Penguin The Censorship Killers

This article from the Autumn 2021 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Senior Fellow, Richard Allsop.

This book was released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of a landmark event in the battle against censorship in Australia. In 1970, Penguin took the bold decision to publish American writer Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint in Australia after importing the work was banned. That triggered a series of court cases, which ended with a fatal blow dealt to the censorship regime. Despite the social and sexual revolution having been in full swing for several years, Portnoy’s Complaint was still a radical and challenging work. Written as a monologue with its narrator Jewish New Yorker, Alexander Portnoy, regales his psychoanalyst with the wretched tale of the lack of enjoyment he derived from the vast array of sexual activity he practised.

In 1969 reading Portnoy’s was emblematic of societal change.

The book attracted significant controversy in the United States, not only for its sexual frankness, but also for its depiction of Roth’s own Jewish community, a group with whom Roth had created tensions in his earlier writing. Most critics praised Portnoy’s Complaint, with as mainstream a journal as Time describing it as a “dazzling performance”. However, many in American society saw the book, and its critical acclaim, as evidence of a rapid decline in morals. This led to localised actions, such as individual libraries refusing to stock the work.

It was generally accepted in America—and in the United Kingdom—that, while opinions may differ wildly about the merit of Portnoy’s Complaint, nothing in it demanded it being prohibited. Many in older generations might dislike this book, finding it as distasteful as protest marches and rock concerts, but in 1969 attending Woodstock and reading Portnoy’s were emblematic of dramatic societal change. However, Australian authorities were not yet ready to concede that this change was unstoppable.

Understanding the history of censorship in this country is necessary to understand why the Federal and State Governments tried to prevent the sale of Portnoy’s Complaint in Australia. Historian Patrick Mullins, who came to prominence with his biography of Billy McMahon, provides an excellent summary of why Australia was still censoring books published without restriction overseas. He traces the story back to when the Australian colonies began assembling tight censorship regimes in the last quarter of the 19th century. The rules were further strengthened post-Federation by the Commonwealth Customs Act and the Post and Telegraph Act, which between them controlled the importation of books and their distribution within Australia.

As Mullins comments, these measures arose from the belief that the new nation was “as susceptible to the contamination of impure literature as it was to foreign invasion”. Australia’s censorship laws thus formed an unhealthy trifecta with the White Australia Policy and Protectionism, as measures which made the country more insular and stunted its cultural, economic and intellectual growth.

Mullins takes us through the major censorship controversies of the 20th century’s first 70 years. In the 1920s, significant works such as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front were banned, as were magazines Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan. The next decade, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and James Joyce’s Ulysses were deemed unsuitable for Australian readers. These extraordinary decisions led to a campaign for liberalisation, partly successful in 1937. Progress was halted by World War II, and wartime tightening of censorship saw Ulysses banned again. United Australia Party Customs Minister, Eric Harrison, claimed hardly a page of the famous novel was fit to read and prohibiting it was needed to maintain the place of “clean and decent literature”. The incoming Curtin Labor Government kept the ban in place.

The 1937 liberalisation seemed a distant memory in the post-War period. In 1945, local author Robert Close was sentenced to three months gaol for using the term ‘rutting’ to describe the sexual act in his novel Love Me Sailor, while international bestseller Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber was banned on the grounds it made “crude and obvious appeal to the sexual instinct”. Censorship regimes were further strengthened by several State Labor Governments in the 1950s and—proving censorship had bipartisan appeal—in 1964, Victorian Liberal Chief Secretary, Arthur Rylah, sought to ban Mary McCarthy’s sexually explicit novel The Group, despite other Australian states tolerating it.

A long-desired system of national decision-making on censorship came into place in 1968 and hopes for significant relaxation came after the 1969 Federal Election when Don Chipp was appointed Minister for Customs. Chipp supported rationalising and liberalising the Australian censorship regime for books and films. However, by then Portnoy’s Complaint had already been assessed by the Customs Department and the National Literature Board of Review and rejected. Chipp decided to back the existing decision and perhaps use his conservative position on Portnoy’s to cover his liberalisation in other areas.

With importation banned, the only way to get Portnoy’s Complaint to Australian readers was to print the books locally. In a daring and top-secret strategy, Penguin developed a plan which enabled tens of thousands of copies to hit bookshop shelves around the nation on the same day, Monday 31 August 1970. Local publication meant responsibility for prosecution fell to the states—a role they were generally quite eager to fulfil. However, South Australian Premier Don Dunstan broke ranks. Dunstan was supposedly “bored and nauseated” by the book and surprised by the critics’ praise for it, but did not regard his own dislike as reason to ban it.

The next hole in the dyke came in January 1971 when Magistrate Malley in the Western Australian Court of Petty Sessions found no case to answer against the bookshop charged with selling the work. Like Dunstan, Malley was no fan of Portnoy’s Complaint, finding it “patently and often nauseatingly obscene”. Yet overwhelming and uncontradicted evidence had been presented that the work had literary merit and this, in his opinion, overrode the obscenity. The bookshop in the WA case was the local Communist party bookshop, whose manager believed “censorship of books for adults is an insult”. One wonders whether she would have applied that principle if Communists had done the censoring.

The failed prosecution in WA was balanced by a successful one in Victoria, which meant the NSW court case set down to begin in Sydney in February 1971 would be the decider. The testimonies of two NSW policemen who queued to purchase the book on the first day were discredited by their claims a schoolgirl in uniform was a fellow purchaser. The problem was 31 August was in school holidays, so the odds of a teenager being in school uniform on that day was remote. The jury could not reach a verdict. A second trial produced a similar result and the NSW Government decided not to prosecute further. With Portnoy’s Compliant now free to be sold in three of the six states, the Commonwealth also had to back down.

New types of censorship are prevalent today.

This was not the end of this period of censorship debates in Australia, but it was the beginning of the end. There were subsequent battles—particularly over the Little Red Schoolbook—but the literary censorship regime crumbled within a couple of years.

There is no doubt battlelines of the period remain simplistically clear in the recollections of the young radicals of the time in their never-ending critiques of pre-Whitlam Government Australia. While it remains easy to ridicule conservative politicians from that era (and to be fair to Mullins he generally avoids ridicule), the past half-century has presented challenges to the thinking of the aging intelligentsia and their younger progeny. Whether it was Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses or modern works accused of ‘cultural appropriation’, contemporary threats to free expression are just as serious as those imposed by Christian conservatives for much of the 20th century. While some of the advocates of the removal of censorship 50 years ago have remained consistent in their principles, others have drifted into support for the new types of censorship prevalent in many intellectual circles today. This shift is extraordinary.

Mullins provides an excellent study of one successful battle for freedom of expression in Australia. Let us hope future historians will have similarly happy tales to tell.