Did you see the news this week about the 35-year-old man jailed for marrying a 14-year-old girl in Victoria last year? County Court Judge Lisa Hannan told a sobbing Mohammad Shakir that "what you did was legally wrong and morally indefensible". By today's standards, that's true. But "if he'd done it in Tasmania in 1941 it would have been completely fine", points out an associate professor of modern history at Macquarie University, Shirleene Robinson. The minimum legal marrying age for females in Tasmania was 12 until it was raised to 16 in 1942. And it stayed at the age of 12 in Western Australia even longer, until 1956.
A man could rape his wife with impunity in Australia even as recently as the 1990s in some states. "The common law ruthlessly reinforces woman's subordinate position in marriage," wrote an advocate for reform, the lawyer Helen Coonan, who went on to become a Liberal Party senator for NSW.
It was the next year that NSW made it a criminal offence to commit rape in marriage, but it was 1992 before the change was made across all states.
Yet it was a controversial reform at the time: "Some conservatives were horrified that it could be made illegal for a man to rape his wife - 'it would change the very nature of our society'," says Robinson.
The Northern Territory's Protector of Aborigines blocked the marriage of a white man and an Aboriginal woman in 1959. The case of Gladys Namagu and Mick Daly became a famed controversy, reported around the world as the case of the "outback Romeo and Juliet".
"Across Australia black and white supporters who'd never met either Namagu or Daly held protest meetings backing their right to marry. In federal parliament the Menzies government, after a barrage of questions from MPs of all persuasions in support of the outback Romeo and Juliet, gave an assurance that no form of discrimination would ever be written into the new national marriage legislation."
Until, of course, John Howard wrote in a different kind of discrimination in 2004, inserting the stipulation that marriage could only be between a man and a woman.
Howard and Abbott can concoct legal and political obstacles, but, like rocks in a river, ultimately they cannot change the flow of social attitudes. Other evolutions of marriage include the recognition of women's rights to property, and changes to the divorce laws to allow no-fault divorce.
