By ZOE FORBES
Jack Thompson is a white Australian who grew up in Sydney. He was one of the first locals to leap from obscurity into Hollywood’s bright lights. People know this. Most people also know he had two wives for about 15 years. They were sisters. No one offered them support. No one ostracised him.
Ruby has experience with non-monogamy too. “The disgust I felt was unbelievable. I thought I was going mad … I just couldn’t get my head around it,” she says.
She is "living polygamous" in Norfolk in the UK with her husband and the surprise second wife he took after 20 years of marriage. Ruby shares her intimate mental struggles on her blog, Polygamy911, to hundreds of followers, many of them outraged.
In this country, how Australians view a man and his multiple wives – as polygamy mostly is in practice – has become mixed up with attitudes to race and religion, especially Islam. How we respond to Jack Thompson's and Ruby's choices is usually wholly different to how we respond to indigenous and Muslim women living in polygamous relationships, according to their traditional cultural practices.
Even within the troubled area of cultural traditions, experience shows that individual cases can't be universalised and the choices and decisions Muslim women and indigenous women face on this issue are not the same, and should not be treated the same.
The law in Australia is clear: any person who marries another knowing that person is already married commits the offence of bigamy under section 94 of the Marriage Act 1961. This carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
But outside of an official marriage contract, there is still plenty of room for all types of people to live polygamously. And they do.
Muslim communities acknowledge a small polygamous community exists in Australia, and there have been regular calls from religious leaders to give these relationships legal status. Centrelink has also confirmed it investigates a number of cases every year (though only to establish appropriate benefit levels). The Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights director Joumanah El Matrah says she had come across just two cases of polygamy in 13 years.
There are a number of common perceptions of the positives and negatives of polygamy, but they are not necessarily true in practice.
El Matrah says there is a “myth of the sisterhood” – the incorrect notion that there is a unique bond and closeness between the wives in a polygamous relationship that is without jealousy – and this is one reason for not advocating polygamy as a lifestyle.
University of Ottawa religious diversity specialist Dr Lori Beaman, says the practice has both good and bad effects for women, just as traditional marriage does. Dr Beaman spoke at the Annual Conference of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion late last year and has published papers on the relationship between polygamy and equality.
“Women in polygamous relationships have the same issues as women who are not in polygamous relationships,” she says. Those issues are the same whenever humans form a partnership – trust, jealousy, affairs and infidelity, sexual problems, financial strains, responsibility issues, boredom and meeting expectations.
Different points of view
In a 2005 interview with Andrew Denton, Thompson was asked about the “bohemian principles” in his relationship. This question reflects the calmest end of the spectrum when it comes to public interest in polygamy.
Typical comments can range from benign curiosity to outrage: from “unusual” to “fundamentalist”; from “it just happened” to “twisting religion”; from taking the lifestyle “in their stride" to “suppressing women’s freedoms”.
One commenter on Ruby's polygamy blog said: “I don’t think Muslim men should be allowed to have polygamy in countries where it is not legal. There is no way polygamy can be just, when everything you do in polygamy is against the law,” said one commenter on Ruby’s blog, Polygamy911.
Another said: “The husband is only threatening divorce because his own ego was hurt,” said another, reacting to Ruby’s decision to take another husband. “I don’t understand why women tolerate their husbands who force such painful lifestyles on them,” she said again.
La Trobe University PhD health science candidate Linda Kirkman says there are distinctly negative associations in polygamy with women’s autonomy and agency. Religious laws promote the idea of multiple wives but have no caveat for the opposite equivalent, she says.
The idea of multiple husbands is rarely raised, as Denton did in his 2005 interview with Thompson: “If you had been in a relationship two guys to one woman, would you have been comfortable with that?”
“Yes,” said Thompson. However, no one will ever know the truth of that statement.
Thompson’s second wife, Bunkie King, left the relationship after 15 years of living with Thompson and her sister, Leona, known as Le.
What has been reported is that she left as a result of jealousy, among other factors. King has said that neither she nor her sister would have chosen that type of "old-fashioned relationship" had they been given a choice.
Behind closed doors
The biggest issue for women in polygamous relationships, Dr Beaman says, is usually being unable to live openly. Keeping such relationships secret means they are especially vulnerable if things are not going well.
Dr Beaman says that in terms of Melbourne’s immigrant women, the issue of vulnerability is in question. This vulnerability is somewhat due to a “knowledge void, or relative void, about the real effects of polygamy on women”.
She refuses to conduct fieldwork on immigrant women in Canada for fear that it would make them too vulnerable and put them in public view of violating the Canadian criminal code.
“Polygamy is so closeted that there is little opportunity to do large scale research that would measure, for example, rates of violence, child abuse, and so on. Without good social scientific research there is lots of room for speculation and for moral panic,” she says.
