School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Ken Gelder This paper will look at the late J.D. Salinger and his novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which was simultaneously a bestseller, a familiar set text on secondary school syllabi and a banned novel in several US states as well as in Australia. The paper will then comment on subsequent issues of censorship and plagiarism in the context of the Swedish author ‘J.D. California’s’ unauthorised sequel, Coming Through the Rye (2009), which – through its court case – raised the issue of plagiarism as tribute versus plagiarism as critique/critical distance. The paper will then offer some general thoughts about literature and sequels and plagiarism in the light of this court case.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Jane Armstrong The cause celebre in censorship in the l920s in England was the banning of Radcliffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Its trial in 1928 has been described by one commentator as ‘perhaps the most famous in the history of British censorship law’. The notoriety surrounding the case overshadowed the banning of another novel, also by a female author, in the following year. This was Norah James’ Sleeveless Errand, published in 1929 by the Scholartis Press, run by expatriate ANZAC and later noted lexicographer, Eric Partridge. Unlike The Well of Loneliness, which at least had a run in the shops before being withdrawn, all of the stock of Sleeveless Errand was seized during a raid on the offices of the Scholartis Press the day after publication. Only a few copies escaped confiscation. In a court case a few weeks later, the presiding magistrate ordered that all remaining copies were to be pulped. The novel was banned ostensibly because of its overuse of profanities. It is more likely, however, that its censoring was due to its portrayal of dissolute bohemian life in post-war London. Passages especially when they were written by a woman, such as ‘we’re bored with people who aren’t bawdy. We call them prigs and prides if they don’t want to talk about copulation at lunchtime and buggery at dinner’ shocked the arbiters of moral taste, led by James Douglas of the Sunday Express, Because of the forced pulping, Partridge lost heavily on the book. However, its banning, as is so often the case, did not stop the circulation of the text. An edition in English was published in Paris in 1929, Morrow published an American edition with minor corrections in the same year, and there were also French and German editions. A 2003 article discussing the banning of both Hall and James’ novels laments the fact that there are no official records relating to the Sleeveless Errand case, suggesting that they were either lost or destroyed, However, the relevant court case file has recently come to light, having been only released by the National Archives Office in 2005. Using these court records, Partridge’s own account of the case, newspaper reports, and contemporary and later commentary on the novel’s banning, this paper will examine the censorship of Sleeveless Errand from a history of the book viewpoint.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Jay Daniel Thompson In this paper, I address the sanitising of texts that are deemed to contain offensive cultural stereotypes. These include Joseph Conrad’s novel The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), which was re-titled The N-Word of the Narcissus when it was recently republished by a Netherlands- based company. I argue that such sanitisations are problem for several reasons. They evoke a falsely glowing image of how certain groups (for instance, blacks) have been represented throughout literary history, and (implicitly) absolve authors of blame for perpetuating hurtful ideologies such as racism. Nonetheless, I contend that it is equally problematic to label these sanitisations as examples of “politically correct censorship”. The term ‘politically correct’ has been used by right-wing commentators to describe the supposedly repressive impact of ‘progressive’ politics upon art and culture. I argue that, in using this term to attack the literary sanitisations described above, critics lend support to the theory that lefties are censors. Freedom of artistic expression is at stake here, and the blame lies squarely at the hands of postcolonialists, feminists and liberal humanists. Throughout the paper, I engage with analyses of ‘political correctness’ in literature and culture by theorists such as Richard Feldstein and Teresa Brennan. I engage also with critical responses to the sanitisation of Conrad’s novel, including media articles and blogs. I aim to make a significant contribution to debates about the politics of literary censorship.