The Trials of Portnoy

by Patrick Mullins

  Booksellers were intimidated into cooperating with Customs officials. The penalty for not doing so, as one bookseller wrote, was to be raided and searched, and have stock seized and staff surveiled. ‘All this may be done, and has been done, not unostentatiously,’ he wrote, ‘but by a large squad of officers while a shop is actually trading, with customers present.’50

  Opposing censorship was difficult. Its effects could not easily be documented or protested. It was ‘a fog on the wharf’, as Nettie Palmer said; it removed any sense of clarity for writers, publishers, printers, and readers.

  West Australian writer Peter Cowan, whose poems had been found indecent in the prosecution of Max Harris, recalled that censorship left writers and readers inhibited: ‘You didn’t know about these [banned] books because they never came in and nobody ever said anything about them.’ Moreover, if you wanted to write, he said, ‘what you did really was to accept that there were certain things that you would not be able to say in any straightforward way … You still had to keep off certain things, and editors were uneasy, and what you developed, I suppose, was a way of writing around these subjects that were forbidden.’51

  Dymphna Cusack, co-author of Come in Spinner, spoke from firsthand experience of the timidity and conservatism that censorship fostered in Australia: Spinner had been ruthlessly edited before publication in 1951. ‘In Australia, we’re basically wowsers,’ she said. ‘Reviewers aren’t very enlightened, [and] consequently you get a backlash. Most of them haven’t read a great deal of literature, particularly foreign literature. They would accept in London, Paris or Berlin what they wouldn’t take here.’52

  ***

  For all the efforts to quarantine Australia from those foreign influences, change abroad would force change to censorship. In the United States and the United Kingdom, censorship policies suffered severe setbacks in the 1950s and 1960s, including the increasingly accepted argument that the existence of literary or artistic merit in a work mitigated its obscenity. The fact that the Literature Censorship Board appeared to accept that, recommending release of works that would otherwise have been banned, caused considerable dismay within the renamed Department of Customs and Excise. In May 1957, comptroller-general F.A. Meere called for his minister, Tasmanian senator Denham Henty, to overrule the board’s recommendations on three titles, and argued that if there were a lack of confidence in the board then ‘action should be taken at the first appropriate occasion to change’ the board.53 Meere’s view steadily hardened, and he pressed the point repeatedly. ‘My view is that the Board, on a number of occasions,’ he wrote, a few months later, ‘has given undue weight to literary merit and in doing so condoned the presence therein of blasphemous, indecent, or obscene matter.’54 Henty agreed to some of these moves, but the influence of a liberalisation worldwide could hardly be stopped.

  What would force change was public scrutiny of censorship policy. This occurred next in 1957, when a ban placed on J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, The Catcher in the Rye, caught press attention.55 Widely regarded as the inaugurating work of the young adult genre, Catcher had been published to acclaim and controversy, and been banned in Australia in August 1956 by Customs officials within the department. Despite this, American ambassadors to Australia had frequently donated copies to school and public libraries, on the basis that it was an excellent example of modern American literature. Geoffrey Dutton, an elegant and well-connected Adelaide-based writer, thought the ban on Catcher particularly dumb, and criticised Henty for maintaining it. He was surprised to receive a letter proposing a meeting, where Henty said he would explain the ban. But their meeting only exposed the ban as a farce: Henty said that Catcher had been banned for its portrayal of male vice, and pointed Dutton to a passage where the narrator indicts his brother for ‘prostituting’ himself as a hack screenwriter in Hollywood. Dutton could only laugh.56

  Criticism of the ban on Catcher became especially loud in September, when the parliamentary librarian removed a copy from the Parliamentary Library. It was the third mishap in an embarrassing week for the censorship regime: Leslie Allen, chairman of the Literature Censorship Board, had stepped down from his post, and the early stirrings of a campaign to see the ban on Redheap rescinded were reported with glee in the Sun newspaper. As a Sydney Morning Herald editorial argued, the secrecy over censorship had to end. There were laws aplenty in the country, should anyone feel that censorship was still necessary. ‘No further “protection” — especially by anonymous Customs clerk[s] — is needed,’ the editorial argued. ‘Commonwealth censorship is superfluous, and should be abolished.’57 Henty sought to defuse the criticism by moving to have the board assess Catcher — which it did, recommending release early in October — but the unabating scrutiny meant that pressure for wider change continued to build.

  It was too much for Henty, who gave way yet again. On 25 October, he announced that officials within the Department of Customs would no longer make decisions on what was banned: the Literature Censorship Board would decide that. To help prevent delays, the board would be split into two committees that would rule on individual works. Moreover, the board would ‘overhaul the present list of books that have been banned’.58

  The result, by April 1958, was a considerably whittled-down list of banned books.59 Works that had attracted attention for being banned — Lindsay’s Redheap and Winsor’s Forever Amber among them — were now permitted. There were still 178 titles remaining on the list, but any additions or deletions to the list would now be published in the Commonwealth Government Gazette, thereby becoming publicly available. Second, the list would be reviewed at five-yearly intervals.

