Both Margaret Sanger, the best-known American birth-control advocate, and Norman Haire, her Australian contemporary, grew up in families where there were 11 children. Both were driven by their mothers' misery to campaign for family limitation. Haire caused outrage in Sydney in 1944 by describing his mother at 40 as a ''devitalised, irritable, cantankerous, prematurely old woman … For all that she got out of life she might as well have been a prize cow.''
He was born in Paddington in 1892 as Norman Zions. His father, a Polish Jew who arrived in Sydney in 1860, did well enough to stand for parliament in the 1870s. Young Norman was educated at Fort Street School and the University of Sydney.
Officially, he was studying medicine but he really wanted to be an actor. He also knew that he was homosexual and although he devised a satisfactory, even flamboyant lifestyle, he kept his sexuality private, both for professional and legal reasons. By 1919 he was on his way to London, travelling as a ship's surgeon. There he changed his name to Haire, an approximate English translation of his father's Polish name Zajac meaning ''hare''. As Norman Haire, he sounded less obviously German or Jewish.
Over the next two decades in London he gradually built up a lucrative practice specialising in ''rejuvenation'' using vasectomy and hormones to achieve the kind of results these days often claimed for Viagra. This enabled him to buy a house in Harley Street and an estate in Hertfordshire, as well as to maintain a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. He also developed a fashionable gynaecological practice and subsidised a free pre- and post-natal clinic where poor women were also taught how to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Haire believed sexual ignorance was a significant cause of ill health and human unhappiness so he became involved in organisations promoting sexual knowledge and providing contraceptive devices, all before the pill made contraception relatively simple, discreet and reliable. He wrote and edited innumerable books and pamphlets, and organised conferences to promote sexual knowledge. Indeed, it was probably at a birth-control conference in Amsterdam in 1921 that he met the man who became his ''lifelong friend''.
By the late 1930s Haire's health was declining. As well as heart problems, he had developed diabetes. After the outbreak of war in Europe, thinking he had not long to live, he risked the dangerous voyage home, again as surgeon on a cargo ship.
The war years in Sydney rejuvenated him. Insulin greatly improved his quality of life. Elizabeth Riddell, now remembered as a poet, then editing Woman, invited him to contribute a sex advice column to the magazine. His simple, lucid discussions of sexual problems written as Dr Wykeham Terriss (a play on Wickham Terrace, the Brisbane equivalent of London's Harley Street), found an enthusiastic and grateful readership.
A consummate actor, he was in demand as a speaker and broadcaster on sexual anxieties such as the threat of venereal disease and illegitimacy associated with the presence of oversexed and overpaid American troops, or Japanese designs on the underpopulated spaces of northern Australia.
After the war, Australia retreated to the safety of traditional sexuality and a baby boom. Led by Catholic spokesmen such as economist Colin Clark, population growth was encouraged and the birth-control movement forced underground. Haire decided to return to London, though he continued to write his books and columns.
Before his death in 1952, Haire settled on the University of Sydney's Fisher Library as a home not only for his books and papers but also a fund for further research on sexuality.
This book is part of his legacy. Though generously produced with excellent illustrations (some in colour) and a remarkable luxury of notes at the foot of the page, it really needed more skilled editorial intervention to pull so much evidence into a better shape, fix inconsistent citations and captions, and eliminate howlers.
Haire has been criticised by the movement for homosexual law reform for his unwillingness to ''come out''. He has generally been forgotten as a birth-control pioneer because he was a man in what was seen as women's business. Claimed neither as Australian, English nor Jewish, Haire appears in a proper perspective in this book, which shows him at last as a worthy subject for his own drama on film perhaps, like Alfred Kinsey, or on television.
NORMAN HAIRE AND THE STUDY OF SEX
Press, 485pp, $35