Bingham’s colleagues did not disagree. Approached by intermediaries working on Graham C. Greene’s behalf, Tasmanian chief secretary Kevin Lyons — an independent in coalition with the Liberals, who also served as deputy premier — confirmed that any vendor of Portnoy’s Complaint would be prosecuted under the state’s criminal code ‘in order to obtain a jury decision on the question of whether or not it is an obscene publication. I would point out,’ Lyons added, ‘that a conviction has been obtained in a prosecution relating to this book in Victoria and that juries disagreed twice in New South Wales about it.’15
Officials within the Department of Customs groaned when they heard of Bingham’s position. ‘All has been quiet since [Portnoy’s] release, except in Tasmania,’ recorded one official. After the announcement that Tasmania would maintain its ban, Chipp had agreed to talk to Bingham ‘to quieten him down’. But Bingham’s willingness to respond to Everett in such absolute terms, Customs thought, had been silly. With their own role in the matter now at an end, Customs officials wished simply for Portnoy to go away. ‘It seems to me he has dug a ditch for himself and will not be able to back down gracefully,’ wrote one official. ‘However, it seems of local interest only — I think everyone else is heartily sick of Portnoy’s Complaint.’16
But Bingham was not alone. Upon enquiry, the assistant administrator in the Northern Territory, M.W. McDonald, advised that any decision to import and sell Portnoy should be made in consultation with a legal adviser. ‘But the Northern Territory Police will take such action as they see fit,’ McDonald added, ‘should they detect breaches of section 57 of the Police and Police Offences Ordinances 1923–1971.’17
Queensland, too, proved to be unamenable. Notwithstanding that the state Literature Board of Review had decided against placing an explicit ban on Portnoy in 1971 — declaring that it was refraining ‘from entering the field of serious literature’ — police had seized copies from the People’s Bookshop, on Brisbane’s Brunswick Street, and the government had pressed ahead with legal proceedings against proprietors Bill Sutton and Vincent Englart. But those proceedings were stalled more than a year later, meaning that efforts to ascertain Portnoy’s legality were frustrated. Officials from the state government told Graham C. Greene’s contacts that the matter against Sutton and Englart was sub judice, and that no comment or clarity on Portnoy could be offered.18
Sutton, a self-proclaimed ‘shearing-shed anarchist’, had taken over the People’s Bookshop in the 1960s, and had stocked it with an enormous range of literature, music, poetry, and art. Much of it was socialist and communist in bent, and the clientele that visited were similarly inclined. The historian Humphrey McQueen, for example, purchased The Modern Prince — Antonio Gramsci’s commentary on Machiavelli — from the People’s Bookshop, and used it while writing A New Britannia.19 Sutton was avowedly anti-censorship and adept at winning allies to his cause. As the case over Portnoy dragged on, with adjournments aplenty, he solicited donations for his defence in the Communist Party–owned Tribune and from the Right to Read movement in Melbourne.
It took until the middle of 1972 for his case to be resolved. In the Brisbane Magistrates’ Court on 3 May, Magistrate E. Martin cut short the first day’s proceedings to read Portnoy. The next day, Martin declared his finding that the book was obscene. He had found it ‘filthy’, and was disgusted by the continued references to ‘gross sexual perversion’. ‘Anybody who does not think this book is filthy is not,’ he said, ‘in my opinion, in step with the community so far as decency is concerned.’ He found Sutton and Englart both guilty.
Sutton and Englart’s lawyer argued that the penalties for the offence should be nominal, and was given leave to call evidence to support that argument. The defence had four witnesses, all from the University of Queensland. First was Professor Peter Edwards, who said Portnoy was not just about sex, and that, while funny, it was also a very moral work: ‘It is of such quality that I have set it for a group of postgraduate students to study.’ English lecturer Rev. John Strugnell said Portnoy was a ‘serious book’, and lecturer Leon Cantrell argued that it was comedic but also ‘immensely serious’. The last witness, solicitor Ron Finney, showed the court various pornographic books that he had bought at random in other Brisbane bookshops: they emphasised sex and violence, he said, without making any serious moral point, as Portnoy did.