  This was, for some, a victory. Journalist Peter Coleman, who would soon begin to research the history of censorship in Australia, argued that it marked the start of a ‘period of qualified liberalism’ in Australia.60 Others took a different view. As the University of Melbourne academic Stephen Murray-Smith would argue, these changes marked the movement of censorship as a political issue from the fringe to the mainstream. Confrontation — between those who wished to maintain it and those who wished to see it gone — was imminent.61

  CHAPTER 3

  Another country

  Henty’s changes had the desired effect: public attention turned from censorship to other matters; and, in its absence, briefly, Customs reverted to form. It banned Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me. It banned James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It banned William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The public seemed to pay no attention.

  What changed that was the banning of James Baldwin’s Another Country.1 A study of interracial love, homosexuality, racism, and masculinity, Another Country had been unofficially banned after its publication in 1962, with a formal ban in place by the following year.2 That ban was not absolute — the novel was made available for the ‘serious minded student or reader’ — but the fact it had been instituted at all provoked enormous controversy. The Literature Censorship Board had cautioned that acute sensitivity and political heat over race could cause a ban on Another Country to be ‘associated with Australia’s misunderstood “White Australia policy” and her refusal to support UN condemnation of South African apartheid’.3 But that caution was ignored — and, when the ban was announced, writers Geoffrey Dutton, Rosemary Wighton, and Max Harris wrote an open letter calling for Henty to overturn the ban for precisely those reasons.

  ‘The banning of Another Country is very likely to be interpreted as an act of colour and racial prejudice on the part of Australia,’ they wrote, ‘and to be interpreted in an anti-Australian way by Asian students and newspapers, by communist powers, and by liberal racial forces in the USA.’4 The impact on Australia’s reputation internationally was another point of criticism. As Dutton, Wighton, and Harris added, Australia had joined Ireland as the only English-speaking nation that had banned Another Country. A reputation as a conservative, puritanical backwater was being consolidated by the continuing intransigence and narrow-mi
ndedness of the censorship regime.

  The fresh attention that Another Country drew to censorship did not abate. Further controversy spread to the ban in place on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which narrated the grooming, rape, and sustained abuse of a teenage girl by the adult Humbert Humbert, who delusionally viewed this as part of a great romantic affair. Then there was controversy over The Group. An account of the lives of eight young American women after their graduation from Vasser College, Mary McCarthy’s novel was contentious for its candid depiction of sex, breastfeeding, contraceptives, and the characters’ experiences of sexism and autonomy. It had been banned in Ireland and Italy — but, in a small victory, had been cleared for publication and dissemination in Australia. Yet in March 1964, in an act that would thrust him into the centre of the censorship battles, Arthur Rylah — deputy premier, attorney-general, and chief secretary in Victoria — ordered that everything be done to see The Group removed from sale in his state.

  A fifty-five-year-old solicitor who had enjoyed a stunning rise through the Liberal Party — becoming its deputy leader a mere six years after entering the state parliament — Rylah was a man of prodigious stamina and will whose qualities of character seemed to manifest themselves in his appearance. To Rylah’s complaint that standard shirt sizes never seemed to fit him, an exasperated tailor once replied, ‘When you’ve got a bull neck, a pigeon chest, and a scholar’s stoop, what else do you expect?’5

  Rylah’s record of reform would be laudable and immense, but in retirement he would argue that nothing he had done had been so subject to distortion as his involvement in the censorship fights. Believing that there was no support in the community for the complete cessation of censorship, Rylah thought the only matter of contention should be where the line was drawn on what to censor and what to allow to go free. Yet this, too, was a distortion: Rylah’s obstinacy and conservatism led him to resist all attempts to redraw that line. In the 1960s, he became a bulwark against liberalisation of the censorship regime. He saw moves abroad to liberalise censorship as evidence of lowered standards and something to be deplored. ‘Do we want the youth in our community to be depraved and corrupted by this filth?’ he said. ‘I say firmly we do not. And I say with calm and resolution, despite the criticism and excesses of the current campaign, the government will not yield on this issue.’6

  Not yielding would require Rylah to exercise his powers and influence with considerable force. His opposition to The Group — not followed by any other state or territory — became one of the most notable attempts to forestall change in censorship in Australia. It also prompted opposition, most notably in the formation of the Freedom to Read committee, which criticised Rylah’s method for preventing sale of The Group in Victoria. Instead of declaring it obscene, which could be fought in court, the committee pointed out, Rylah had ordered police to warn booksellers they could be prosecuted under Victoria’s Police Act. To this effective threat, the booksellers responded as Rylah hoped. They were too terrified to stock the book.7

  The continuing controversy led to a debate on the ABC’s current affairs program Four Corners in March 1964 between Rylah and Freedom to Read chair Hector Monro. In the course of that debate, Rylah stated that he had read The Group and ‘would not like it to be in the hands of my teenage son and daughter’.

  Neither of his children were then teenagers. Emblematic of the censorship regime’s unabashed paternalism and capriciousness, the remark became notorious.

