The excitement and action reached Western Australia. Arthur Williams, of the In Bookshop, in Perth, wrote to Greene to tell him that booksellers were resisting police attempts to restrict the book and were fully cooperating with Penguin.18 Certainly that was the experience of the proprietors of the Terrace Arcade Bookshop, also in Perth. Claiming to be a friend of a regular customer, a detective visited the store, purchased a copy of Portnoy, thanked the bookseller, and returned three hours later with four members of the Vice Squad to seize all remaining stock. They were not thorough — they inexplicably left six copies behind — but they issued charges under section 2 of the state’s Indecent Publications Act. Electing to pay the fine, the Terrace Arcade proprietors were not overly concerned. They were amused at how it was turning out, they told Greene:
The whole situation has a delicious Gilbert & Sullivan flavour. One of our customers has ordered twenty copies and is going to have a treasure hunt with them. They are to be wrapped in plastic bags and hidden at an open-air theatre. This should provide some pleasant exercise for the Vice Squad.
‘We will let you know how things progress,’ they finished. ‘Perhaps there will be such an outcry that the charges against us will be dropped before the hearing.’19
***
It quickly became clear that the state governments would each need to take responsibility themselves. Officials from the Department of Customs washed their hands of the matter. Portnoy’s Complaint was a prohibited import, yes — but this was a locally published edition, they told enquiring reporters. They had no jurisdiction or grounds to prosecute anyone. There was only one possible way of using federal law to intervene, and that would require establishing where, when, and how Portnoy’s Complaint had been smuggled into the country for use in the Penguin edition, and who had done so. A spokesperson promised that the department would investigate, but behind closed doors the department had already decided against it. Michie had told Customs officers that he had not imported the book, nor had it been imported through Penguin. ‘He “acquired them from a friend”,’ recorded the sceptical but realistic Customs officer. ‘I suggest NFA [no further action] on this aspect.’20
Nor could the state governments rely on one another to maintain a uniform resistance to Portnoy’s Complaint. The Tasmanian government banned it immediately, and the Queensland government promised to do the same, but the South Australian government made the crucial and significant decision to break with its counterparts. Announcing on Monday 31 August that it believed adults were entitled to make their own decisions on what to read, Attorney-General Len King said that there would be no prosecutions, provided that booksellers sold the novel responsibly. ‘If a bookseller keeps the book out of public view and confines sales to adults who make direct enquiry, and there are no other adverse features of the case,’ he said, ‘there will be no prosecution.’21
As well as being consistent with ALP policy, the decision had been spurred by Don Dunstan’s aversion to censorship. As King later said, Dunstan was ‘libertarian’ about the issue: ‘His view was that we shouldn’t ever prosecute for indecency or any published material or theatrical productions and so on. People could make up their own minds. He was in favour of restricting any doubtful material to people over the age of eighteen, but beyond that he considered it was open slather.’22 Portnoy’s Complaint supposedly bored and ‘nauseated’ Dunstan, and its rapturous reception surprised him, but he pushed King to allow the book through.23
Although King’s announcement would have been especially cutting for Griffin Press, its most important consequence was its effect on the agreement for uniform censorship. In one short press statement, the agreement had been broken. The consensus was gone. It was a vital victory for Penguin, instrumental in tearing through the otherwise blanket hostility toward Portnoy. Michie was elated. ‘The complaint now endemic in Australia,’ he telegrammed Greene, on 2 September. Hooker followed that with a letter: ‘There’s not a dry seat in the whole of Australia,’ he crowed. Penguin had sold 68,000 copies already, and ‘the whole place is in an uproar’.24 ‘That was a great moment,’ Hilary McPhee recalled. ‘A hole was punched in the system. It was a big victory, and it gave us a sense that it was very nearly won.’25
