sources and studies

This page considers studies of censorship in Australia and New Zealand, along with sources for analysis of the Australian and New Zealand censorship regimes, for example legislation, archival documentation and official reports.

It covers -

• historical overviews
• legislation - enactments and parliamentary inquiries
• law reform discussion papers and reports
• government agencies - reports and archival documentation
• advocacy groups - the ACCL, EFA and other bodies
• media studies - works on film, literature and broadcast censorship
• hot & cold wars - 'blue pencil warriors' and the D Notice regime
• individuals and cases - works about Goossens and other figures
• accessing the censored

     historical overviews

As a useful point of entry we recommend The High Price Of Heaven (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 1999) by David Marr, author of major biographies of Patrick White and Garfield Barwick.

It is complemented by Peter Coleman's Obscenity, Blasphemy & Sedition: The Rise & Fall of Literary Censorship in Australia (Potts Point: Duffy & Snellgrove 2000), Paul Wilson's concise Dealing with Pornography: The Case Against Censorship (Sydney: Uni of New South Wales Press 1995), Helen Vnuk's Snatched: Sex & Censorship in Australia (Milsons Point: Random 2003) and Roger Douglas' 2002 study Saving Australia from Sedition: Customs, the Attorney-General's Department and the Administration of Peacetime Political Censorship. James Cockington's Banned: Tales from the Bizarre History of Australian Obscenity (Sydney: ABC Books 2005) is entertaining but provides no details of sources.

A key source for understanding the New Zealand regime is In the public good? Censorship in New Zealand (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press 1998) by Chris Watson & Roy Shuker. The official brief overview (PDF) from the NZ Office of Film & Literature Classification has some value.

For a perspective on book-banning see Brought to Book: Censorship & School Libraries in Australia (Port Melbourne: ALIA Thorpe 93) by Claire Williams & Ken Dillon, C.E Beeby's Books You Couldn't Buy: Censorship in New Zealand (Wellington: Price Milburn 1981) and Australia's Censorship Crisis: The Uncensored Examination of Australian Censorship (Melbourne: Sun Books 1970) edited by Geoffrey Dutton & Max Harris.

     legislation

Current Australian Commonwealth and state/territory legislation is highlighted here.

Access to colonial and superseded Commonwealth, state, territory legislation (enactments and regulations) poses more of a challenge. Little of the legislation is publicly online; researchers must perforce rely on major libraries.

Detailed academic analysis of particular proposals and enactments is found in the serial literature.

A background brief on Censorship & Classification in Australia was published by the federal Parliamentary Library in 2001.

Reports by parliamentary committee and Hansard coverage of debates are invaluable. At the Commonwealth level these include -

part 2 (1996) and part 3 (1997) of reports by the Senate Select Committee on Community Standards Relevant to the Supply of Services Utilising Electronic Technologies regarding the Regulation of Computer On-Line Services

Pre-1980s Commonwealth and state/territory material is unfortunately not online, another demonstration of the myth that 'everything' is available in cyberspace.

For the Commonwealth Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999 (BSA Act) - the cornerstone of the online content regulatory scheme - see Carolyn Penfold's intelligent 2002 paper Internet Content Regulation in Australia; Perceptions Thus Far, which teases out issues noted in her 2001 paper on Nazis, Porn & Politics: Asserting Control Over Internet Content and Peter Chen's 2000 thesis.

For the landmark UK Obscene Publications Act a perspective is provided by Michael Roberts' 'Morals, Art & the Law: The Passing of the Obscene Publications Act 1857' in Victorian Studies (1985: 28)

     law reform discussion papers & reports

Reports by the Commonwealth and state law reform and criminology research bodies are of particular value. These include the 1994 New South Wales Law Reform Commission Blasphemy report and the Australian Law Reform Commission's 1991 report on Film & Literature Censorship Procedure.

     government agencies

An understanding of how past regimes operated is inhibited by -

• the range of participants (eg the Australian Customs, state police forces, justice departments and Commonwealth/state classification agencies)
• the disarray (and poor survival) of archival documentation relating to policy development and administration
• the scattered nature of archival material, parliamentary debates and press coverage of prosecutions or 'scandals'.

There is a discussion of current agencies later in this profile. Few of those agencies have been the subject of detailed academic investigation. For the NZ Customs Service see The Guardians at the Gate (Wellington: Silver Owl Press 1990) by David McGill.

     advocacy groups

There has been surprisingly little scholarly attention to the history of Australian civil liberties groups and opponents such as the Festival of Light.

