Modern Dating Rituals in Australia, 1940-1970

This research maps out a history of romantic rituals in Australia from 1940 to 1970. In doing so, it analyses changing conventions as modern forms of ‘dating’ replaced ‘calling’ throughout Australian society, bringing romantic behaviour into the public eye. It also investigates the construction of these conventions, and situates them clearly in a social, political and economic context. There is a particular focus on the tension between the regulation of dating behaviour as a precursor to marriage and subversion of these norms and expectations, and how these varied among different groups of Australians. Dating regulations were used as a form of attempted containment by various authorities, including governments, churches, the medical establishment, and legal institutions. However, dating could also be experienced as an act of escape and pleasure: as a site of resistance (in a Foucauldian sense) to seemingly inescapable discursive power. For some, this rebellion was a necessity as much as a choice, as many individuals were explicitly excluded from the accepted norms of dating behaviour. Gay men and lesbian women were not able to marry or publicly date their partners, and the social and romantic lives of Aboriginal Australians were subject to surveillance and intervention by state and federal governments. For European migrants to Australia in the post-war period, romance and marriage were inextricably tied up in the act of migration and were taken very seriously. This work explores the discourse around dating as it varied due to gender, age, sexuality, and race, represented through these groups’ own experiences of, and often resistance to, the rituals of dating in Australia in the mid-twentieth century.