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Jenny Hocking The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (BSANZ) 2010 conference Books have long attracted an array of legal, religious and cultural prohibitions. Most spectacularly, specific books have been decried, seized and publicly destroyed by state and religious institutions. Likewise, there is a long history of conflict over the availability and matter of children's and young adult literature. But 21st-century prohibitions also extend well beyond fiction genres, with anti-terrorism legislation and bans on euthanasia criminalising possession and sale of specific 'how-to' handbooks, or even their consultation in academic research libraries.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Dennis Bryans Robert Close’s two trials for obscene libel were fought tooth and nail by the prosecution. The reason for such alarm appears partly to have arisen because publishing since the war had advanced to where the demand for novels in Australia justified printing them here. This removed censorship controls from the Customs department and left the authorities with State police powers alone with which to enforce the law. Anxiety came from a section of the public, who, having been accustomed to partaking of a carefully scrutinised diet of literature imports was shocked by even the mildest of profanities published within the country. As the law stood the police could only act on receiving a complaint, and naturally there were complaints. Close was confident of winning when a mistrial was declared because Ian Mair, an Argus journalist, was seen having lunch with the jury foreman on the last day of the first trial. After a second trial in Victoria, Close was convicted and fined £100 and sentenced to gaol for three months in April 1948. ‘In passing sentence the judge said ‘he had little doubt that Close had selected the plot of “Love Me Sailor” because it gave him opportunities for salacious writing which he considered would appeal to a number of minds in the community and would result in a large sale.’A warrant was issued empowering police to search the premises of Georgian House and destroy any copies of "Love Me Sailor," held by bookshops, librarians or newsagents. The National Library resisted calls to withdraw the novel, which continued to be sold in the ACT. Throughout the Commonwealth advocates of law-reform, publishers and booksellers increasingly demanded action, resulting in uniformity of Commonwealth laws (1966) and the removal of responsibility from the Department of Customs and Excise in March 1973.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Hui-chen Lee This paper presents a unique case where a translated Bible was banned not because of religious disagreement but due to the fact that the target language into which the Scriptures were rendered conflicted with the language policy and the political ideology initiated by the government. Taiwan was open for evangelism in 1865 and with the evangelistic activities came with translation of the Bible into Taiwanese, a derivative of the dialect spoken in Fujian, China. What is unique with this vernacular is that about 25 percent of its morphemes do not have conventional representation of the Chinese character. As a consequence, the Protestant missionaries working in Taiwan and Fujian employed the roman letter to transcribe the dialect and translate the Bible. This set of romanization scheme was generally known in Taiwan as Peh-oe-ji (POJ) ‘Vernacular Script’. After Taiwan was returned to the Nationalist Party government from the Japanese colonial rule at the end of the Second World War, Mandarin Chinese was instituted as the official language. The massive official efforts to promote Mandarin, however, resulted in a discouragement of speaking and writing in Taiwanese and ultimately a complete ban on the use of Taiwanese. In this ambience, the efforts to endow the Bible with Romanized Taiwanese continued but were taken over by Taiwanese nationals. In the late 1960s, the Catholic and Protestant scholars collaborated to retranslate the New Testament into Taiwanese. This translation, officially entitled Ko-Tan Colloquial Taiwanese Version but popularly nicknamed as “Red Cover Bible” owing to its red cover, was completed in 1872, but ended up being confiscated right after it was off the press in 1973. It has never made its way to the church and has somewhat become a mystery Bible in Taiwan, which many have heard about, but few have managed to read in its book form.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Patricia Holt Formal censorship of Australian novels published overseas was the responsibility of the Commonwealth Department of Customs and Trade. Informal censorship was the habit of book designers, publishers, distributors, and literary agents. The habits of the latter groups were influenced by the strictures and secrecy of the government. Lack of knowledge of the government’s methods and decisions meant that it was safer for the publishing industry to err on the conservative side lest it incurred onerous penalties. The strictest period of censorship of imported novels occurred between approximately 1930 and 1958, during which time the responsible Minister, and his department, frequently overstepped their authority in order to ban books that affronted their sensibilities. Nevertheless, the Commonwealth Government was never legally challenged over any of its decisions