Why are the basic rights of LGBTI Australians being put to a nonbinding, nonsensical national survey? Why is the no case predicting the end of the world and posturing as the victim? Why is there suddenly so much cruelty and hate in a nation renowned for tolerance?

There are plenty of easy and obvious answers: the argument against allowing same-sex couples to marry is lost so the no case is fearmongering on every issue but the actual one; the right of the Liberal party is using marriage equality to stage an insurgency against the moderates; Australia has caught a cultural war fever from America’s homophobic sneezing.

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But none of this explains why gay people marrying is the issue among so many that has driven the right to such extreme action and rhetoric.

I agree with Salman Rushdie: “Even if prejudice has roots in all societies, each malodorous flowering of the plant occurs in specific historical, political and economic circumstances.”

In Australia the specific historical circumstances that shape prejudice towards LGBTI people is summed up in one word, convictism.

In colonial Australia same-sex relationships among convicts were considered the most serious threat to lawful authority.

In our early 19th century single-sex prisons the only bond strong enough to withstand the inducements to inform on your fellows, and the punishments meted out to surly inmates, was romantic love.

This is why prison officials went to such extreme lengths to separate same-sex convict couples by relocating them to prisons hundreds of kilometres apart.

Their fears were real. Same-sex bonds were at the centre of prison rebellions like the flash mob at the Cascades Female Factory or the Ring on Norfolk Island.

The notorious escape from Sarah Island by convict cannibal Alexander Pearce was actually instigated by Matthew Travers and Robert Greenhill, two men historians believe were in a relationship.

When the food ran out and the convicts began to conspire against each other, Travers and Greenhill’s bond outlasted every other form of confederacy between the absconders.

Same-sex relationships were also the biggest bugbear of Australian colonists who sought to forge a free, stable and respectable nation out of a prison camp.

The chief rhetorical weapon used by the movement to end convict transportation was the fear that Australia would be forever stained by the sin of Sodom.

Not only did homosexuality not have a place in the nation they were building, it was antithetical to it.

As the late Robert Hughes noted in his book on convictism, The Fatal Shore: “There could have been no better breeding ground for the ferocious bigotry with which Australians of all classes, long after the abandonment of Norfolk Island and the System itself, perceived the homosexual. And this in turn seemed like an act of cleansing – for homosexuality was one of the mute, stark, subliminal elements in the ‘convict stain’ whose removal, from 1840 onwards, so preoccupied Australian nationalists.”

The third challenge homosexuality posed in the colonial mind was to modernity itself.

Colm Tóibín has observed that if the English became modern in factories, then the Irish became modern in church.

To that we could add that Australians became modern in prison.

It was in prison that we learned how to run our day according to the clock; how to scrub everything spotless clean; how not only to use machines but to be like them; how not only to surveil others and be surveilled in turn, but to surveil ourselves.

In the view of colonial officials, sodomy was the epitome of the unruly and irregular passions and perversions of pre-industrial life.

It is no coincidence that the Benthamite prisons built to tame these passions and make machines of men were filled with convicts sentenced for “unnatural vice”.

The uniquely threatening challenge homosexuality was thought to pose to authority, respectability and modernity in colonial Australia helps me understand Australian homophobia today.

It explains why the battle to decriminalise homosexuality was most bitterly fought in the two states – New South Wales and Tasmania – that have least in common apart from their convict past.

It explains why the path to that reform was smoothest in the two states – South Australia and Victoria - that pride themselves on not starting life as prisons.

It explains Australia’s uniquely torturous path to marriage equality, the particular anxieties no campaigners seek to tap, and the strange perception among many no advocates that they stand for the future, not the past.

Most of all, it explains the deep threat homosexuality is thought to pose in some sections of Australian society and the apocalyptic language they use to express this sense of threat.

The crusade against marriage equality reveals just how deep this sense of threat runs.

It isn’t your typical, garden-variety campaign to defend “traditional moral values”.

It is about much more than a single law reform or a simple moral conviction.

For all their talk of “respecting gay people”, crusaders against marriage equality behave like they are battling an existential threat to family, faith, nation and civilisation.

Their campaign feels like a howl from the depths of Australia’s collective cultural id.

None of this should be taken to mean I am pessimistic about Australia’s potential to progress.

A particularly nasty form of homophobia may reside deep in our national subconscious but in our heart lies a tolerance and an aspiration for fairness that can overcome it.

I know because I’ve seen it before.

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In the 1990s, during a long and bitter debate about decriminalising homosexuality, Tasmania faced its colonial demons and defeated them, going on to adopt some of the most progressive LGBTI human rights laws in the world.

It was very painful for LGBTI Tasmanians to have our worth diminished and our lives dissected for year after horrible year, but our grace and patience have been repaid manifold.

I have no doubt the same will happen for the nation as a whole.

As difficult as it is for many LGBTI people and our families to endure this unnecessary and cruel postal survey, my hope is that Australia will emerge from it having rejected the darker aspects of our history and aiming for a brighter future.