Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  The Federated Housewives’ Association was a consumer cooperative in Victoria. It campaigned against rising prices during World War II and ran housewives’ tearooms. Fuelled by post-war discontent in the late 1940s, it carried its campaign into the failure of governments to address the management of the modern household, and inflation and price rises in the economy. The 1949 election campaign had seen the opposition Liberal Party target women voters via the Women’s Weekly, through the image of the housewife beset by Labor government interference in her daily shopping. But Ben Chifley’s price control referendum of March 1948, designed to protect the family from high prices, had been rejected, and the powers of the Commonwealth Prices Commissioner were rescinded by Menzies by 1950, and inflation and profiteering abounded during the transition from a government-dominated economy to one more driven by the market.

  The Federated Housewives’ Association had presented a Bill of Rights for the Home to the premier of Victoria, Tom Holloway, in 1948: ‘Following the lead of English-speaking nations in preceding centuries, when human rights have been demanded by those nations and later by the Commission of the UNO [United Nations Organization], it is felt that the time is right for a Victorian Bill of Rights for the Home, since the maintenance of the British Empire depends on the happiness and solvency of the homes of its citizens.’ The rights of women at home should be their ability to retain savings from housekeeping allowances, to be insured against accident, to share in the deceased husband’s estate, as well as access to child endowment and to comfortable and convenient homes with labour-saving appliances. Better preparation for marriage was called for: compulsory homecraft training for at least one year for all girls.

  By 1954 the New South Wales branch of the Housewives’ Association was assuring women, ‘Your problem is ours.’ One of the objectives was to give advice, and expose all existing evils that caused the housewife worry and discomfort, and even to organise the boycotting of unsympathetic or unethical businesses.

  The rival Progressive Housewives’ Association was formed in Sydney in June 1946 by a group of women linked to the Australian Communist Party and who had marched as housewives alongside trade unionists in the 1946 May Day march. It pointed out that it took £12 a week to maintain a decent living standard for a family and ‘yet the basic wage is only £7 2 shillings’.

  By 1950 so many women had joined the workforce that the Housewives’ Association became the Union of Australian Women. The woman was now caught between the kitchen and the workplace.

  THOSE NASTY BOOKS

  Meeting ships and planes, members of Australian Customs had always seen part of their duty as intercepting questionable literary material they would send to their department for adjudication. Members of the public could complain about books as well. Sir Robert Garran, the great jurist and historian and interpreter of the Constitution, was chairman of the Australian Commonwealth Book Censorship Board in the 1930s and upheld, for example, a complaint against George Orwell’s third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, as possessing no literary merit and being indecent. Books which were the subject of Customs seizure or public complaints went to the Minister for Customs for final decision.

  In the early days it was under Customs General Order 890 that books were banned, such as Rabelais’s The Heroic Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, which was banned from 1926 to 1929. By March 1936, General Order 890 listed 513 titles. Nettie Palmer, Australian writer, said that arguing with the censor was like ‘wrestling with fog’.

  Frank Forde, Minister for Customs in June 1930, was approached by a delegation of writers, journalists and booksellers and asked to lift the ban on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, James Joyce’s Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Forde stood firm. The Australian writer Jean Devanny had the distinction in 1929 of being the first Australian (albeit New Zealand-born) writer to be added to the list, with her The Butcher Shop banned as a prohibited import. On 18 June 1930, Norman Lindsay’s exposé of a country town, Redheap, joined The Butcher Shop on the banned list.

  As well as these federal powers, there was a patchwork of powers allowing the states to ban literary works. The Australian authorities approved very much of British Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks’ 1928 address to the writers of Britain: ‘The tone of the Empire comes from the authors of our land. If the tone is pure, the blood will go on pulsating through the whole world, carrying with it purity and safety. If the stream of the blood is impure, nobody can tell the effect it will have right through our Empire.’

  It is easy to parody the censors, but after banning A Private Anthropological Cabinet by Robert Meadows, 500 Photographs and Drawings, published in 1934, they were pilloried for being lenient on Professor Paolo Mantegazza’s The Sexual Relations of Mankind, first published in English in 1932. In May 1937, it was passed by the renamed Literature Censorship Board (LCB) for restricted release to libraries, on the strength of Professor Mantegazza’s work as a ‘pioneer in the field of sex-psychology’.

  In June 1934, Garran took a sane line, restricted release, in the matter of Norman Lindsay’s The Age of Consent, arguing that: ‘Literature cannot be trimmed down to the standard of a mid-Victorian young ladies academy. A very wide freedom of expression and treatment must be accorded to a writer of an honest study of any aspect of life. Exactly what limits the law sets today to this freedom it is not easy to say.’ Garran’s liberalism was less strict than the inclination of Customs and its ministers. In 1937 Keith Binns replaced Garran. Binns would later become an Appeals Censor, serving until 1966.

