “the mixed legacies of the public intimacies” of the decade (236).

There is much to be said in praise of this book. Not only is it at its core a fascinating tale, rich...