The banning of books is not all that uncommon – it’s done for political, legal, religious or ‘moral’ censorship reasons.
The narrowing of the collective spectrum seems to be gaining traction in the US especially, where school boards, stacked by ultra-conservative Christians, are limiting childhood education, presumably as God intended.
Just wait till the kids learn about Exodus 35:2, which says the death penalty applies to working on the Sabbath, or Exodus 21:7, which is ‘When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go free as male slaves do.’
Anyway, Australia has its own history of censorship.
According to unimelb.edu.au, ‘the most common reason for book bans by the Australian government was actually “offensive obscenity”.’
‘Ulysses was banned in Australia from 1927 until 1937. Hundreds of other titles, including The Kama Sutra and Lady Chatterley’s Lover had bans lasting until the ’60s and ’70s.
Supporting Australia’s puritan views on literature, Angela Heathcote’s article, The books Australia banned (www.australiangeographic.com.au) states: ‘In 2010, literary historian, Nicole Moore, from the University of NSW, stumbled upon 793 boxes of books deep in the underground of Australia’s National Archives in Sydney’.
Angela says, ‘Inside, were copies of Ulysses by James Joyce, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, even Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by Fanny Hill’.
‘These titles, and thousands more, were banned in Australia through the 20th century, considered to be obscene, blasphemous, or excessively violent’.
Nicole said, ‘Until the early 1970s, Australia was one of the strictest censors in the English-speaking world’.
‘We were often compared to Catholic Ireland and apartheid South Africa, both of which had strong religious and ideological reasons behind their censorship, but we banned some books they didn’t ban’.
Angela adds, ‘Around 90 per cent of the books that were banned in Australia during the 20th century were classified as “obscene”.’
‘Obscene takes on the British common law meaning, which declares that a book has the potential to “deprave or corrupt” its reader. This definition was often stretched and Nicole says it had a racist and homophobic agenda.
‘James Baldwin’s famous 1962 novel Another Country, which is set in New York City in the 1950s, and mentions interracial sex, was banned under this definition’.
Thankfully, censorship laws were eased in 1969, after the appointment of Don Chipp as the Customs Minister in the newly elected Fraser Liberal government. According to Nicole, apart from Chipp’s reforms, it was the Australian publishing industry who started protesting the laws and printed the banned sexually explicit 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth.
‘Around 170, 000 copies managed to go into circulation very quickly. Penguin was rumoured to be keeping their stock on the road in unmarked trucks, to avoid seizure,’ she says.
Hans Lovejoy, editor
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