Officials from all of the state governments and the federal government were dismayed and critical. Though his own officials had noted in July that it might well happen, Don Chipp saw that the whole concept of uniform censorship in Australia would now require ‘urgent re-appraisal’.26 He said in the House of Representatives on 2 September that he was ‘surprised and disappointed’.27 A conference of state chief secretaries and federal ministers, at which they were going to discuss censorship, was only two weeks away. But now, the South Australian government had taken unilateral action. ‘Whatever faults might have been discovered in the censorship laws in the last two years, at least there has been uniformity throughout Australia,’ he said. ‘I think it would be one of the great tragedies of our time so far as censorship is concerned if we returned to the insanity of having seven censorship systems, such as was the case prior to 1968.’28
Arthur Rylah, who had been on holiday, returned seething at the ‘unilateral’ decision. ‘That State seems to have given the green light for the printing and publishing of any obscene book whether prohibited in the past as an import or likely to be prohibited in the future,’ he wrote to Don Chipp. ‘I cannot imagine anything more calculated to destroy the edifice of Commonwealth and State uniformity in this area which we have so painstakingly built during the past two years … I am not sure just what we can salvage from the wreck, but Victoria will be pleased to do everything it can to assist.’29
Matters were now escalating. Both sides were digging in. Boosted by the news from South Australia, Michie was in the newspapers, boasting that 70,000 copies of Portnoy’s Complaint had been sold, dismissing Australia’s censorship system as ‘insidious, inconsistent, and ridiculous’, and calling for wholesale reform.30 Booksellers were emboldened: in Perth, Arthur Williams was making undisguised plans to circumvent police action in Western Australia by mailing copies of Portnoy from South Australia; in Sydney, James Thorburn was promising to continue selling copies, come what may; in Melbourne, with sales showing no signs of abating, Cheshire bookshop employee Bill Holl declared that Portnoy was ‘the best thing that ever happened for bringing young people into the shop’.31 The press was laughing. Journalists from The Sydney Morning Herald cracked open a phonebook and tracked down a Bankstown electrician who shared the surname of Roth’s character. He had not read the novel. ‘Who is this Portnoy in the book?’ he asked.32 The Age called the whole affair a ‘Keystone Cop melodrama’, and welcomed Penguin’s demonstration of the ‘absurdity’ of the censorship system:
In the present crisis, the State Government [of Victoria] has no option: it must immediately close the border with South Australia. Apart from the fact that South Australians who have read Portnoy’s Complaint may decide to travel interstate, there is the clear and present danger that Victorians unwilling to do battle with Melbourne’s bookstores might cross the border and buy a copy without having to compete with plainclothes policemen. Anxious Victorians standing by their wireless sets can be comforted by the fact that the Minister for Customs (Mr Chipp) and the Acting Chief Secretary (Mr Smith) are keeping in touch.33
The embarrassment stung authorities into greater action. In New South Wales, with special warrants signed by Eric Willis, the Vice Squad raided three Sydney bookshops on 2 September: Angus & Robertson, on Castlereagh Street; the Pocket Bookshop, on King Street; and the Third World Bookshop, on Goulburn Street. Detectives had already visited all of these bookshops, but now they swooped to stop any further sales. They seized all unsold stock of Portnoy, netting nearly 800 copies from Angus & Robertson alone. Some bookshops, knowing that raids would come, had taken precautionary measures. Bob Gould had made an arrangement to store his copies of Portnoy offsite, in the basement of a nearby hotel.
Copies, disguised in beer cartons, were brought to his shop only as they were needed. When officers arrived, Gould had sold three-quarters of his stock and had only twenty-three copies on the premises. Police seized those, and informed him that Willis had promised to prosecute anyone selling the book.
Gould affected innocence. ‘I didn’t know anything about it. How can I find out?’
‘I suggest,’ said one officer, drily, ‘you read the papers, or listen to the radio.’
Police departed with the twenty-three copies — but without the hundreds more that sat untouched barely a block away.34
Reporters were present when police arrived to raid Thorburn’s Pocket Bookshop. Quickly and quietly, they seized his stock — even plucking a copy from novelist Patrick White, just as he was about to purchase it.35 Thorburn, aware that the publicity provided by press coverage was necessary for the fight, spoke freely about the raid: ‘They were very nice about it.’
