Family is the bedrock of Australian society; the place where we locate safety, commitment, and shared growth, and 'the people who make you who you are', in the words of Ebony, one of the stars of the 2015 documentary Gayby Baby.
As the controversy around that film demonstrated, Australia is also subject to debate over which kind of family is the right kind, and which versions are to be considered inferior or to be corrected.
This battlefield over family has had many manifestations in our nation's story; with particularly horrific consequences for Indigenous families purposefully ripped apart in the years of the Stolen Generations child removal policy, which many say is only being repeated today.
Misunderstandings and willful refusals abound in appreciating the many ways in which children and young people get the nurturance and education that we ask of 'family', while the still-idealised nuclear family remains the site of the most intimate violence.
Australian television, as Adolfo Aranjuez noted recently, is getting better at reflecting this. In Redfern Now, family is a refracting lens through houses, streets, the neighbourhood, personal history, and collective struggle; from Aaron, Robyn and Donna's household of dad, daughter and grandkid to partners Richard and Peter and their daughter.
In Offspring, family keeps multiplying as surprise siblings turn up and Billie decides to raise a new baby with the daughter of an old friend. In The Family Law, a family of five becomes headed by a single mum. In Please Like Me, a young gay man creates the lasting, nurturing bonds we associate with family, while the straight guy is unable to manage anything more emotionally complex than getting stoned.
As these recent cultural products demonstrate, diverse, non-nuclear and often non-heterosexual families have been increasingly the norm in Australia for many years now. In tracking these trends, the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) refers to 'complex' households, but even they admit 'complex' is a bit of a misnomer; noting that homes 'where children may live with: a single parent; a non-biological parent; step or half-siblings; ... or a grandparent' are 'very much in the mainstream'.
As for households headed by same-sex couples, they have increased from 0.3 to 0.9 per cent of all couple families. And it's young people who are leading this charge — both in that same-sex couples in this count are likely to be younger than opposite-sex partners, and in that acceptance of the equality of same-sex couples is