  ***

  Remarks like Rylah’s, and the attitudes to which they spoke, sparked the involvement of most relentless opponents in the fights against censorship, most of whom emerged from the alternative and student press. These underground and campus-based magazines — produced in straitened circumstances via cold type and photo offset printing, published on irregular schedules, advertised by word of mouth, and sold on street corners or in pubs — were a self-conscious alternative to the newspapers and magazines produced by Fairfax, Australian Consolidated Press, and News Ltd: a fifth estate that was willing to experiment and to publish frank and controversial material.8 Amid the great flowering of student activism in the 1960s — in campaigns over the White Australia policy, military involvement in Vietnam, women’s rights, sexual freedom, and Indigenous rights — those involved in these presses agitated for change and freedom. As historian Barbara Sullivan later wrote, the ‘thoroughgoing cultural freedom’ these activists sought could only follow from freedom from censorship.9

  One of the most notable publications was Oz, based in Sydney and founded by former student editors Richard Neville, Richard Walsh, and Peter Grose. Featuring an eclectic roster of contributors and a distinctive look, thanks to the efforts of art director Martin Sharp, Oz immediately caught the ire of authorities with its mocking, satirical coverage of government and Australian culture. After the restrictions of writing for student publications, Walsh said later, ‘we wanted something that left us free to write whatever nonsense that we wanted … We set it up to amuse ourselves and other people.’10 Grose recalled the origins similarly: Oz was inspired by the potent satire of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, and institutions such as Private Eye and That Was the Week That Was. ‘We had no intention of challenging censorship,’ he explained later, ‘only of challenging pomposity and hypocrisy through the medium of satire.’11

  Calling itself both ‘a stand-out sophisticated magazine’ and ‘a real epigram of depravity’, Oz took a simple stance on offence and censorship: ‘If you are offended by Oz, don’t buy it,’ Walsh wrote, in 1963. ‘There is no justification in the world for censoring “offensive” material, unless the offended are forced to read or view it.’12

  Their first number, published on 1 April 1963, seemed designed to provoke a reaction. It contained extracts of a fake diary kept by the Queen, a history of chastity belts, and an interview with an abortionist.13 At a time when abortion was illegal in New South Wales, this last piece was particularly provocative. And yet, as Walsh argued later, the editors had not ‘set out deliberately’ to be so.

  We were not really aware of how out-of-step with the community we were. Nor, as it turned out, were the authorities. Society was on the move. The conservative values that we were protesting against were not in sync with the rest of the community. The new generation that was coming along did not accept the values and ideas of the 1950s.14

  As further issues were published, the gaps between Oz, the community, and the authorities became chasms. Advertisers fled, and the editors were kicked out of the offices they had leased. The state government ‘went into a tailspin’, and moved to shut the magazine down.15 In June 1963, it brought obscenity charges against Neville, Walsh, and Grose. Walsh’s family solicitor advised the three to plead guilty, on grounds that, as first-time offenders, they would be treated leniently. They might even escape a conviction, the reasoning went. The price, however, was giving up their right to appeal and guaranteeing a severe sentence should they reoffend.16 ‘Soft-pedalling’ their intentions and stating they had no plans to ‘sail so close again’ to the wind, the three pleaded guilty early in September, and were fined £20 apiece.17 Grose, who had decided to leave, dissociated himself from the magazine, and his solicitor told the court that that he had ‘searched his soul and found Oz to be utterly worthless’. But Neville and Walsh were unrepentant about what they had produced.18 Outside the court, they repeated their belief that nothing in the magazine was obscene and that they were not worried about further prosecutions.19 ‘Most people agree that Oz improves each month,’ they said, ‘and our aim has always been the publication of a satirical, rather than smuttish, magazine.’20

  The February 1964 issue caused another uproar. The front cover, featuring a photograph of three men appearing to urinate on a sculpture set into the wall of the Sydney offices of P&O Shipping, was made all the worse by the note that the building had been opened by Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies.21 Court action again followed — and, this time
, the mistake of pleading guilty the year before became acute. Justice Gerald Locke disparaged evidence tendered on the merits of the satire in Oz as ‘an affront to the intelligence of the court’. He rubbished the magazine and its readers: ‘In my opinion, the publication would deprave young people or unhealthy minded adults so injudicious as to fancy it as literature and so misguided as to cultivate the habit of reading it.’22 Regarding them as unrepentant reoffenders, he sentenced Neville and Walsh to six months’ hard labour, Sharp to four months’, imposed a £100 fine on Oz Publications Ltd, and, for good measure, added a £50 fine on their printer.

  The severity of that sentence prompted a considerable welling of support for the Oz team. Funded by donations, they lodged an appeal that was heard in December in the Sydney Quarter Sessions Court. This time, represented by future governor-general John Kerr QC, the Oz team saw its evidence and arguments accepted. Literary experts testified with success. Justice Aaron Levine agreed with James McAuley’s evidence, for example, that the magazine presented ‘successful satire’ and that exposure to it would not necessarily corrupt or deprave. Upholding the appeal, Levine also held that prosecutions for obscenity needed to point to real examples of people who would be corrupted or depraved. ‘Not some mere theoretical, nebulous, or fanciful tendency to deprave,’ he declared, ‘but a real and practical tendency to deprave, not a theoretical group of unidentified persons, but persons or groups for whom the court in judgement can refer to as those likely to be affected.’