  Australian authorities throughout World War II and afterwards were proud to reject publications accepted in New York and London (including Christina Stead’s Letty Fox), and to maintain the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But post-war controls were complicated by the entry of books in Italian, German, Czech and Slavic, many of which may have been seditious or erotic, but the immigrants weren’t telling.

  Three literary boards subject to altered mandates succeeded each other in 1933, 1957 and 1967. The Australian Literature Censorship Board (LCB) sat from 1933 to 1957. The LCB was then reconstructed in 1967 as the National Literature Board of Review.

  There were strange anomalies. Amongst the work of other writers, Jean Devanny’s The Virtuous Courtesan was banned in 1936 but Martin Boyd’s The Night of the Party was passed. The British edition of Love Me Sailor, the Australian author Robert Close’s earthy novel of Kings Cross, Sydney, was passed by the board but banned by the minister in 1950. On a state level, Angry Penguins, an Adelaide journal edited by Max Harris and John Reed, was in September 1944 convicted of obscenity and fined under Section 108 of South Australia’s Police Offences Act.

  In 1946, Angry Penguins published an essay on obscenity by American Henry Miller, whose three novels were banned in every English-speaking country. In Melbourne a struggling realist writer named Robert Close, an earnest battler who had worked in a number of trades but loved the sea, read Miller’s essay in the broadsheet and felt that he had fulfilled the principles outlined by Miller, who had said, in the wake of the terrible war, ‘What is obscene then? The whole fabric of life as we know it today.’

  The earliest action against Close’s Love Me Sailor was the prosecution of three Adelaide booksellers by a zealous Detective Vogelesang, a specialist in obscenity matters. Close and his publisher had tried to escape obvious trouble by using the term ‘to rut’ to cover sexual intercourse. That would not save them. The prosecution’s main objection to the book was its ‘sailors’ language’—in fact most insistently the use of the word ‘rutting’. The lawyers pointed specifically to the mention of a ‘rutting gesture’ and in court asked Close to demonstrate what that meant. In a letter to Close, Henry Miller asked him if ‘rut’ was his word or a real sailors’ word, and Close proudly admitted he had thought of it himself: ‘I did use it as a substitute for “fuck”.’ The novel concerns a Miss Miller, a seductress who travels as a passenger on a clipper ship. She is of course a
centre of storminess and desire amongst the crew and is ultimately drowned. The sailors’ dialogue and remembrance of brothels were considered a great problem. The Crown Prosecutor from the Adelaide Police Court declared, ‘The height of indecency seems to have been reached with Close’s description of the second mate taking a cabin boy on his first visit to a brothel.’

  The first time the booksellers were charged, in 1946, it was with an obscure offence named ‘obscene libel’ (the ‘libel’ being one directed not to an individual but the public). The book was a national sensation by then. A literary critic who was a friend of Close’s, Ian Mair, shared a beer with the foreman of the jury and thus invalidated the trial. The entire text of the novel had been read to the jury by the defence and then by the prosecution. The retrial, held in the same year, was presided over by Justice Fred Martin, who would sit on Frank Hardy’s trial for criminal libel in his Power Without Glory five years later. The second trial was abortive, but the third, before the Victorian Supreme Court, led to Close and his publisher receiving gaol terms and fines. The obscenity judgment from the 1868 Hicklin case in Britain was quoted by Justice Herring before the Supreme Court: ‘It is not everything that is filthy that comes within the criminal law, there must also be a tendency . . . to deprave and corrupt people whose minds are susceptible to corruption and into whose hands [the book] may fall.’ Handcuffed in the courtroom, Close was taken down and driven to Pentridge to serve a three-month sentence.

  Close’s gaoling for obscenity shocked Australians and rebounded on Australia internationally. He was supported by the Fellowship of Australian Writers, the Australian Journalists’ Association, the Council of Civil Liberties, and International PEN. Novelist, lawyer and anti-censorship campaigner Leonard Mann declared that people of all kinds of political and other opinions had been dismayed ‘by the recent revelation of the state of the law and by what has happened under it’. Close’s sentence was reduced on appeal to ten days. But the appeal judgment still sought to affirm a standard for obscenity that could be punished by prosecution. Love Me Sailor remained a banned book, after all. Justice Fullagar fumbled his way to the fuzzy principle that ‘there does exist in any community at all times—however the standard may vary from time to time—a general instinctive sense of what is decent and what is indecent, of what is clean and what is dirty’.

  By 1950 Close had left for Europe, and he did not return to his homeland for twenty-five years. Nothing else that he would write in his lifetime would have such dramatic results. The publicity for the book was redoubled when his English publisher brought a case against the UK Minister of Customs, and the British public bought copies feverishly, allowing Close to live a comfortable life of exile in Madeira and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The French edition, entitled Prends-Moi, Matelot!, sold splendidly in an era where there was never much protest against the depiction of women as simple objects and radiators of male desire. On those grounds the apostle of Venus, Norman Lindsay, found Close’s book ‘wowseristic’.

  The lengthy delay between the Adelaide prosecution, the Victorian charge, and the three Love Me Sailor trials meant that there were years in which the outcome was uncertain but the threat was clear.

