ABORIGINAL
AUSTRALIA
Cultural
Modern Australia is largely a product of European immigration, and as such, its religious heritage is largely that of Europe. However, that is not the case for all Australians. The indigenous people, known regionally as Aboriginals, have their own unique spiritual traditions and belief systems dating back well before James Cook ever landed in Botany Bay.
The biggest impediment to learning about Australian Aboriginal history, let alone its queer history, is the fact that there are no first-hand written documents. Most of the documentation that we have comes from European explorers and colonists, which is highly skewed. Furthermore, Australia is huge. Naturally, with so much land, there doesn’t exist one sole Aboriginal tribe with a unifying culture. Like the Native North Americans, there are numerous Aboriginal tribes, all with their own unwritten spiritual histories and cultural dispositions to LGBT+ persons.
With much of the Aboriginals’ history being passed down via oral tradition, its history is only as true and valid as the previous generation and the way in which they told it. Unfortunately, Christian missionaries were forcefully influential to these native people, so Aboriginal history has become blurred with Christian ethics and values. Among most tribes nowadays, the firm assertion that queerness of any kind has never existed among their people is the de facto belief. If any of their own turns out to be queer, then it is because of the influence of the West, who has corrupted their youth because it is assumed not to be natural throughout their people’s history. (The irony of how Christianity used to justify such beliefs as also a Western import is lost amidst the homophobia.) Because of this, queer Aboriginals face profound derision and mistreatment from their own people.200
If we look at Aboriginal history from an objective, nonreligious vantage point, we can ascertain that there must’ve been queer people among their indigenous tribes. LGBT+ persons have existed in all societies all over the world, so one can safely presume that the same is true for Australian Aboriginals. One tribe that we know to be queer-inclined was the Aranda tribe. Located in what is now the modern state of South Australia, homosexual displays within the context of playing was encouraged from an early age. Common children’s games involved Aranda youths mimicking homosexual acts, albeit unaware of their significance. One Aranda game, common among children everywhere, was playing house, wherein a group of kids pretend to be a family and imitate the roles that they saw their families doing. Among this tribe, however, the roles of mother and father were not strictly divided by gender, and so little boys could pretend to be the mother and little girls could pretend to be the father without anyone, young or old, seeing it as odd.
However, Aranda children would take it a step further and mimic everything they saw their parents doing, including having sex, an act never hidden in privacy from children. Of course, being kids, they didn’t know what sex was, and even if they did, they didn’t have the biological maturity to actually do it or the cultural impression that it was something dirty and taboo. As long as siblings and cousins didn’t play pretend sex, the adults of the tribe were cool with it. In fact, they even applauded their children for simulating sex since sexuality was seen as a natural and admirable part of life. And since the parental roles were not gender specific, two girls or two boys could be mother and father while pretending to have sex. The little girls playing the father, in particular, were known for using sticks as dildos in order to enhance the imaginative realism.
When Aranda youths reached that awkward age where they were barely biologically mature enough to have sex, yet were still considered kids in the eyes of society, they took playing house, or rather playing bedroom, to the next level. If two gay boys were playing together, the one playing the father would insert his penis in between the thighs of the one playing the mother and effectively have sex that way because they could get away with it via the ambiguity of it being a children’s game. If two girls were playing, the one playing the father would use her fashioned dildo as an actual sex toy and insert it into the vagina of the one playing the mother. Even among adult lesbians of the tribe, the use of fashioned dildos was well-known and popular. 201
However, the Aranda are probably better known for their boy-wives. Just as with girls, young boys, too, could be promised to older men. These boys effectively served as temporary wives by doing domestic chores, helping the “husband” with the hunt, and having conjugal sex (but only after the boy became sexually mature). Unlike girls, though, around their mid-teens these boy-wives would become emancipated from their arranged marriages since they were now considered adults. During the marriage, the “husband” was expected to teach the younger man the ways of manhood, essentially preparing him for adulthood by the time he was emancipated. The actual sex, itself, though, was very unique and would probably be seen as too painful even for the most hardcore masochistic fetishist in today’s dungeon scenes.
