Week 128: Marriage and the Family in Australia

A.P. Elkin, Marriage and Family in Australia (1957)

Robert Menzies made the Australian family the centre-piece of his Forgotten People vision for the nation. The Menzies Government introduced the landmark scheme of Child Endowment, and developed policies to foster a rapid rise in rates of homeownership, all of which contributed to the national birthrate reaching an all-time high of 3.548 in 1961. But that doesn’t mean that there were not anxieties expressed about the changing nature of Australian families, and particularly rising divorce rates during the Menzies era. Indeed, the Menzies Government itself may have been a contributing factor, seeing as it introduced the first nationwide form of ‘No Fault’ divorce.

These anxieties were all expressed in the book Marriage and Family in Australia, edited by leading anthropologist, Anglican Minister, and proponent of Indigenous welfare Adolphus Peter Elkin. During the Great Depression Australia’s birthrate had plummeted so far that people had feared the death of the Australian family, and there was a related moral panic against early forms of contraception. While Menzian prosperity put those fears to rest, Elkin’s contributors found plenty of other things to worry about.

In the waning years of World War Two the divorce rate had reached unprecedented levels. Demographer W.D. Borrie, from the University of Sydney, warned that divorce and the somewhat related phenomena of juvenile delinquency were ‘maladjustments now threatening family’.

Social Scientist Harold Fallding tracked the growing shift from the traditional ‘patriarchal’ marriage, in which the husband/father was the definitive and acknowledged head of the household, to the rapidly rise in the ‘partnership’ marriage, in which both husband and wife acknowledged each other’s theoretical equality. Fallding noted that the latter were proving to be more unstable, though this may have just been a reflection of the fact that women who demanded equality from their husbands were inherently less submissive, and more willing to leave if they were not being treated with respect and care.

Elkin himself was no brutish luddite. He acknowledged that the function of the family had evolved into ‘the provision of an emotionally satisfying centre’, from which individuals were provided with health, stability, and a foundation on which to seek personal development. This function naturally required that marriages should become more ‘democratic’, as opposed to their older ‘authoritarian’ form.

Reflecting on the incidents of marriage breakdown, and the number of troubled children for whom the family was not providing adequate care, Elkin concluded rather glumly:

‘The calculation is that 15 per cent, of the population either will or should spend part of their life-time in a mental hospital, and that another 20 or more per cent., while not needing hospitalisation, are nervously and emotionally unfit to cope with even the normal demands of marriage and family living.’