Martin appeared to listen only because he had to. When they were done, he fined Sutton $20 — half of the maximum possible penalty — and ordered the seized copies destroyed.20
The fine was token, the number of copies small, and Sutton could see the wry side of the matter. A budding writer and member of a realist writers’ group in Brisbane, Sutton used the trial as basis for his satirical fable, ‘The Goodlooking Bookseller and the Ugly Society’, in which the eponymous bookseller is charged for selling Portnoy’s Complaint. The matter does not upset him. He has stocked the novel with a plan to eventually sell it to police and be brought before the courts. He is ‘not fooled by the propaganda that he lived in a free country’ — especially in the ‘city of the Winding River’, in the state of ‘Banana-land’, where ‘Kama Sutra Joe’ is premier, and the government looks after its mates. He is, however, curious about why he is being prosecuted, and so asks a friend, Professor Harry Edwards, for an explanation. ‘If the capitalist can control you sexually,’ Edwards tells him, ‘then they have you by the balls politically.’
The trial unfolds much as it did to Sutton, but the Goodlooking Bookseller is undeterred. When a moral panic breaks out over another book — this one, small, red, and intended for children — he decides to stock and sell it, as well.21
***
The Little Red Schoolbook was the work of Danish schoolteachers Søren Hansen and Jesper Jensen. A compilation of frank, calm advice on a gamut of topics for adolescent children — sex, drugs, alcohol, politics, authority, and independence — its benign name was nonetheless all out of sync with the controversy that it aroused all over the world. It was banned in France and Italy, denounced by the pope, and became the subject of a long-running obscenity case in the UK that went, eventually, to the European Court of Human Rights.
In Australia, the book caused considerable angst. Referred to the National Literature Board of Review in July 1971, Customs held off on an explicit decision on whether to ban it until the following year. In the interim, activists smuggled the book into Australia, and began to circulate a domestically printed edition — notably, under the auspices of ‘Thor’. Despite this, Customs continued to explore whether it could ban the book. But Chipp rapidly came to realise that a ban would not work. Even if the matter of the domestic edition were set aside, the book’s content just did not justify banning. The book did not advocate drug use. Its discussion of sex was frank but far from pornographic — a crucial problem, if Customs was to try to invoke Regulation 4A. The book did warn young readers not to trust adults — ‘All grown-ups are paper tigers,’ it declared — but this was not firm ground for a ban.22
Conservative-minded MPs in the government nonetheless became increasingly critical. Partly stemming from the acrimony that had suffused the Liberal Party since John Gorton had been deposed from the prime ministership and replaced by his deputy and foreign minister, William McMahon, in March 1971, the controversy over The Little Red Schoolbook also pointed to the desire among some MPs for the government to continue to be the guardian of the nation’s morals and virtue. John McLeay, the assistant minister assisting the minister for civil aviation, said that allowing the book would undermine morals among schoolchildren; government backbencher and malcontent Les Irwin bleated that it could lead young people into ‘misbehaviour’.
This noise and fuss prompted McMahon to call Chipp and tell him to change the decision. When Chipp refused, McMahon told him that the matter would go to cabinet — and that he would be forced to change the decision. Over the weekend that followed, Chipp heard that McMahon was backgroundin
g the press on the matter, boasting that cabinet would override Chipp. Chipp decided to raise the stakes. Calculating that McMahon could not afford a resignation ahead of the election due that year, he decided to call the prime minister’s bluff: Chipp spread the word that, if he were forced to reverse the decision, he would resign.23
At cabinet on the morning of 18 April 1972, The Little Red Schoolbook matter was at the top of the agenda.24 Chipp was blunt when he made his case. The advice from his department was clear. As there were no grounds for banning the book under the Customs Act, any censorship would have to be political. The advice he had received, he said, including from educationists, was against banning. ‘Beyond that,’ he went on, ‘the practical point is that the book is here and being printed. So there is no opportunity, in reality, to ban the book.’ Moreover, any such ban would doubtless have been appealed — just as any ban cabinet sought now would be appealed.