In Aranda culture (and in other Aboriginal cultures in central and northwestern Australia), ritual subincision of the penis was commonly practiced. Before you search online for images of subincision, know it’s the slicing of the penis from the tip of the urethra down the bottom of the shaft to the base, halfway bisecting the penis the same way a worm is dissected in science class. The blood from this ritual mutilation was considered sacred and used in a host of spiritual workings, but between male lovers a subincised penis could conveniently form a makeshift vagina. The younger male would wrap the older male’s subincised flesh around his own penis (like a hotdog bun) and masturbate into the open urethra of his husband. The act of anal sex, however, was considered off-limits between boy-wives and their husbands. 202
With the arrival of Europeans, much of anything the Aboriginals did that could be perceived as homoerotic was heavily suppressed. Along with the explorers came colonists, and with colonists came Christian society, which, to a large extent, is the dominant spiritual ideology of Australia and its native people today.
Aboriginal Australian Takeaway:
Let the Children Be
As shown by the Aranda, there is great power in letting kids be free to play with gender and identity and be themselves. Many of us in the queer community grew up under our parents’ expectations of being straight and were often told to act more like how our biological gender is “supposed” to act. As adults we try to not do this, but we inadvertently do it in other ways. We might not expect our kids to be straight, but we pressure them in other expectative ways: you have to go to college, don’t go into the arts because it won’t pay the bills, girls should be less promiscuous than boys, do things this way, don’t do things that way, etc.
So, for your next magical activity, do a deep meditation focusing on the expectations you have or had of your children; if you don’t have children, imagine that you did or substitute younger relatives. In the stillness of your heart, examine where you’ve pressured or pushed your kids with certain expectations, good or bad. Why those particular expectations? Do they stem from issues or baggage from your own past? Is it unconscious copying of how things have always been done in your family without a particular reason? Are they based on your worldview of how to survive in this modern society? Is that worldview the only worldview? Is your worldview your children’s maturing worldview? Do they have to interact with the world exactly how you did or would’ve done? And so on.
Only nothing comes from nothing. There is a source for why you push your kids with certain expectations. Get to the root source of those expectations and objectively see if they truly are for the child’s greater good or if they are for other motives unresolved or unknown.
Deities & Legends
Mimi Spirits
According to the Aboriginal Australians of northern Australia, the Mimi were fairylike spirits who lived alongside humans in an alternate dimension where genders didn’t exist. They are described as being extremely tall and thin and spent most of their time in rock crevices since even a moderate wind could snap their fragile, elongated frame. They’re also credited with teaching the native people how to hunt, use fire, cook meat, and paint.
However, the Mimi were also notorious for being very dangerous and fatally attacking people if they felt they were being approached in an incorrect manner. Because they existed in this other dimension, though, they were thought to be genderless. The indigenous people of northern Australia never enquired further into the sexual identity of the Mimi, instead allowing them to exist in sexual ambiguity, living in an alternate dimension where singular gender/sexuality is agreed to be beyond human comprehension. 203
200. Troy-Anthony Baylis, “The Art of Seeing Aboriginal Australia’s Queer Potential,” The Conversation, April 15, 2014, http://theconversation.com/the-art-of-seeing-aboriginal-australias-queer-potential-25588 (accessed Dec. 9, 2016).
201. R. Aldrich, “Peopling the Empty Mirror: The Prospects for Gay and Lesbian Aboriginal History,” Gay Perspectives II (Sydney: University of Sydney Australian Centre for Gay and Lesbian Research, 1993).
202. Bob Hay, “Boy Wives of the Aranda,” Bob Hay Online Resources (Canberra: University of the Third Age, 2006), http://bobhay.org/_downloads/_homo/NHH%2007%20Boy%20Wives%20of%20the%20Aranda%20-%20The%20Pre-History%20of%20Homosexuality%20I.pdf (accessed Dec. 9, 2016).
203. Baylis, The Conversation, http://theconversation.com/the-art-of-seeing-aboriginal-australias-queer-potential-25588.