ABSTRACT
This piece grew out of a desire to bring together several themes which have preoccupied me over the past decade or so: the debate over Australian identity, both in terms of multiculturalism and our relationship to Asia, the role of intellectuals in this debate, the existing position of homosexuals in a post-gay liberation and, some would say, post-AIDS world. The essay arose from a visit to Rockhampton, a provincial city of 60,000, which sits on the Tropic of Capricorn, some 300 miles north of Brisbane. In a sense, though I didn’t know this when I originally wrote the piece in 1994, it was a sketch for what would become my most recent book, Defying Gravity (Altman 1997a; see also Dessaix 1998).
