The right to read: Australia’s bizarre history of literary censorship and the men who brought it down

If isolation has motivated you to undertake a digital detox, we have a saucy and exciting list of books to add to your reading schedule. What’s the one thing all these brilliant works of literature have in common? They were once banned in Australia.

If you think banning books was a practice exclusively associated with authoritarian regimes think again. Australian has a long and unsettling history of literary censorship. Prohibiting books was a tradition that proceeded federation and continued up until the 1970s. Books that the state deemed morally corrosive or too sexually explicit were considered unfit for public dissemination.  

The books Australia banned

The state believed it had an imperative to protect the moral virtue of society and safeguard the dominance of white, Anglo Saxon, Christian culture.  A convoluted system of federal and state laws prevented the importation and dissemination of “obscene” literature. Federal law allowed the Department of Customs to regulate all books entering Australia by ship or plane. Customs officials would search through suitcases, and would be instructed to confiscate and destroy any book deemed subversive. State governments gave police the power to seize books from stores and burn them.

Publishers, booksellers and writers were routinely fined, arrested and even imprisoned.

If you’re wondering what type of books could have possibly been considered so threatening, chances are you’ve probably already read one.  D. H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, (1928) Vladimir Nabokov’s international best seller Lolita (1955) J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1953) and even some James Bond novels are amongst the books once banned in Australia.

In most cases content of a sexual nature was the primary objection, especially anything considered “deviant.” A term of derision, deviant sexual behaviour could be interpreted to include any kind of sex that took place outside the respectable confines of marriage.  References to homosexuality, abortion, masturbation and obscene language were considered particularly egregious. 

When the cracks in Australia’s literary censorship model started to show

Today of course, in an age where internet pornography is widely accessible these objections seem quaint, even laughable. Cracks to the censorship model began to show around the 1960s. The sexual revolution brought challenges by university students who published sexually explicit content in their newspapers as an act of defiance. This eventually resulted in the censorship board relaxing some of its decisions on certain books.

Pushes to liberalise the system gained momentum and reached a climax in the early 1970s after the Australian government announced that it would ban the critically acclaimed Portnoy’s Complaint. The book was an international bestseller, following the life of a young America man struggling with his sexuality and orthodox Jewish upbringing.  

The book that changed the game

Risking fines and imprisonment, 3 men from Penguin books resolved to smuggle copies of Portnoy’s Complaint into Australia and publish them. The men believed the book to be of profound literary merit and the censorship system nonsensical and outdated.

Managing director John Michie, finance director Peter Froelich, and editor John Hooker were part of a new guard of idealistic and ambitious men who wanted to champion books that challenged the status quo and reflected the changing face of Australia’s cultural identity.

In July 1970, after successfully smuggling copies of Portony’s Complaint into Australia Penguin was able to print 75,000 copies in Sydney and shipped them to wholesalers and bookstores around the country. Eager readers stormed bookstores to get their hands on the converted and illicit novel that had taken the world by storm. The police quickly descended, court summons were delivered to Penguin Books and politicians insisted that there would be hell to pay.

The operation is the subject of a recent book by Patrick Mullins called ‘The Trials of Portonoy.” Mullins provides a fascinating insight into the prudish sensibilities of the time by including extracts of the court proceedings, which followed the book’s publication.

Prosecutor Leonard Flanagan denounced the novel in striking terms

 “When taken as a whole, it is lewd,” he declared. “As to a large part of it, it is absolutely disgusting both in the sexual and other sense; and the content of the book as a whole offends against the ordinary standards of the average person in the community today – the ordinary, average person’s standard of decency.”

According to Mullins, the defendants were undaunted by the court battle and had spent a considerable amount of time preparing for it. They had expert lawyers at the helm and the crème de la crème of Australia’s literary, and academic elite rallied to their side in support. Witnesses for the defence included Patrick White, academic John McLaren, The Age newspaper editor Graham Perkin, historian Manning Clark and poet Vincent Buckley as well as many more.

Ultimately, Penguin Books was only convicted of breaching censorship laws in Victoria and fined $104.50. The Whitlam government eventually dismantled the censorship system and introduced a classification code in its place.

Is freedom of expression alive and well in Australia’s publishing industry today?

It is somewhat sad that the heroic actions of the Penguin men are not better known. In a recent interview, we asked Georgia Richter, a publisher at Fremantle Press, whether this tradition of fighting for freedom of expression is alive and well in Australia’s publishing industry.

“The idea of censorship is an anathema to us.” She said “If something is political or hard hitting that’s not going to be a reason to not publish it. I think what’s very interesting about this time and space is a growing awareness of not speaking for others, of own voice considerations and of seeking own voice stories.”

Did you know about Australia’s bizarre history of literary censorship? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.