to ban. The secretiveness and the severity of the regime was only mitigated or ameliorated, from time to time, by the cleverness of certain literary intellectuals, who were formally or informally consulted over the proposed banning of particular novels. These people included Christopher Brennan, Professor Leslie H. Allen, Sir Robert Garran, Parliamentary Librarian E. R Bryan, and Kenneth Slessor. The fear of public ridicule also contained some official excess. Systemic and non-systemic methods of censorship during the first half of the twentieth century are illustrated by reference to six of Norman Lindsay’s novels for adults. Two of his novels were banned by the Commonwealth Government, but the others were affected by informal discrimination. In conclusion, this paper gauges the effect on Australian literature of such a censorship regime. But it is impossible to truly estimate the toll, because the Commonwealth Department of Customs and Trade kept records, and sought advice, only for novels that it regarded as having literary merit. Those publications falling outside this category, including comedies and cheap paperbacks, were summarily dismissed and disposed of without documentation or reference to expert opinion. This paper is sourced from published and unpublished accounts of the workings of the Commonwealth Department of Customs and Trade, the records extant in the Australian Archives, manuscripts concerning Norman Lindsay’s authorship and publishers, and textual study of the novels themselves.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Caron Eastgate Dann When Anna Leonowens wrote her memoirs about teaching the King of Siam’s family in the 1860s, the country’s government reportedly tried to prevent the book’s distribution. Margaret Landon, whose novel about Leonowens, Anna and the King of Siam, was the basis for the musical The King and I, said that when she lived in Thailand in the 1930s, Leonowens’s books were hidden by those who owned them. Today, some 90 years later, The King and I remains banned in Thailand, though Leonowens’s books are available. Leonowens, however, is branded a liar, a fraud and a sensationalist – not so much because of what she wrote, but because of what others have written about her. Most despised by Thais among Hollywood’s inventions in the film is the idea that there was a romance between the Siamese king and the foreign school teacher. This preposterous scenario was never even hinted at by Leonowens herself in her books. The romance angle is taken further in the latest film, Anna and the King (1999), in which the two are depicted as falling in love. Naturally, this film also was banned in Thailand. Though the story has been adored by generations of film- and theatre-goers, most literary critics have treated Leonowens harshly. This paper will examine how Leonowens has been damned, discredited and disregarded by critics, often for reasons of gender and class rather than content. It will also examine why the film became so popular and how it continues to influence westerners’ views of Thailand more than 50 years after its release, while the books long ago slipped into obscurity. The paper will set the ostracising of Leonowens against the jailing in 2008 of the Australian writer Harry Nicolaides. He was convicted of lèse-majesté in Thailand because a few pages in his novel, Verisimilitude, were considered offensive to the royal family (even though the book had a tiny print run and sold only seven copies). In addition, the paper will look at the banning in Thailand of two recent biographies of the current King of Thailand.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Nicole Moore Previous histories of Australian literary censorship have asserted that federal Customs withdrew from literary censorship in the early decades of the century, after its first court case became a public laughing stock in 1901. Peter Coleman’s influential Obscenity, Blasphemy and Sedition (1962) asserts that in 1928 ‘the complete list of banned works of literature was made up of three books’. This conclusion seems to have been reached on the basis of the paucity of Customs records, however, rather than on positive evidence of more liberal practice. Coleman himself suggests that Customs records were destroyed on the move from Melbourne to Canberra in 1927 and Ina Bertrand’s history of Australian film censorship records a destructive fire in the Sydney Customs House in 1926, where much censorship administration was conducted. Broader evidence suggests that, although its contents varied considerably from 1902, the banned list was much more extensive than three titles before 1928, and publications did not circulate more freely. It was maintained as Customs General Order 890 for most decades of the twentieth century. Expanding upon research for the Banned in Australia bibliography (Austlit 2008), and a forthcoming new history of literary censorship, this paper details instances of the banning of literary titles by federal censorship from 1901 to the banning of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1929. Moreover, it elaborates on the endeavour to reconstruct General Order 890, as an archival impulse in itself determined by contemporary empiricism in bibliography and a return to positivist materialism in histories of the book. What can General Order 890 tell us about the ordering of censored meaning in Australia, both its suppression and reproduction?

