Literary censorship in Australia

Some readers may have difficulty understanding why a serious novel cannot be published in a developed nation like Australia.

Perhaps this is most difficult to comprehend from an American point of view. American writers and publishers are protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression. This guarantee applies to books evoking explicit sexual images, as the U.S. Supreme Court decided on March 21, 1966, when it overturned the 1873 anti-obscenity Comstock Act.

Australia has no First Amendment, nor any similar guarantee of free expression. Instead, it has an Office of Film and Literature Classification, which has the power to censor literature.

In November 1998, Kathryn Paterson was appointed Director of the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Ms Paterson had spent the previous five years as Chief Censor in New Zealand. During her term of office in New Zealand Ms Paterson banned a T-shirt adorned with a sexual cartoon, the "humour" of which she herself recognised. According to The Weekend Australian (November 21-22, 1998, p. 22), "She is on record as saying she has no problem with sexually explicit material, as long as it is not available to children and is not degrading or dehumanising".

Rachel - a story of obsessive love is a novel concerned with masochistic sexual obsession. It therefore contains specific descriptions of masochistic sexuality. Masochism is, almost by definition, "degrading and dehumanising" - regardless of the fact that the participant actually enjoys such treatment. (For the record, Rachel would be as incomprehensible to children as, say, Lady Chatterley's Lover or Fanny Hill. It is, however, largely concerned with a quest for degradation.)

This is not to say that the Office of Film and Literature Classification would necessarily ban a book like Rachel. The real problem is the climate of uncertainty. This was perhaps best explained by Charles Rembar. He was the U.S. lawyer representing publishers of erotic literature at the 1966 Supreme Court case. Arguing against state-by-state censorship in the U.S., Renbar told the Court that:

... the economics of publishing are such that the prospect of the loss of part of the national market may well produce negative decisions on whether or not a particular book will be published. The problem is not so much with the big best seller. The problem is with the first work of a new writer, or the work of an established writer whose merit has been recognized but whose books are marginal so far as economic return is concerned. If publishers do not have constitutional principles of nationwide application to go by - if distribution in some states is foreclosed or unpredictable - there will inevitably be a self-imposed censorship.

Effectively, Australia is a whole nation in which distribution may be "foreclosed or unpredictable".

This factor of unpredictability may explain why one of Australia's major publishers said of Rachel, "It is certainly a very powerful novel", but added "In its present or even a slightly modified form I can't see a major Australian publisher taking on the book".

There is perhaps a further problem.

Australian publishers have strong links to British publishing firms. Given the small print-runs of even the most successful Australian novels, publishers naturally hope to see a U.K. edition of their books succeed. But in Britain, the largest chain of bookshops/newsagents has a strict code of ethics banning depictions of specified sexual acts.

Rachel would fail their test. (Two decades ago Fleet Street's hottest columnist of the day, Julie Burchill, included all of these proscribed sexual acts in the first draft of her best-seller Ambition. The publishers, Bodley Head, forced her to remove them for fear of offending the big book chains.)

It is therefore clear that Rachel could only be published in a nation where freedom of artistic expression is constitutionally protected.

Which is why this web page has been created. If the major publisher quoted above is correct, Rachel is "a very powerful novel", and presumably deserves to achieve publication. Yet for the reasons already given, publication in Australia is impossible. Rachel is therefore a "refugee novel" that has to be published in America.

NOTE: Kathryn Paterson died at the age of 36 in September 1999.  New, much stronger censorship guidelines were introduced in October 2000. Even before the new rules were introduced, a film had been banned solely because a female character in it said she was going to "spank her monkey". Since then, with both main political parties chasing votes in key marginal seats, the Office of Film and Literature Classification has been under even more pressure to further tighten the guidelines.

 

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