The Boys of Bullaroo

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The Boys of Bullaroo is a collection of six short stories, each set a decade apart, spanning the period from the Great War to the Vietnam conflict.All of the main characters have a connection in some way with a mythical Australian outback town, Bullaroo, somewhere west of the Great Dividing Range. They appear as protagonists in their own stories, and then are sometimes woven into other tales peripherally, or as minor characters.In the days before the information age, life for a man who identified as gay, or even one who slept with other men, was quite different to today. Men could often feel they were somehow "sick" or abnormal. It was not uncommon for many young men to believe they were the only queer ones in the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century, unless one worked in a medical profession, there would be little information, other than street talk, about what men actually did with each other. It was not uncommon for men not to know even the basics when it eventually came to physical intimacy. True naivety actually did exist and it was more common than the modern man would believe.The anthology moves forward, story by story, from 1919 until 1966, each one focussing on a theme of the decade: the Great War, the razor gang wars of Sydney in the 1920s, the mobilisation and enlistment fervour of the Second World War, and the POW camps after the fall of Singapore, the immediate aftermath of WW2, and outback towns empty of men who didn't come home, the influx of immigration from central and Southern Europe in the 1950s, the new arrival in Australia of Americans on R&R, in the 1960s and the return of conscription.Alongside these themes, the stories deal with problems unique to gay men growing up over the span of time the anthology deals with: mateship and loss, male prostitution, men who don't identify as same-sex attracted, but who fall in love with another man under specific circumstances, young men who find love in the arms of strangers when there is no love to be found at home, men forced by family pressures and those of religion to enter into loveless marriages, rather than to spend their lives with another person of the same sex, the offering of one's body in exchange for survival in the most brutal of conditions, and whether a chance encounter can lead to a lifetime together.Doubtless these themes and stories were universal, but The Boys of Bullaroo deals with them from a unique, Australian perspective."Did you think you'd be the first man to fight for his country who loved another man? Or that Patrick was, or that I was? Love is love, Anthony. We don't get to choose who we've given our hearts to while we serve-love comes unbidden. We only get to choose why we fight. We might fight for our country, but we die for those we want to protect, be it man, woman, or child. No one gives up their life gladly for an ideal, no matter what they tell you or what you read in the tabloids. In the backs of our minds, we are only fighting for the survival of the person, or the people, we care most about-our comrades and our loved ones. Some of us are lucky enough to have both, in the same person, standing right next to us.