McMahon’s retreat, in the face of Chipp’s well-publicised threat and his argument, was quick and ignominious. ‘I have read only one chapter [of The Little Red Schoolbook],’ he said, ‘and I found it unbelievable — I didn’t read further.’ He accepted Chipp’s position that there should be no ban on the imported edition. ‘On practicalities and on law, we could not sustain a ban. So the minister’s position is sound.’
The ministers who spoke afterwards grudgingly agreed, but their comments underscored their view of censorship as a way of maintaining morality in the community. Peter Nixon, the minister for shipping and transport, said The Little Red Schoolbook was ‘in very bad taste, ludicrous and disgusting’, that its section on sex ‘justifies banning’, and that the ‘subversive slant’ in its discussion of the school system was not appropriate — but also admitted that Chipp’s case was sound. The minister for education, Malcolm Fraser, grumbled that the book ‘undermined family and society’, but also conceded that Chipp’s position was correct. Ian Sinclair, the minister for primary industry, made no secret of his dislike for the book, but emphasised, repeatedly, that Chipp was in the right and that the government should stand behind him.
There was no room for manouevre. A ban would not be instituted. The only action that the government could take was to have Fraser exercise his ‘influence and authority’ to prevent the book being distributed to schools.25
It was a desultory attempt, made at the last gasp, to reassert the powers of the censors to shape the country’s morals — and it was, almost immediately, snuffed out. The state governments almost as a whole decided not to prosecute the publisher of a domestically produced edition; Bill Sutton openly invited prosecution from the Queensland state government for stocking and selling it; and Wendy Bacon — still fighting against the censorship regime — led university students across the country in a protest against the restrictions on the book by handing out copies to schoolchildren.
As the year wore on, with the Liberal government limping towards an election that it knew it was almost certainly going to lose, further acts of defiance emerged. The most notable of these was Angus & Robertson’s decision, late in November, to publish a domestically printed edition of Beautiful Losers, the second novel written by Leonard Cohen before his switch to music. Originally published in 1966, Beautiful Losers had been almost immediately banned by the Commonwealth’s Literature Censorship Board for its focus on sexuality, its profanities, and its depiction of sex and drug-taking.
The mixed results of the Portnoy trials had led the book’s UK publisher, Jonathan Cape, to approach the National Literature Board of Review for a reconsideration of the ban — but they were rebuffed. Angus & Robertson thus decided to publish it in the same way that Penguin had published Portnoy, but this time restricted the number of copies to 3,000, and produced it as a hardcover priced at a relatively expensive $4.95.