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Megan Richardson Robert Southey, fondly remembered as the author of ‘The Three Bears’, was in 1817 English Poet Laureate and outspoken conservative when he learnt that the publishing firm Sherwood, Neely and Jones proposed to publish his play Wat Tyler without his authority. The play had a curious history. Composed twenty-three years earlier in Southey’s radical student days and left with the publisher James Ridgway (who was at the time residing in Newgate prison), it was never published by Ridgeway and later forgotten by Southey – or so he claimed. Since it celebrated the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, it was considered seditious in some quarters in a year in which tempers were running high during the war with France and Habeas Corpus had been suspended. But there was to be no prosecution of Southey for sedition, although questions were raised in Parliament about his role in Wat Tyler‘s ensuing publicity. Rather, Southey himself sought to seek to prevent Sherwood’s publication of Wat Tyler through legal action of his own. The resulting scandal in which ‘politicians, newspapers, reviews and literary men lined up for battle’ (as said by Hoadley, ‘The Controversy over Southey’s “Wat Tyler”’, 1941, 38 Studies in Philology 81 at 96) meant that the interest in this relatively minor literary work remained alive for centuries to come. This paper considers Southey’s attempt to rely on his ‘property’ right in the manuscript to obtain an injunction to stop publication of Wat Tyler, which failed before Lord Eldon in Southey v Sherwood (1817) 2 Mer 435, and speculates about how copyright law may be used as an instrument of free speech and censorship.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Emmett Stinson In December 2005, eight books written by Muslim authors expressing anti-Western political sentiments were, on the recommendation of then Attorney General Philip Ruddock and the AFP, reviewed by the Australian Classification Board and classified “unrestricted.” In February 2006, Ruddock announced that both the Classification Board and the Classification Review Board would now be housed under the auspices of the Attorney General’s Department. Unsurprisingly, in June of the same year Ruddock appealed the Classification Board’s decision on those books, with the result that two, Join the Caravan and In Defence of the Muslim Lands, were banned. In this gesture, the system of Australian censorship became explicitly imbricated in global issues of terrorism and security. The decision prompted critical responses from a variety of sources, including the Australian Society of Authors, PEN, the University of Melbourne, and Frank Moorehouse (in his essay “The Writer in a Time of Terror”). While most of these responses attacked the Review Board’s decision through notions of human rights and free speech, I will suggest that these events are better understood through conceptual paradigms in the work of Giorgio Agamben. The Classification Board does not explicitly censor works, but rather places them under an implicit ban in which they are “refused classification.” As a result, these works are not illegal to own, but cannot be sold in bookstores or placed among the regular holdings of libraries. Such books are placed in a “state of exception” in which they are, through a legal procedure, systematically excluded from the very legal processes of classification itself. It is this very paradoxical figure that Agamben attempts to examine, in which sovereign power is able to exempt or exclude human beings (and here books) from normal legal processes through legal means; effectively the rule of law is used to enable its own suspension—a notion that Agamben grounds in the Roman juridical figure of the homo sacer. Following Agamben, I will argue that Australian censorship needs to be considered not under the framework of civil liberties, but as a raw exercise of the state’s sovereign power over its citizens.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Andrew Sergeant In 1968, the National Library of Australia acquired a collection of 135 books from the renowned booksellers, Librairie Paul Jammes in Paris. These works had formed part of a larger collection that had been put together over a number of years by Andre Jammes on the theme of books that had been banned and destroyed in 16th, 17th and 18th century France. The catalogue that was produced to advertise the collection, ‘Le Bûcher Bibliographique: Collection de Livres Condamnés Poursuivis et Détruits’, has itself been described as having ‘come to be recognised as a pioneering venture in documenting the movement of human thought that it chronicled’ (‘Librairie Jammes’, editorial article, The Book Collector vol 54 no 1, Spring 2005, p. 17). The catalogue is divided into ten sections, each with detailed notes on the books and pamphlets listed therein. The Library’s copy has been annotated in pencil, indicating the desired items (but some had already been sold by this time). The sections comprise: I. Bulles, Edits, Censures II. La Réglementation du Livre III. La Réforme. Critique et Exégèse de la Bible IV. Jansénisme et Quiétisme V. Les Jésuites VI. Pamphlets historico-satiriques VII. Politique. Théories du Gouvernement, etc VIII. Sources et Développements du Rationalisme IX. Encyclopédistes, Déistes, Matérialistes X. Livres Documentaires sur les Hérésies.