Moving beyond mateship:reconstructing Australian men's practices

In this chapter I will explore the implications of the definitively Australian<br />style of masculine behaviour called 'mateship' for gender relations in<br />Australia. Mateship is part of the Australian male heritage; it originated in<br />colonial days and was glorified in war and sport. The feminist movement<br />in Australia has challenged the dominant form of masculinity inherent in<br />mateship and the basic rationale for gender relations that flow from it. In<br />this context, I will discuss Australian profeminist men's attempts to challenge patriarchal gender relations and construct non-patriarchal subjectivities and practices. Theorizing about masculinity in Australia has tended to be derivative of overseas literature. This is partly because publishers are looking for overseas markets for their books so they discourage writers on masculinity from grounding men's practices in a specifically Australian context. While there are benefits in generalizing about western masculinities, such writing misses the uniqueness of the lived experiences of Australian men. It is this uniqueness that I will address in this chapter. As McGrane and Patience (1995: 15) note, 'Australian masculinism has a history of its own that needs to be recognized at the same time as it can be usefully compared to the masculinisms of similar cultures'.<br />