Smash Our Obscene Society: Censorship and the Student Press in 1960s Australia
WORDS BY NIX HERRIOT.
For much of the last century, Australia banned more works of literature than most other Western countries. Labelled obscene or seditious, novels ranging from James Joyce’s Ulysses to James Baldwin’s Another Country found their way onto the government’s banned list. As late as the 1960s, the majority of films screened in Australian cinemas were censored. The state’s exclusionary treatment of people under the White Australia Policy was echoed in its approach to books, pamphlets, and films. This pervasive censorship regime, explains historian Jon Piccini, was carefully “designed to enforce cultural and political conformity”.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, On Dit had been heavily censored and even ceased publication until 1944. Adelaide University Student Union President and communist activist, Elliott Johnston, was the target of controversy over his support for strikes considered contrary to the war effort. But, by the 1960s, there were signs of an emerging challenge to the repressive Cold War atmosphere that had suffocated students’ political and cultural expression.
Student newspapers, Piccini suggests, were being captured by growing protest movements and soon became Australia’s closest counterpart to America’s underground press. Students at Melbourne University took to the pages of Farrago and railed against their city’s “dingy, suburban, aggressively middle-class solemnity”. In On Dit, Empire Times and other papers, students raised their voices against injustice and celebrated the democratic power of new print technology. “We don’t have the printing resources of the establishment press,” declared Brisbane’s Society for Democratic Action, “but we do have one advantage – no one can censor our Multilith 1250”.
If conscription and the Vietnam War had catalysed an atmosphere of youth radicalism, then Australia’s censorship regime added fuel to the fire. “Youth in Australia controls nothing but the teenage gramophone record business,” complained the writer Geoffrey Dutton at the time. Bookstore owners selling objectionable publications regularly found themselves falling victim to arrest by underground members of the vice squad. Student newspapers and their editors came under close surveillance. Frustration towards the conservative Censorship Board, headed by male octogenarians, steadily mounted among students as publishing itself came to be viewed as a form of direct action. By the mid-to-late 1960s, banned books, posters, and magazines were spreading like wildfire.
In 1968, a cacophony of colourful guerrilla newssheets appeared in high schools, with titles such as Treason, Tirade, Student Power, and Out of Apathy. Students, at school and at university, were coming into increasing conflict with the structures of paternalism and everyday authoritarianism. “From our point of view,” wrote the activists behind Melbourne’s Tabloid Underground, “controversy and struggle are good since it is then that people are jolted out of complacency and re-examine their old ideas”.
In the early 1970s, Geoff Gold, a Maoist student activist at Flinders who had published Tabloid Underground, set up Gold Star Publications and, most famously, acquired the Australian rights to the Little Red Schoolbook. Mimicking Mao’s Little Red Book, this Danish publication educated students on sex, drugs, and alcohol and encouraged rebellion against school discipline and parental authority. “Democracy is built on action, and it comes from below,” the authors declared. Banned in Queensland, the book became the target of significant controversy as right-wing outrage helped sell hundreds of thousands of copies.
By the time the Little Red Schoolbook became a bestseller, activists had taken to the trenches in an all-out war against censorship. In 1968, radicals in Sydney re-published the American pamphlet, How Not to Join the Army, and had their bookshop raised and printing equipment seized by police. “Our law enforcement agency rules what we can say and how and when we fuck, what we may look at, and who cannot print what is designated as obscenity,” Empire Times editorialised in 1970. One student at Monash University even took a job on the Melbourne docks to import banned literature with the help of communist wharfies.
There was some support for these authoritarian moves and student newspapers became a particular target of sometimes hysterical controversy. Conservative politicians and public figures were particularly vocal, even urging that action be taken to suppress the publication of papers like Empire Times. “Freedom must be restricted for the benefit of everyone,” declared one Anglican cleric in Adelaide. “It’s not only pornographic,” complained an evangelical protester burning copies of Tharunka at UNSW, “the paper has a kind of Marxist-anarchist line which, together with is presentation of sex, seems aimed at undermining much that is good in our present society”.
As the Little Red Schoolbook had shown, attempts to curtail radical ideas often had the opposite effect by ensuring publicity for activists and their arguments. Students hoped to expose the hypocrisy of a nation that was happy to conscript young men to fight in Vietnam but expressed outrage at swear words and nudity. As the editors of Empire Times wrote in 1970, “Obscenity is killing kids and dropping napalm … Smash our obscene society!”.
Editors of student newspapers tested the boundaries of and raise public awareness about the stringency of Australian censorship. The publishers of Tharunka and other papers found themselves dragged into court and charged under acts which weaponised archaic concepts like depravity and corruption. In 1972, Wendy Bacon was imprisoned for publishing a sexually explicit edition of student publication Thor. But, by then, Bacon recalled, “the censorship laws were in disarray”. The actions of student radicals across the country and others had helped smash censorship, which began to evolve away from a criminal regime to its current bureaucratic classification model.
Of course, the threat of criminalisation remains, as when the Classification Board banned a satirical guide to shoplifting published by La Trobe student paper Rabelais in 1995, or when a 2013 issue of Honi Soit was pulled for its failure to censor photos of 18 vulvas. In 2022, however, free speech is threatened not so much by censorship boards, but rather by anti-protest and draconian anti-terror laws, crusades against whistle-blowers, and the corporatisation of universities. The federal police no longer raid left-wing bookshops, just the offices of trade unions and the national broadcaster.
At a time when many of the social gains of the past are being eroded, relaxed censorship laws remain an important legacy of the 1960s, alongside the interconnected victories of increased sexual freedoms, civil rights, and a less authoritarian atmosphere in high schools and universities. Activism challenging Australia’s once widely accepted censorship regime was a hallmark of the student movement worth celebrating. A revived culture of resistance, agitation, and challenging existing traditions would serve us well today.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article has been reuploaded and was originally published in 2022.