Ban the Book

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday October 2, 2014

A favourite American ad depicts two little girls sitting on a classroom floor. One holds a Little Red Riding Hood picture book in her hands; the other holds a huge military assault rifle. The headline asks: "One child is holding something that's been banned in America to protect them. Guess which one." The answer, of course, is the story book. Red Riding Hood has a wine bottle in her basket, for grandma.

The ad is from "Moms Demand Action", a large movement fighting America's gun-toting insanity. But what intrigues me is the amount of censorship still rife both abroad and at home. There's an awful lot of banning going on and sometimes we're not even aware of it.

There are books we do know about, though who bans them and where can vary. Tampa by Alissa Nutting is the latest controversy. The ban is not by the Classification Board, but by some booksellers in some states. The story of a beautiful young schoolteacher seducing her 14 year old pupils rang lots of alarms in these days of paedophilia fear. Yet some commentators have recommended that the book be required reading in schools, to make the children aware of possible dangers.

Where does one draw the line - and by whom? Politicians are fond of tub-thumping morality as we saw in Bill Henson's 2008 case where his moody nude portraits were accused of being pornographic. For a while it looked like we would get back to painting fig leaves on Renaissance angels. But it shows how moral fashions can twist and turn in little time.

An exhibition in the University of Melbourne, "Banned Books in Australia", pointed out that "Twentieth century Australia had the strictest censorship of any democratic nation". This is backed by an impressive list of banned titles. From Honore de Balzac in 1901 to James Baldwin, to Jackie Collins and even Daniel Defoe. Most of Genet, James Joyce, Mae West and all of Henry Miller.

No wonder, by the 60s, our youth were ready to rebel - if you saw Brilliant Creatures on TV last month, you watched as Australia's suppressed youth exploded into the world, in the shapes of Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Robert Hughes and Clive James. Simultaneously Richard Neville and friends trampled British obscenity laws in the Oz trial.

In Australia and Britain the young carried out constant war against censorship. In Melbourne the stern Deputy Premier Sir Arthur Rylah declared that the statuette of Michaelangelo's David was obscene, placed as it was in a shop window for all to see the young man's attributes, and ordered it covered up. He became a national laughing stock and after that it would take a very brave bigot to make such bold declarations.

In movies, the theatre, on stage, and of course in books, it looked as if the issue of censorship had faded away.

But of course it hasn't. It's still with us, but in different guises, it's a whole new censorship. For very good reasons of course, but I still feel suspicious of it. Taking photographs of children in a park. Staring too long at a pretty girl - is it admiration or is it stalking? Or even our Red Riding Hood carrying a basket to her nanna's - is that a bottle of alcohol under the napkin?

I'm even feeling sorry for smokers, as they are driven further out into the wilderness. You see them huddled against the cold rain or the burning sun, clutching their weed sticks.

Collectively, we can be awfully cruel censors.