When I was a 21-year-old baby queer desperate for community, I decided to write my English Honours thesis on androgynous lesbians in fiction. Not knowing where to begin, I visited The Bookshop in Sydney’s Darlinghurst, which is Australia’s oldest LGBTQI+ bookshop. Wearing a crop top and a lost look, I approached the counter and did an updated Oliver Twist: “Please, sir, I want some gay lady shit?”
The store owners took pity on me, and so began my lezzie-lit education. Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Alma Routsong’s Patience and Sarah (1969), Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (1982), Sarah Waters, Sarah Waters, Sarah Waters. But where were the queer female Australian novels?
In recent years there has been an influx of excellent queer Australian nonfiction – I’m thinking Madison Godfrey’s memoir in verse Dress Rehearsals (2023), Yves Rees’ memoir All About Yves (2021), and the Benjamin Law-edited anthology Growing Up Queer in Australia (2019) for starters. In poetry, there’s Jazz Money’s How to Make a Basket (2021), Alison Whittaker’s Lemons in the Chicken Wire (2016), and Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light (2014).
There have been a lot of great LGBTQI+ male Australian novels published recently – think Omar Sakr’s Son of Sin (2022), George Haddad’s Losing Face (2022), Nigel Featherstone’s My Heart Is A Little Wild Thing (2022). But Australian novels with sapphic love/lust in them? These are rare birds – and when I do find them, I hold on to them tight.
Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach (2020, Text) is one recent example. If there’s one thing pop culture has taught us that queer women know how to do, it’s yearning. McPhee-Browne’s novel plays into this, but I’m not mad at it. It’s about two Melburnian best friends, Ness and Hetty, who move to Toronto to try to live their best youthful lives. Ness is queer and obviously in love with Hetty; Hetty is either oblivious or a bitch, you decide.
McPhee-Browne thoughtfully depicts the co-dependent dynamics of this female friendship, and agonisingly recreates an experience that many queer women can relate to: falling in love with your straight bestie.
Next up is Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (2018, UQP). This novel was recommended to me by so many friends, all of whom lauded Lucashenko’s eviscerating critique of white Australian privilege, and her devastating portrayal of dispossession and cyclical trauma in a First Nations community. And yes, these reviews are accurate. But this book is also gay as hell. Why did none of my friends lead with this?
Too Much Lip’s protagonist is Kerry, who I love, because she is a self-described lesbian who nevertheless falls for a vanilla white guy. We all contain multitudes, sue us! Kerry is brash and messy and brave: my kind of woman.
The Performance by Claire Thomas (2021, Hachette) is one of my favourite Aussie novels of the past few years, which also happens to feature a young, multiracial queer woman as one of its protagonists. It’s set entirely during a Melbourne theatre performance of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, so you may immediately think: no, thank you. But I’d encourage you to read on; when you are watching a purposefully boring existential play, your mind goes to some interesting places.
Thomas’ novel is told from the perspectives of three women – Margot, Ivy, and Summer. I love how this novel juxtaposes Summer’s experience of the play with the very different concerns of Margot and Ivy, who are older, white, moneyed, and straight. Plus, Thomas is just very funny, and honestly I’m done reading books that don’t make me laugh.
Looking for more lesbian stories in Australian fiction, I find myself traversing a range of genres I wouldn’t generally read. I was flicking through the fantasy section of a bookshop when I saw it: A Restless Truth by Freya Marske (2022), about queer female magicians solving a murder onboard a cruise ship in ye olden times. It is so much fun.
Its protagonists are Violet Debenham and Maud Blyth – Violet is the sexually experienced one, and Maud is just discovering that women can have sex with each other. The novel is not set in Australia, but Marske herself is Australian, and a lot of the sexy banter in this book has a distinctly Australian humour to it – to my mind at least.
Other notable additions to the queer lady Aussie novel canon include The Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter (1994), a genre-bending queer detective adventure, featuring erotic asphyxiation and the gritty, dangerous world of poetry; Nothing But My Body by Tilly Lawless (2021), in which a queer sex worker navigates love, sex, friendship and the desire for home, all in stream of consciousness first-person prose; Devotion by Hannah Kent (2021), a lush 19th-century queer female love story that crosses oceans; Iris by Fiona McGregor (2022), a fictional account of the real life of queer sex worker Iris Webber, set in Depression-era Sydney; and Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down (2021), the Miles Franklin winner which follows bisexual protagonist Maggie as she goes through the care system in Australia and experiences trauma after trauma, while still trying to find the love and safety she craves.
There is not enough space here to list every queer, non-male Australian novel – the books I’ve mentioned above are just some of my favourites, and I am still, always, looking for recommendations. And look, if you can’t be bothered reading a novel but you’re desperate for queer woman content this Pride season, just visit Bunnings – it’s not let me down yet.
Is there an Australian novel about queer women that you loved? Join us in the comments