‘Have you been depraved by it [the novel]?’
‘I don’t think so, whatever depraved might mean.’
‘Do you think you’re doing any harm by selling it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ replied an amused Thorburn.36
Further raids in Sydney and elsewhere in New South Wales followed. Thorburn’s shop was raided twice more. The pickings were not much bigger, but police managed to get their hands on just shy of 1,500 copies overall. In Victoria, police raided bookshops in Melbourne and seized copies. That Wednesday, they served Michie and Penguin with three summonses. The first was a charge for knowingly keeping obscene articles for gain; the second called on Penguin to show cause why the seized copies of Portnoy should not be destroyed; the third, to Michie personally, was a charge for selling obscene articles — that is, for having ‘sold’ the novel to police.
Penguin’s staff knew that events were unfolding as they had foreseen. Writing to Greene on 8 September to inform him of the charges laid against Michie, Hooker admitted, ‘This I suppose was inevitable.’ But there was a hint of jangling nerves in his note that, for Portnoy’s release in South Australia, ‘we must be thankful for small mercies’.37 Peter Froelich recalled these days in similar terms. ‘We knew they were going to have a go at us,’ he said. ‘We knew they would come for us.’ But even that knowledge did not prevent him from feeling nervous. ‘It was a scary time. We had stirred up a hornet’s nest,’ said Froelich, ‘and we didn’t think it’d be as big as it was. But, then again, we’d say, “Isn’t that exactly what we set out to do?”’
Michie had reason to be nervous. He and Hilary McPhee had each recently left their marriages to be together, and both feared that muckraking journalists might seek to make hay of it.38 But Michie remained calm. He did not waver. The personal summons that might have given others pause only reinforced Michie’s determination to see the matter through. ‘His thinking was that if this is the way that the establishment is going to treat him,’ recalled Sessions, ‘then he was going to fight back all the way.’
Publicly, Michie was defiant. Accusing police of trying to use ‘intimidation tactics’ to dissuade booksellers from selling the novel, he announced that the entire print run had sold out and that Penguin was now planning a second print run. (‘This will make the government really look up,’ Hooker wrote to Greene.)39 Michie said that Penguin had set aside $15,000 as a ‘fighting fund’ to defend itself, and repeated his promise to fight all the way to the High Court. Moreover, aware that the decision of the Menzies government to ban C.H. Rolph’s The Trial of Lady Chatterley had drawn further attention to the issue of censorship, Michie announced Penguin’s intention to publish an account of the court proceedings against them for Portnoy’s Complaint. Penguin would do so, he said, irrespective of any verdict in the trials. ‘I think the account of the court proceedings would be of world interest,’ he told journalists. ‘… Censorship is an international issue.’40
This was no off-the-cuff promise. Hooker was already writing to Greene for records and information about his contacts with Chipp and other publishers; he was also making it clear that Penguin would do all it could to keep the issue, and the book, front and centre in the public consciousness: ‘The writing of the trial book will, of course, take eighteen months or so because it looks as though we will have to appeal as far as the High Court of Australia.’41
Sydney-based writer and reporter Julie Rigg, then aged twenty-six, would be commissioned to write the book. A reporter since her teens, Rigg had worked on newspapers in Australia and the UK, and, since 1964, had written for The Australian, where she became a columnist. She had edited a collection of essays on women in Australia in 1969, and had a long interest in censorship. ‘It was appalling and ridiculous,’ she said later. After meeting with Hooker, she began amassing material — clippings, law reports, transcripts. From the beginning, C.H. Rolph’s The Trial of Lady Chatterley was the model she intended to follow. The book would be the record of the public drama, contextualised and substantive, professional and fair.