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Nathan Garvey Over the last thirty years, the literature of sexual scandal has often been at the centre of scholarly re-readings of Enlightenment history, literature and politics. Yet, in the context of British book history at least, our understanding of the trade in erotica and scandalous books in the later eighteenth-century remains limited. While much attention has been devoted to aspects of this literature such as its intersection with radical politics and its significance for the history of sexuality, the question of how the trade in these books related to wider print cultures has been neglected. The common assumption that this was a ‘secret’ trade and therefore unrecoverable is not entirely borne out; for the most part, the publishing history of late eighteenth-century British erotica remains ‘hidden’ not because it was conducted in a particularly clandestine fashion, but because it has been under-researched. This paper will undertake a preliminary ‘mapping’ of the trade in scandalous books in London, ca.1770-1800. It will look at some of the landmark publications in the field, including the emergence of influential periodicals devoted to erotica and scandal, The Covent Garden Magazine (1772-1775), The Rambler’s Magazine (1783-1791), The Bon Ton Magazine (1791- 1795), and The Ranger’s Magazine (1795). I will focus on the careers of several specialist publishers of erotica, outlining their general publishing and business activities and their trade networks. The geographical location(s) of the trade within London will be illustrated with particular reference to Richard Horwood’s Plan of London and Westminster (1792-1799). The paper will also chart, as far as possible, the changing reception of scandalous books in England during the French Revolution, and detail the increasingly urgent efforts to stamp out the trade by tightening, and policing, legal definitions of obscenity and libel.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Richard Pennell This study centres on two case studies 1. The 2005-06 attempt by the Australian government to ban eight books and a film on Islamicist themes. After the Literature Classification Board did not prohibit them, the Attorney-general appealed to the Classification Review Board. This banned two books by a Palestinian jihadist theoretician, Abdullah Azzam, unanimously rejected banning five more and the film and split over (but did not ban) one by an Egyptian jihadist that motivated President Sadat’s assassins in 1981. The Board’s reasoning, outlined in its determinations, show that it framed its arguments in the context offences to general standards of morality, decency and propriety of ‘reasonable adults’ in publications dealing with sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence etc or those that ‘instructed’ in matters of crime or violence. It found that mostly these books did not remotely offend majority standards, although the Attorney General, and one Sydney newspaper, presented them as attacks on ““Western civilisation.” The books were assessed according to rules drawn up primarily to deal with sexually explicit material which conflated in the rhetoric of politicians and a histrionic press, two themes: the sexually and politically deviant. 2. The treatment by the British tabloid, The Sun of Omar Bakri Mohammed, a jihadist shaykh in a radical London mosque, whom mainstream press and political comment accused of both defrauding the welfare system and high treason. In October 2008 The Sun revealed his daughter was a pole-dancer, that her breast enhancements had been bought from her father’s welfare payments, and that she was a sexual predator. Thus a political radical was linked to soft-porn sex.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Caroline Breashears The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (BSANZ) 2010 conference Books have long attracted an array of legal, religious and cultural prohibitions. Most spectacularly, specific books have been decried, seized and publicly destroyed by state and religious institutions. Likewise, there is a long history of conflict over the availability and matter of children's and young adult literature. But 21st-century prohibitions also extend well beyond fiction genres, with anti-terrorism legislation and bans on euthanasia criminalising possession and sale of specific 'how-to' handbooks, or even their consultation in academic research libraries.