In Melbourne, fear of speaking out in a climate of Islamophobia is a factor in the lack of discussion on the subject, El Matrah says.
Some institutions are trying to make it easier for Muslim women: The Australian Muslim Women’s Centre for Human Rights in Melbourne and the Immigrant Women’s Health Service in New South Wales both offer supportive environments, and encourage community engagement and raise awareness of cultural difference through events such as public forums.
Cultural bias and acceptance
Monash Indigenous Centre deputy director Dr John Bradley has more than 30 years’ experience in the Northern Territory working with indigenous Australians who are polygamous.
He says we should not presume women in these situations need support. In fact, he thinks support of any kind is unwarranted.
“Polygamy and polyamory have been part of our societies for a long time. It is disingenuous to deny it,” he says.
Dr Bradley asks us to remove our cultural bias and expectations.
In the Northern Territory, “women who are wives to a man do not need support of any kind, they have a deep understanding of the cultural practice, how [polygamy] works and live in a community that also understands these principles”, he says.
This is not to say it always works perfectly. Both men and women can be pressured into marriages they don't want. Men are usually older, at least 25, and wives can be as young as 12.
“One has to seriously remove the white lens of perception from these situations, they are complex matters – deeply complex. Just like indigenous women often reject white feminist values as espoused in academic circles, similarly they also reject white-centric views of something that they understand deeply and are in much more control … than the ‘other’ might presume,” he says.
A healthy way for society to deal with these relationships is to offer acceptance, Kirkman says.
The more aware and accepting a society is of other relationship types, the healthier the society is, though this acceptance should not come with oversight or privilege.
Strengths and weaknesses
An Aboriginal elder and the founding member of Aboriginal rock band Yothu Yindi, Witiyana Marika, has two wives. He said on SBS’s Insight program in May 2012 that it was part of Aboriginal culture for men to have multiple partners to form larger clans and stronger families.
He said the women were treated equally and there were a lot of positives about growing up in a large extended family.
Dr Bradley says we should remember that it is a separate system, and forcing everyone into the mainstream white one, with its distinct patriarchy, is to miss the significance of polygamy for the people involved.
A woman nursing a small child would find it difficult to collect food in the harsh nomadic conditions of desert life but if, on the other hand, there are several wives living together, one of them can look after the children, while the others go out in search of food. A younger wife would also be able to care for her husband when he was old and frail.
There are also disadvantages. Many young men of marriageable age cannot find wives because the girls in their group have already been assigned to older men. Youth is naturally drawn to youth, and that can lead to unlawful relationships as well as the theft and abduction of wives.
In this context, some of the men neglect or turn out their first wives in favour of new and younger women. When they become frail, older wives are often looked after by their married daughters, and can face a marginal existence.
As a rule, El Matrah says, wives seem to live in tolerable harmony. It does sometimes happen that the older, neglected wives become jealous of the younger ones and this leads to problems, and this is true in both Muslim and Aboriginal communities.
A dangerous idea
Islamic Friendship Association of Australia president Keysar Trad, who spoke at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney on why polygamy and other Islamic values are good for Australia, says the biggest issue is when a woman loves a married man and he is afraid to enter into such a relationship, and that in these circumstances polygamy can be a benefit.
When Trad wrote an article defending the legalisation of polygamy, he was accused of being “sexist” and “twisting religion to justify his needs”.
“Other issues relate to a society or a nation that tries to tell them through all its avenues that they are doing something wrong,” Trad says.
"It is conflicted when society tolerates the idea of infidelity and mistresses and other forms of extra-marital relations.
“Some women also worry that their parents will not accept this for them, in fact the vast majority of parents would try to dissuade their daughter from entering into a polygamous marriage and this is because they have been influenced by non-Muslim relationship ideologies.”
El Matrah agrees. She says issues of race dominate public discussion on Muslim practices such as polygamy. But she says it is vital to have a multiplicity of voices speaking on the issue and that women are the point of origin for their own change.
Living with the choice
For Ruby, who didn’t choose polygamy initially but who has stuck by her husband who chose to take on another wife after 20 years of marriage, issues remain. But she is happier now than she has been and chooses to talk publicly about her choice.
“I’m at peace,” she writes in her blog.
“When he said that he understood my feelings now, and that I had been right when I said that the general rule of never doing to anyone what you would not have done to yourself should surpass all other respects, I knew we would be fine.
“What ever happens, I believe in honesty in marriage. No lies. It may hurt sometimes, but nothing hurts as much as being lied to.”
To lump people together is to not see the individuals involved. To have some consistency and respect when dealing with discrete and unfamiliar cases is important.
Thompson, when he spoke to Denton about his two wives, made his contentment with the situation plain. “Twice as much joy, maybe. But certainly the same amount of joy,’’ he said.