Martin Thomas

The Blue Mountains glimmer on many horizons. For Sydney-siders, they are a blue haze that promises a weekend away among the gums and spooky grand hotels. For visitors from further afield, they offer wilderness supported by tourist kitsch: statues made from chicken wire; bogus Aboriginal legends; 3-D movies; and, best of all, the scenic railway, a sardine can on a high wire that sways across the valley beneath Echo Point.

The mountains are a place of beginnings and endings. In 1813 three white men made what they called, in their blindness and arrogance, The First Crossing of the mountains. Convicts tried to cross them, too, searching for China or for colonies of whites who were free and happy. A century later, the mountains were becoming a place for final steps and breaths. People leapt to their deaths from beauty spots. Descendants of the first inhabitants of this breathtaking place, including the Darug and Gundungurra people, still live there, although in public discourse the Aboriginality of the mountains is more often inscribed in inanimate objects such as The Three Sisters or the Orphan Rock.

It is curious that in a culture where physical contact and affection is far more freely expressed among women than men that the lifestyles of lesbians are thoroughly submerged. The old bigotries are still prevalent, but it seems that the factors that have placed male homosexuality on the public agenda – gay liberation and more recently the AIDS crisis – have done little to enhance the profile of lesbians.

This silence, compounded by the apathy and stereotyping in the mass media, makes an anthology such as The Exploding Frangipani a potentially important book. But the overall assembly of the collection, and some of its more dogmatic contributions in particular, left me feeling unconvinced. I was uncertain, to begin with, at whom the book was aimed: lesbians, would-be lesbians, devotees of gay literature or, that elusive being, the ‘general reader’.