  In 1946, Angus & Robertson had become the first Australian publishers of fiction to be convicted of obscenity, over We Were the Rats by the World War II veteran Lawson Glassop. Part of the problem was the inclusion of watered-down lines from the 1892 ballad ‘The Bastard from the Bush’:

  ‘If ya had a harlot to support ya

  Would ya give up work for good?’

  And the bastard from the bush replied,

  ‘My _ _ _ _ oath, I would.’

  ‘Would you knock a man down an’ rob ’im?’

  Asked the leader of the push.

  ‘I’d knock ’im down an’ _ _ _ _ him,’

  Said the bastard from the bush.

  A Tasmanian women’s group had approached the Minister for Customs to complain about Glassop’s work, and he shifted the buck to the Chief Secretary of New South Wales, the state in which the book was published. The Chief Secretary took action against the book. In April 1946, the publisher was taken to court and fined ten pounds for breaching the state’s Obscene Publications Act. The decision rested not only on the bowdlerised version of ‘The Bastard from the Bush’; the police took particular exception to Chapter 31, in which Australian soldiers talked over a copy of an American girlie magazine. Angus & Robertson withdrew We Were the Rats and it remained out of print for fifteen years. It was republished in an expurgated version from which Chapter 31 had been cut.

  In his fictionalised autobiography, whimsically entitled Fairyland, the expatriate Australian writer Sumner Locke Elliott described Sydney in the 1940s. In Fairyland, Locke Elliott came of age with a successful job as a writer for children’s radio but he does not know what it is about him that makes him feel he does not fit. He meets an American and knows from his conversation that he must leave Australia, and in the late 1940s takes a plane for the United States. He was by then a banned playwright of the play Rusty Bugles, banned by the New South Wales Chief Secretary, Labor’s Jack Baddeley, for its blasphemous and indecent dialogue. The New South Wales police enforced the state’s Theatres and Public Halls Act in October 1949 to close down Rusty Bugles, even though the dialogue between soldiers extended its profanity only as far as ‘bugger’ and ‘bastard’ (clearly Labor infighting had never been laced with such prurient words). After the banning, Rusty Bugles was presented in a marquee set up in Sydney’s Rushcutters Bay, with no theatre company named. Marquees did not fall under the Act. Locke Elliott became one of the doyens of US television drama writers.

  The Catcher in the Rye scandal of 1957 provoked the first major review of censorship administration. Copies of J.D. Salinger’s work had been seized by Customs, but Harold White, the National Librarian, noticed a copy of it in the Parliamentary Library. White was obliged to remove it because the book had been banned in Australia since 21 August 1956 by Customs without reference to the Literary Censorship Board.

  Commentator Peter Coleman pointed out in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald that ambassadors of the United States had donated copies of the book with other American books to foreign libraries as an example of American literature. The Sun-Herald noted that The Catcher in the Rye was on set reading lists in American universities, although it is true that the title had attracted hostility from American schools and libraries.

  The LCB sat on the matter and decided that although it seemed that American teenagers were freer in their manners than Australians and although the ‘great Anglo-Saxon adjective’ appeared several times, ‘the important thing is that the boy’s attitude is essentially chaste’. The Board recommended the release of the book, and the minister acted on its advice. The Minister for Customs, Denham Henty, decreed that all books of literary pretension be referred to the Board from that point on.

  As a result of the Catcher contretemps, there was a reform in censorship. The minister announced that the entire banned list was to be reviewed for the first time in its history by LCB members, and these reviews would be repeated every five years. The list was then to be made public and gazetted in Parliament. A woman was to be appointed to the LCB, and university libraries would be permitted to import titles on the restricted circulation list without requiring specific permission from Customs. The Sun-Herald reported that ‘the first spring cleaning since Federation of the secret list of banned literature in Australia is now in progress’.

  Coleman, later an arts conservative but at this stage of his life a libertarian, celebrated the release of such works as Redheap, God’s Little Acre, Appointment in Samarra and Apples Be Ripe. Devanny’s The Butcher Shop, on the banned list since 1929, was also released, as was Christina Stead’s Letty Fox and John Dos Passos’s 1919. So were Oscar Wilde’s translations of Petronius’ Satyricon and The Love Poems of Ovid, as well as Boccaccio’s Decameron and Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass.

  Letty Fox: H
er Luck was the work of a brilliant writer born in the St George area of Sydney and married to the left-wing and highly cultivated American banker William Blake. An account of a girl’s wartime adventures in New York, it would be banned in Australia from 1947 to 1956—Stead’s only novel banned in Australia and not anywhere else in the world, even though one American critic described it as ‘saturated with sex’. This hostile review had been much commented upon in the Australian press, and Customs intercepted a copy early in 1947 and forwarded it to the Censorship Board. The Board wrote, ‘The authoress has a powerful intellect. It is all the more regrettable that she should have used it injudiciously. The book should be banned.’