They included Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), D.H. Many books had been banned from importation from the 1930s to the 1960s. The federal government had also added a Literature Censorship Board, on which a mix of scholars and bureaucrats determined the fate of books. As Nicole Moore shows in her 2012 book, The Censor’s Library, the system brought together the customs system, postal regulation and various other legal mechanisms. Dating back to the late nineteenth century when the novels of Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac and Guy Maupassant were considered too racy and radical for the Australian reading public, the multilayered system grew especially fierce through the interwar period. His new book takes us on a fascinating journey through the final years of Australia’s literary censorship system, deftly telling the story of the many obscenity trials prompted by sales of Roth’s controversial novel in this country.Īustralia’s censorship regime was a complex one, involving federal and state mechanisms designed to prevent offending books from being published, sold and circulated. Patrick Mullins is the recent winner of the NSW Premier’s Douglas Stewart prize for his previous book, Tiberius with a Telephone: The Life and Stories of William McMahon (Scribe, 2018). By the end of 1972 the system would be in tatters. The great test of Australia’s censorship regime was in motion. “It was like the Germans going into Poland in 1939,” observed John Hooker, Penguin Australia’s New Zealand–born publisher. In August 1970 thousands of copies of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint were printed and distributed in absolute secrecy to booksellers and wholesalers across Australia.
The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin Brought Down Australia’s Censorship Systemīy Patrick Mullins | Scribe | $35 | 336 pages
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