Illustration from Where Did I Come From? Arthur Robins/Penguin Random HouseHow did you learn how babies are made? What about what an orgasm is? If you grew up in Australia in the past 50 years, there is a good chance it was an advertising executive, not a sex education expert, who taught you the facts of life.This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Australian publication of Where Did I Come From? The book had been published internationally two years earlier, but like many books in the 1970s, it took a while to arrive here. Where Did I Come From? was written by Peter Mayle, a first-time author with no background in sex education. He was the creative director of an advertising agency in London when he was faced with a typical parenting conundrum. Depending on the interview (and he gave many), Mayle either claimed that his son asked him how babies were made or what an orgasm was. Overcome with embarrassment, he insisted he had to leave for work immediately.Searching for a suitable book to read to his son, Mayle found “either birds or bees at one end of the scale, or it was doctors and nurses at the other, and it was very clinical”. Then he had a “stroke of genius”: I thought there was an opportunity to do a book which told the true facts, but in a friendly way, and a sympathetic way, and a way that kids would find diverting as well as informative.Mayle enlisted fellow advertising worker Arthur Robins as illustrator and began a draft to avoid a talkative neighbour on a plane.The book would sell over two million copies, but would later be eclipsed by another of Mayle’s works. His 1989 memoir A Year In Provence, documenting his new life in southern France, had triple the sales of Where Did I Come From? and led to several copycat publications.Critical receptionInternational critics compared Where Did I Come From? unfavourably with its recent predecessors. Childhood Education magazine felt Margaret Sheffield’s Where Do Babies Come From? displayed “tenderness and respect for the miracle of beginning life”, whereas Mayle’s writing “abounds in poor taste and factual errors, shows no reverence at any step along the way, and looks like expedient sensationalism”. Several reviewers expressed shock at Mayle’s frank discussion of sexual pleasure. “Shared orgasm is beyond a seven year old’s experience,” claimed conservative British magazine the Spectator, “and as impossible to comprehend as the taste of caviar when your closest parallel is a fried fish finger.”But the children’s section of Australian Bookseller and Publisher thought the book was “brilliant”: Sex is really removed from being “dirty” to being happy and normal. In fact children reading this will hardly be wanting to wait until they are grown up enough to join the fun!The book was immediately popular in Australia. It went into its third printing only six months after its first publication. Ten years later, Mayle had written several more books for children, including the puberty manual What’s Happening To Me?, selling a total of 3.5 million copies worldwide, half a million in Australia alone. Where Did I Come From? was also common in libraries, and lots of parents used it with more than one child. In other words, many, many more people read it than its sales figures tell us.Plus, there were the video versions, made in 1986 and shown in countless Australian classrooms. These were produced in Australia, used an Australian narrator, and previewed to Australian children. They led to Mayle, a UK citizen, being incorrectly labelled as Australian in some countries’ media. Shaping sex educationWhy was Mayle so successful in Australia? Maybe because when Where Did I Come From? arrived, Australians were eager to read about sex. Censorship had recently been loosened. Cleo magazine was publishing explicit erotic information; Dr Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex was a bestseller. Women’s Liberation was also very active, and was pushing for more and better sex education.But the book’s popularity extended beyond the 1970s. It continues to shape sex education today.Where Did I Come From? heralded two major shifts in how we have “the talk” with our children. First, it created debate about how we should discuss sex. Mayle was explicit: he described erections, thrusting, and even the fact that sex normally occurs in a bed. He emphasised that (heterosexual) sex happens not only to create new life, but because it is enjoyable. It ends in a “tremendous big lovely shiver” for both parties. Illustration from Where Did I Come From? Arthur Robins/Penguin Random House Not everybody agreed with this approach. In 1985, the Canberra Times reported that Mayle had been “assaulted by a handbag-wielding woman” a few years earlier in the nation’s capital. She was “one of those who have objected, who still object, to sex being a matter for free discussion, even perhaps to it being discussed at all”.The book was also occasionally pulled from library shelves. In 2006, an article in the NT News – headlined “Outrage over kids’ sex books” – quoted a mother from Darwin complaining her eight-year-old son had “visions in his head I would not like to think about”, after he discovered Where Did I Come From? and What’s Happening To Me? at school. “I was appalled,” she said. “Why don’t they just put porn on the shelves?” The backlash to this incident demonstrates how most Australians viewed the book. In messages to the newspaper, a mother of three boys called the woman “cotton wool mum. He has the book cause HE wants 2 learn. Its his choice n better a book than [learning from] mates.” “What a tragedy her poor son is learning where he comes from and people like making love,” another reader wrote mockingly. Several of the people I interviewed for my research had positive memories of Mayle’s discussion of pleasure. Lara (a pseudonym), now in her thirties, liked “discreetly” reading the book with a friend, which they found “hidden away in the big kids’ section” of the school library. She felt it appealed to the logical part of me […] I don’t understand what this tingly feeling is, but if you’re telling me it’s what makes them feel good, I understand that people wanna feel good.The book’s emphasis on pleasure taught children something else too: that sex was a taboo topic adults wanted to avoid. As a child in the early 1980s, Alison would ask family friends to read the text aloud: “I’d see the look of horror on their faces.” Alison “genuinely liked that book” and “wanted to hear it again and again”, but also wondered whether “I knew it got this really weird reaction out of adults and I was trying to figure out what that was”.Slightly tabooYou’ve probably noticed several of these stories involve libraries. That’s because of the second shift epitomised by Where Did I Come From? – a change in who teaches children about sex.Schools in most Australian states started offering comprehensive sex education from the 1970s. This meant telling children the facts of life was no longer the responsibility of parents or the church.Where Did I Come From? was, however, designed for parents to read aloud. Mayle thought it should “be used as a sort of bridge between parents and children […] it is essential that the parent finishes off the process which is started by the book”.Yet this is, overwhelmingly, not how the book was read. There were girls like Lara, who found Where Did I Come From? at the school library. But others read the book alone and at home.This wasn’t always due to parental awkwardness. Many adults were embracing new ideas about children taking the lead in their own sex education. They would leave the text on the lower rungs of bookshelves, so their kids could consult it when ready.These well-intentioned efforts could have the opposite effect: children felt they couldn’t discuss sex with their parents, and that they should read Where Did I Come From? in secret.For example, Emma’s mother read her and her sister the book aloud in the 1980s, and made it clear they could revisit it whenever they wished. But Emma’s re-readings were “definitely a private experience”, because “to look at it more deeply was slightly taboo. Maybe more than slightly taboo.”Some parents skipped discussion of the book altogether. Lizzy (a pseudonym), born in the 1990s, was eight when Where Did I Come From? appeared on her bed. “I remember feeling really guilty […] like it was something I shouldn’t be looking at, but obviously my parents put it there for me.” As Lizzy recalled, “the world was being opened to me” as she read the book alone in her bedroom – nearly 40 years after critics worried it was too sexually explicit for children.Where Did I Come From? is now outdated in some respects. It doesn’t discuss surrogacy or IVF. It doesn’t mention the testicles or the clitoris. It refers to the “unborn baby”, not the “foetus”.But its influence can still be felt. Its focus on pleasure was exciting to young readers, if controversial among adults. Its history is about more than the words on its pages. Where Did I Come From? remains important 50 years on because the way Australians read it shaped how we think about sex today.Saskia Roberts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.