The silly season is over, thank God. We are back to regular programming on the
ABC. When you’re a single and 50, that’s
no small thing. First cab off the rank for
my 2018 viewing was a new season of Australian
Story. I am a fan of this show. The relentlessly upbeat attitude of some farmer
who has had their arms chopped off in a threshing machine may irritate, but
there is still something compelling about real people telling real
stories.
And let’s face it, I am a political tragic. Last week’s episode about Christine Forster
was, naturally, a no-brainer. Forster is
a Liberal Councillor for the City of Sydney, but she is more famous for being
the sister of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
And for those who have been living under a rock for the last
few years, Forster was also a vocal campaigner for same-sex marriage. Earlier this year, she was on stage at the
Sydney celebration of the Postal Vote, where I was a face in the crowd.
Forster is what some of us tactfully call a “late bloomer”. That is, she was married with kids (four!) before
she became a lesbian. Apparently she met
her partner Virginia Flitcroft at a day care centre, while dropping off their respective
children.
“We had an affair,” Forster confesses in Australian Story. “I’m certainly not proud of that. I wish that we hadn’t, but that’s what
happened.”
Forster’s confession came in the same week as revelations of
Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce’s affair with a staffer. Joyce’s behaviour has attracted much
condemnation, particularly from the left.
‘Barnaby Joyce doesn’t know the meaning of marriage!’ screams one link on
my Facebook feed. Au contraire, I think;
I am sure he understands it very well indeed. The reaction to Joyce’s
indiscretion makes me uncomfortable, not least because I have been on both
sides of the moral Passchendaele of infidelity.
Those episodes left me with nothing but an appreciation of my capacity
to behave badly and more usefully, a reluctance to judge.
Yet Forster’s revelation attracted not a murmur. Despite
being a Liberal Forster is, it seems, a different case. She is one of us, at least to the extent that
she is a lesbian. And Forster’s affair
was set in the context of a journey to an authentic sexuality, which makes it
ok. Her former husband, whose feelings
of disappointment and betrayal were likely equal to those of Mrs Joyce, is
invisible. He was dumb enough to marry a
lesbian, after all.
But it is the story of Forster’s lesbianism, and her joyous
marriage, that really interested me. I’m
not so naïve as to think that Australian
Story is more than just that, a story – constructed, with the fingerprints
of its makers fully visible. But what
does it tell us about what it means to be a lesbian now, in this modern,
equality-loving Australia?
The story begins on a joyous note: the happy couple are choosing their
outfits. But this is a different sort of
wedding, and the story is quick to make the point. “I’m very retro 1950s,” says a Flitcroft, “Big
skirt, big dress. Christine’s going for
a sort of morning suit, but more feminine.”
It’s hard to see how the couple’s outfits are relevant to anything
except as code: Forster, it seems, is to
be coded as masculine. Flitcroft confirms this, adding, “I couldn’t
ask her to wear a dress.”
And very quickly, we cut away from the present for a guided
tour of Abbott family history. Despite
the Abbotts being a “loving, caring” family, it seems that the young Christine
was always different. “I was riding
billy carts ad bikes and making bows and arrows. I had a Ken doll … I was what was termed in
those days a tomboy.”
Australian Story
can’t resist a peek at brother Tony as well.
The former Prime Minister was, according to Forster, “the apple of Dad’s
eye, there’s no doubt about that”. Yet this
favouritism brought with it a prescriptive attitude to gender, as Forster
observes, “My father was an only child and he was pretty much, from a young
age, living only with his mother because his father was in the merchant marine so
he was away a lot. He would describe
himself as being a real sook as a child.
So I think there was a deliberate plan from Dad, to make sure that Tony
was a man’s man.”
The gender dynamics of the Abbott family would, it seems, provide
fertile ground for psychoanalysis. Yet Christine
rebelled, even if unconsciously. “Chris
was very sporty, very studious,” a friend observes. “As we got older, through
high school, we started to get a bit more into make-up and things like
that. She didn’t tend to do that.” Forster’s
rebellion was, though, only partial. As
she proceeded to university, we are assured that she was “normal”. So normal, in fact, that she married the
unfortunate Mr Forster not long after graduating.
Yet viewers, already aware of how the story ends, await the
truth. It comes some years later. “It probably wasn’t until I was in my
thirties that I started to realise that I had a physical, sexual attraction to
women.” Then comes the famous meeting
with Flitcroft at the child care centre which, Forster confesses, “hit me like a
ton of bricks”.
Curiously, Flitcroft’s background is not subject to
scrutiny. She is not related to any
Prime Ministers and her childhood toys were therefore uninteresting, I
suppose. But this lack of questioning is
itself a code: Flitcroft is a “normal”
woman. Her story begins with such a
confirmation: “I was in a very happy, settled married life,” she recalls. “With a beautiful 2 year old son and a
gorgeous 5 year old daughter. Externally
it was Happy 101.”
What, then, are we to make of these codes? Some feminists may be unhappy about the
coding of Forster and Flitcroft as butch and femme. In the 1970s, many feminists derided butch-femme
as replicating patriarchal heterosexual relationships. Later queer theorists have celebrated these
same relationships, reading them more as a parody than imitation. A woman in men’s clothing, they point out, is
not the same as a man.
Yet whatever your take on the butch-femme dynamic, it’s revealing
that Australian Story can represent it to a wider audience without
explanation. Clearly, this style of
relationships has penetrated mainstream understandings of what it means to be a
lesbian. If that was the case fifty
years ago, it’s still the case today.
There is no indication of what or whether the Abbott and
Flitcroft families think about butch-femme relationships, but understandably the
relationship upset both. Here again we
segue to Tony Abbott, now head of the Abbott clan after the recent death of
patriarch Dick. Abbott is by all accounts a decent chap when
he’s away from politics, and it turns out that he and his wife Margie were “very
supportive behind the scenes”. The exception was his very public remarks that
“children do better with a Mum and a Dad,” which mother Flitcroft found “hurtful,
deeply hurtful”.
Meanwhile the butch Forster – herself a mother of four – maintains
a stiff upper lip and fights the good fight in the public domain. Forster’s teenage sons continue the seal of male
approval, with a friend reassuring us that, “Chris’s boys are very proud for their
Mum. She has put herself out there. They are comfortable with her being gay.”
Well, that’s a relief.
Who knows what her daughters think, as there is no mention of them. Perhaps they were just too smart to put their
faces on television. But Forster herself
is no dummy, which begs the obvious question of why she consented to this
project. We can, methinks, expect to see
her face in a future political campaign, and for an office higher than that of Sydney
City Councillor.
Yet I can’t help wondering if the males of the Abbott clan
would be as supportive if Ms Forster were to become one of them. That is, if she was transgender instead of a
lesbian. We will never know, because the
word “gender” is never mentioned in this story.
This might seem a glaring omission, as much of Forster’s
story is about gender roles and gender variance. Gender variance is at the heart of lesbian
identity - so much so that the coded signals of the tomboy and the butch
require no explanation. Everyone knows
these codes, just as they know the codes about sissy boys and effeminate men. Yet to speak gender variance per se is something quite different, and
usually avoided through sublimation and disavowal.
“You have a choice,” says the marriage celebrant preparing for
the pair’s nuptials. “Of being called a groom, a bride, or a partner.”
“Neither of us are grooms, obviously!” Forster responds defensively.
Obviously.
So it’s agreed: here come the brides. And rather paradoxically, what a relief it is.
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