Richard Walsh, who had been appointed publisher at Angus & Robertson by Gordon Barton after his success in running Nation Review, was forthright about the reasons for publishing and the impunity with which the company was operating.26 ‘Basically,’ he said, ‘we believe this is a very fine book, which should be published and read. A confrontation with the censor is only a very secondary motive. All we want to do is get the book on the market, and achieve some steady sales.’ And although police came to Angus & Robertson’s new premises on Pitt Street on the first day that Beautiful Losers was available, and purchased copies — all in front of the press — Walsh was not cowed.27 Angus & Robertson did not seriously expect to be taken to court, he said. ‘Not after Portnoy.’28
If the company were taken to court, however, it would fight. ‘We felt there had to be a confrontation over censorship,’ Walsh said later, ‘with Beautiful Losers if need be. And when the state saw how strong we were — particularly having Gordon Barton, who was rich and willing to spend money to defend it, to go on a crusade for it — they backed off. They had lost the war on Portnoy’s Complaint. They had lost the war on Oz and Tharunka. And they decided to turn their attention to other matters.’29
Angus & Robertson did, however, decide to withhold the book from sale in Western Australia, largely because it could not judge the effect of the changes that had been made to the state’s Obscene and Indecent Publications Act in the wake of the failed case against Joan Broomhall. Although those changes had been made with the express aim of targeting ‘certain magazines’ and not ‘bona fide writers’, there was sufficient concern from Angus & Robertson that a prosecution could follow if they distributed the book in Western Australia. Their decision to withhold it from sale was embarrassing; according to one Perth journalist, people in the state were ‘writhing’ from the knowledge that they were being bracketed with Queensland in the censorship fights.30
But then there was the election, on 2 December. The Labor Party, led by Gough Whitlam, with his promises in healthcare, education, taxation, and the arts, won office — and, in a series of swift decisions, began to dismantle the book censorship regime. On 19 December, responsibility for censorship was transferred to the Department of the Attorney-General. From then on, it was no longer the remit of the Department of Customs to search luggage bags for banned literature; nor was it up to the department to determine whether material should be banned. The days of acting as a protector of the nation’s virtues and morality were over.31 As the subsequent advice to Customs officers had it, ‘The customs role in censorship matters will … progressively diminish.’32
It was the moment where everything changed — punctuated, perhaps fittingly, by the Whitlam government’s decision that same month to allow into Australia the Warner Bros.’ film adaptation of Portnoy’s Complaint.
CHAPTER 17
Stories of Australian censorship
A year after the Portnoy trials ended, John Hooker went to the US and met the man whose book had spurred the whole affair. Philip Roth had not resiled from controversy in the three years since he had published Portnoy’s Complaint. He had since published a caustic and satirical roman à clef of US president Richard Nixon, Our Gang (1971), and a surreal homage to Kafka, The Breast (1972). But he had grown weary of the notoriety that Portnoy continued to attract — to the point that, during the fight over his novel in Australia, he had allowed his agent to say only that he was ‘amused’ by the whole affair. Thus, at Hooker’s explanation of what had happened, Roth deadpanned: ‘I suppose, after me, all the shits came in?’1
There was something to this, as Hooker acknowledged. In its efforts to reform the censorship system so that adults could choose what they wanted to read and view — whittling the list of banned books down to zero, and declining to use section 4 of the Customs Act to ban books and launch prosecutions — the Whitlam government all but did away with the controls that could keep publications out of Australia. In light of this, the state and federal governments had to negotiate an agreement to provide a new approach to writing that claimed no literary or artistic merit — that is, to pornography. The agreement they reached shifted the onus of reg
ulations onto the point of sale. Imported and domestically produced works would be classified by the federal government according to agreed-upon guidelines, and those works would be subject to restrictions on how they could be displayed and sold. The aim was to simultaneously ensure the freedom of access to material for adults, to protect children, and to prevent public offence.
Along with the growth of the American pornography industry and the proliferation of domestic publications — made possible by continued innovation in printing technology — the result was a dramatic increase in the availability of and demand for pornography in Australia. By 1974, the New South Wales government was complaining that Sydney had been ‘flooded’ by pornography.2 The shits, as Roth had suggested, had certainly come in. Those who won most from the censorship fights, Richard Walsh said later, were the producers of pornography: ‘They were the ones who took advantage, and got the most advantage.’3
There were attempts to stem the tide. The Queensland Literature Board of Review sought to step in where the federal government had retreated, and set about prohibiting an increasing amount of material. It banned ninety-three publications in 1972–73, sixty-seven in 1973–74, eighty-two in 1974–75, and eighty-six in 1975–76. In its annual report for 1973–74, in a section titled ‘A Nation of Voyeurs’, the board argued that its prohibitions had nothing to do with the individual’s freedom to read:
The Trials of Portnoy Page 26