‘I am very annoyed and disgusted with the discrimination, prejudice, ridicule and scorn, with possible disgrace and ruin of my reputation, and good name, if my family, friends, associates and colleagues ever discovered that I express my ‘feminine personality’ by dressing completely as a woman. And yet, because of my ‘feminine personality’ I consider myself to be more compassionate, more understanding, and certainly more relaxed and happy, than the average male.’ Thus wrote the president of a group of heterosexual transvestites to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships.

Born out of the controversy over an unsuccessful bill to liberalise the abortion laws in the Australian Capital Territory, the Commission was set up in 1973 after a motion had been passed in Federal Parliament to establish an inquiry into all aspects of social, sexual and family life. Its terms of reference were extraordinarily wide, but the main task of the Commissioners – Elizabeth Evatt, Felix Arnott and Anne Deveson – was to look into the range of matters ‘relating to the roles and responsibilities of men and women as individuals, as members of society and in their relationships with each other.’

Their report is a stunning documentation of social dysfunction. Running to five volumes, with no less than 511 recommendations, it caused quite a stir, if for all the wrong reasons, when it was leaked in the middle of the 1977 Federal election campaign. Now that the dust has settled, we can take a more dispassionate look. The report still makes much better reading than the general run of official publications, but it is an official publication. In an effort to make the material more readily accessible and assimilable, Anne Deveson has compiled an ‘edited selection’ of the evidence gathered by the Commission. The result of her labors, Australians at Risk, is a lively, informative and devastating record of the inability of Australian society to meet the basic human requirements of its members.