For the ACCL see Adam Carr's 1997 thesis Intellectuals and Politics in 1930s Melbourne: Events leading to the formation of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, 1914-37 (1997).

     media studies

Australian Media Law (Sydney: LBC Information Services 1999) by Des Butler & Sharon Rodrick offers a point of entry to Australian media law.

For literary censorship see in particular Joanna Parkinson's 'Australia's Trustees: the Censor and Literary Censorship, 1929-1937'. There has been no major work on adult/child comic censorship; sidelights are provided in Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni Press 1999) edited by John Lent. Denis Cryle's 1996 paper Culture and Commerce: Gordon & Gotch Ltd in Australia 1890-1940 notes the role of the dominant journal distributor in censorship.

The major work on film censorship remains Ina Bertrand's indispensable Film Censorship in Australia (St Lucia: Uni of Qld Press 1978), complemented by Sonia Walker's brief 2002 paper Film Censorship In Western Australia: Public, Government & Industry Responses 1898-1928. Liza Sigel's crisp Governing Pleasures: Pornography & Social Change in England, 1815-1914 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni Press 2002) offers perspectives on supply, demand and postal treatment of feelthy pictures.

For computer games censorship see in particular Anthony Larme's site.

     hot and cold wars

Much of the writing about defence/intelligence censorship is embedded in journals (rarely online) and academic monographs.

For the D Notice scheme see Pauline Sadler's 2000 Australian Press Council article and her National Security & the D-Notice System (Aldershot: Ashgate 2001).

The site of the UK DA committee and Alan Palmer's 'The History of the D-notice Committee' in The Missing Dimension: Governments & Intelligence Communities in the 20th Century (London: Macmillan 1984) edited by Christopher Andrew & David Dilks are also suggestive.

For 1939-45 military censorship see John Hilvert's Blue Pencil Warriors: Censorship and propaganda in World War II (St Lucia: Uni of Queensland Press 1984) and studies of individual media groups featured on the Ketupa.net site. These include Gavin Souter's Company of Heralds (Melbourne: Melbourne Uni Press 1981), Bridget Griffen-Foley's Sir Frank Packer: The Young Master (Sydney: Collins 2000) and The House of Packer: The Making Of An Empire (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 1999) and Ross Fitzgerald's Red Ted: The Life of E G Theodore (St Lucia: Uni of Qld Press 1994) or RB Walker's Yesterday's News, A History of the Newspaper Press in New South Wales from 1920 to 1945 (Sydney: Sydney Uni Press 1980). Secrecy: Political Censorship in Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson 1972)

The anti-communist crusade features in Susan McKernan's 'Literature In A Straitjacket', in Australia's First Cold War: Vol 1 - Society, Communism & Culture (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1984) edited by Anne Curthoys & John Merritt and The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1998) by Stuart Macintyre.

     individuals and cases

For an account of key writers and anti-censorship campaigners such as Norman Lindsay and Frank Hardy see Sense & Censorship: Commentaries on Censorship Violence in Australia (Melbourne: Reed Books 1990) by Michael Pollak.

The Wobblies feature in Sydney's Burning: An Australian Political Conspiracy (Melbourne: Heinemann 1967) by Ian Turner.

For the Goossens Case see Strange Case of Eugene Goossens & Other Tales from the Opera House (New York: HarperCollins 1988) by Ava Hubble and Cockington's more anecdotal 2005 Banned.

Fred Nile's Fred Nile: An Autobiography (Sydney: Strand 2001) and Tess Livingston's George Pell (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove 2002) should be read in conjunction with works such as The High Price Of Heaven (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 1999) by David Marr and For God & Country: Religious Dynamics in Australian Federal Politics (Canberra: Parliament of Australia 2001) and God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right In Australian Politics (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin 2005) by Marion Maddox.

     accessing the censored?

Access to what has been censored in the past is uneven.

The records of most government agencies (for example the federal Attorney-General's Department, federal police force and Customs Service) that have been transferred to archival custody contain few examples of confiscated magazines, films, comics or photographs.

The National Archives of Australia does not, for example, to hold a discrete and large-scale collection of pornography, accessible to the public or otherwise. Collections within universities and collecting institutions such as the Grainger Museum or National Gallery are spotty, poorly described (when described at all) and generally only available on a restricted basis. There is no major collection equivalent to that of the Kinsey Institute.

In contrast, much writing that was banned on political grounds or as an affront to past mores (eg because it dealt with emancipation, family planning, divorce and 'perversion') is now available in university libraries, often in secondary storage given the increasingly antiquarian nature of works such as Forever Amber or tracts from the International Workers of the World.

A perspective is provided in Edgar Crook's 2000 Erotica in Australian Libraries: Are We Negligent Collection Managers? paper.

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