AustLit

'In the 1970s, the loosening of the censorship laws and sexual mores enabled the countercultural Balmain Group to indulge in libertine literary representations which opened up new perspectives in Australian literature. Among them, let us mention freedom of sexual expressiveness, the broadening of the Australian erotic fiction repertoire, the addition of a new dimension to realism, daring depictions of alternative lifestyles and sexualities, the challenging of mainstream heteronormativity, the expression of a subversive counter-culture, the expansion of the boundaries of the Australian novel genre. These new approaches to sexuality, as evidenced by explicit sex scenes probing a wide range of sexual practices, have shaped a sexual revolution in print and a counter-cultural art of dealing with dirt (understood as licentious subject-matter) which my paper will try to conceptualise. I shall restrict my scope to material published in the 1970s by analysing the prose written by some of the Balmain Group authors such as Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding.' (Publication abstract)