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As we entered the 1960s, the pace of our flight to freedom or licentiousness in the real world quickened.

British poet Philip Larkin told us that “sexual intercourse began in 1963.”

More or less concurrently, our literary treatment of sex was transformed from a patient evolution into a virtual revolution. From hinting and teasing, our literary flirtation with the intimacies of sex now took us.-.and quite quickly - “all the way”.

But the revolution still remained, except at the more extreme literary edges, somewhat shy and fearful.

It gathered pace as the second half of the 20th Century brought a wholesale revolution in our every day - and overnight - attitudes to sexual behaviour.

This real-life revolution accepted not only heterosexual frolics using a variety of positions, techniques, sex-toys and the rest, but also homosexual relationships between two men or lesbian love between two women. A variety of other activities also received a high degree of acceptance, whether among straight or other couples.

A reasonable hypothesis is that these permissive attitudes towards sex compelled at least some superficial acceptance in the literary world. With some lag, this did occur. The revolution in the real world was accompanied by a broadly similar revolution in the ways that the literary world dealt with what had been, especially in Anglo-Saxon societies of the Victorian Age, a pretentiously “delicate” and, at the same time, irresistibly titillating subject.

It is hard to say to what extent the somewhat shy and fearful literary revolution helped quicken and intensify the everyday sexual revolution. It may have been the other way round. Probably each felt an empathy in which one lent reinforcement to the other: more sexy literature encouraged more liberated sex; more liberated sex encouraged the sophistication of its literary counterpart.

Whatever the relative influences, the revolution is still far from complete. In launching Martin Amis’ novel, The Pregnant Widow in January 2010, the publisher Jonathan Cape wrote:

"The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. The death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. In many senses, including the literal, it was a velvet revolution; but it wasn't bloodless. Nor was it complete.”

The items included in some of the collections of my work reflect this evolution as it burgeoned into a gathering storm of revolution.

Written in 1954, “The Courtship of Sammy O’Dowd” was published in The Australian Magazine – A.M. on 22 March 1955. The characters are rough bush folk, hard-working and decent.

The women who apply to become the hero’s wife are modest and virtuous. If they do not wear chastity belts, it is because they are of such virtue that they will never need them. They are described, in a childish kind of innocence, as being “as good a collection of fresh-faced little dolls as you’d ever get at the sheep-dog trials in Gunnyganoo”.

Women tended then to be put on pedestals. Sweet, innocent little souls, they were obliged to endure rather than be eager to enjoy the sexual fevers of their men – even if those men were, as they were without exception expected to be, their husbands. Their role was to accept sex as a necessary evil associated with a wife’s conjugal duty and, of course, with motherhood. As Lady Alice Hillingdon (1857-1940) wrote in her Journal in 1912:“I am happy now that George calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old. As it is, I now endure but two calls a week, and when I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England.”

Not everyone agreed that women were such virtuous creatures.

George Jean Nathan came right out and said in Bedside Esquire of 1940 that women have “sweet faces and foul minds.” What is more, he said that “Women’s minds are less clean than men’s”.

Courtship does not even hint at such disturbing possibilities.

That was because few “decent” people openly concurred in Nathan’s view.

Anyway, in the matter of sex, society demanded that the minds of men and women both be clean. If women were typically assumed to have minds much the “cleaner” of the two, men should nevertheless lead a speckless, sex-free life too.

That meant, among other things, that they should respect women’s purity and not be “dirty” towards them in words or actions. Above all, of course, they should not let their fantasies extend to making physical love to them whether in real life or in imagination.

Tea and Empathy illustrates what was regarded as “proper” - even in everyday situations in which a husband and wife were the leading actors.

Formally, the average man did “observe the decencies” towards women, although Courtship acknowledged that he could have “impure” thoughts and Jenny Squires was described in rather risqué terms as having “eyes warm with promise that her husband’s nights will be as full of joy as his days.”

That was a society in which a gentleman raised his hat respectfully to a lady on every possible occasion. He studiously avoided the use of rude words in her presence.

It was very different from, for example, Shakespeare’s London as it was in reality. Pauline Kiernan tells us that, in the Great Bard’s time, “men and women spoke freely about sex with one another and…women actively instigated talk about it. Plays by Shakespeare’s fellow writers all have female characters talking about fucking, pricks, cunts, ejaculation and buggery.

There was certainly no concession, then, to any notion of a “female sensibility” which might have taken offence at the vulgar puns of the plays.

By contrast, the average man in Courtship was studiously, even tediously careful in the words he used in the presence of almost any woman - even barmaids in public bars who could anyway be tough if any “gent” got out of line. His conduct and intentions towards women were expected to be “honorable” at all times.

Most men tried to live up to such expectations; although “bounders” like Flashman in Thomas Hughes’ Victorian novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays could always lurk somewhere as disgusting exceptions.

In that context, the women in “Burke’s Creek” even more than the men may be compared to characters in The Saturday Evening Post of the period. The Post and its famous illustrator, Norman Rockwell, depicted a society that was Christian, patriotic, hard-working and virtuous.

Perhaps rather nervously, we might suggest that men may have been motivated less by a desire to honour the “little lady” than to keep her under their control. Among themselves, men like David Strang in my book Haverleigh used a vivid range of four-letter words - and four-letter thoughts - which might be seen as part of a secret-society code to create and reinforce male bonding. Women were excluded. They didn’t know the words and weren’t allowed to hear them. To tell them what they were and what they meant would be not so much too shocking as too much a violation of the code.

Sanctimoniously, women were not actually forbidden to use the words. Rather they were seen as being so sweet and pure that they would never dream of uttering such words anyway; and their purity must never be soiled by the sight of such words in print or the sound of them in conversation.

In this context, the honour and courtesy shown the woman and the acknowledgement of her delicate sensitivities were closely linked with a family home, a well-kept garden and a white picket fence. Except for the men on their boys’ nights out, members of such families were not foul-mouthed. They did not tell dirty stories, seek out carnal pleasures or have carnal thoughts. Christian marriage was a sex-free zone. Blondie might live with Dagwood and bear his children but we could never imagine that he ever said, thought or did anything “naughty” with her or that she would ever concur, except as part of her conjugal duty, in doing anything “naughty” with him.

So the text of Courtship contains no hint of four-letter words. They have no place in a story about a society as uncontaminated as that in the Australian bush before the 1960s.

The same applies to Sleep Deeply, Father. The characters belong to a more prosperous, urban Australian family. The references to the daughter’s apparently adulterous fling offer no details of what precisely she may have done. Any such detail was – if at all - only for more scandalous news sheets and not for family magazines. Again, there are no four-letter words – even spoken in anger.