There would be much to record. The efforts to suppress Portnoy were failing. Booksellers who had hesitated to sell it began to order copies; other sellers were daring the government to prosecute; consignments were still wending their way across the country; and police action to seize copies was inconsistent and at odds with the statements of various politicians. Internationally, the affair seemed farcical: advising Australia’s authorities to ‘relax a little’, the Guardian said the fuss was not worth the bother and made Australia look ‘ridiculous’.44 On 4 September, The Canberra Times echoed this, editorialising that the ban had been mistaken, that attempts to enforce it were foolish, and that, if the novel could so easily deprave or corrupt, the problem was with the education system, not the book.45
Others poked fun at the absurdity of the whole affair. ‘Does [Victorian acting chief secretary] Ian Smith seriously contemplate midnight raids on the quiet groves of suburbia wherein already lurk hundreds of smuggled copies of the dreaded Complaint?’ asked Melbourne’s scandal rag, Truth.46 Journalist Maurice Dunlevy pointed out that the insistence of officials in New South Wales and Victoria to prosecute when South Australia had refrained meant that ‘the right to be depraved and corrupted is not an equal right for all Australians’.47 The next day, The Sydney Morning Herald carried a positive assessment of the novel by former editor John Douglas Pringle. Emphasising the book’s humour, language, and subject, Pringle admitted that Portnoy’s Complaint might be pornographic, but that it was also a ‘cry from the heart of the human condition’. Eric Willis’s scathing comments about the book, however, were ridiculous: the chief secretary was ‘talking through his hat’.48
But the book’s publication did not enjoy universal support among the public: there were those outraged by what Penguin had done. One correspondent wrote to Michie, accusing him of trying to make ‘a fast buck by polluting minds impressionable and otherwise … This kind of pornographic codswallop is socially decadent and for the cerebrally effete. I think that it is high time that Australian booksellers like yourselves ceased serving pervs and set about trying to elevate our community above the level of the gutter.’49 Penguin’s staff were hurt neither by this nor by threats from the authorities. As Graham C. Greene wrote to John Hooker, ‘If you get sent to prison, I will come out personally with the soup.’50
Officials at all levels of government continued to do whatever they could to halt Portnoy’s spread. On Monday 7 September, belying the Department of Customs’ unwillingness to get involved, postmaster-general Alan Hulme announced that the Post Office would seize all copies of Portnoy that it found in the mail system. The Post Office had the right to intercept books and parcels, he said, and, if any parcel indicated that it contained a copy, it would be seized and burned. But, in the same breath, Hulme admitted that this would occur only by chance: the Post Office had no intention of opening every parcel, and it was unlikely to look hard for such parcels.
Only in plac
es where the government exercised a close level of control could threats and intimidation be sustained. Canberra bookseller Teki Dalton sold thirty copies of Portnoy on 31 August before police visited and warned him of potential legal action. A worried Dalton pulled the book from sale and contacted officials at the Department of the Interior, which governed the ACT, with a simple question: was selling the book illegal? The answers were murky. There was no instrument for a ban on a book in the ACT, nor was any such ban in place regarding Portnoy’s Complaint. But, Interior told Dalton, there was a risk of prosecution, with a potential penalty of up to $200 or imprisonment for six months. Who would decide whether to prosecute? The attorney-general, Tom Hughes, QC.51 Dalton backed down. He undertook to not to sell any further copies in exchange for a promise that he would not be prosecuted for the sales already made.
This intimidation was roundly criticised. An Australian National University (ANU) criminal-law academic called it a ‘mangling of the law’, and the president of the Council for Civil Liberties, Peter Stott, pointed out that by threatening Dalton the government had evaded settling whether the sale of Portnoy was illegal. ‘If the book is to be stopped,’ he said, ‘it should be done in such a way that can be contested in the courts.’52
***
That contest now became the priority. In New South Wales, the government confronted the question of who, and in what order, it would prosecute. There were compelling reasons to aim first at the low-hanging fruit of booksellers such as Gould and Thorburn, rather than tackle Angus & Robertson employee Paul Grainger and Halstead Press managing director Aubrey Cousins. Gould and Thorburn would not have the resources to fight the charges properly; in the case of Gould, whose left-wing sympathies were overt, it would be easy to paint him as a disreputable seller of smut.
The Trials of Portnoy Page 12