trends and topographies

This page covers -

• orientation - making sense of censorship since the 1780s
• trajectories - a shift from prohibition to classification?
• secularisation and secrets - from blasphemy to contemporary hate speech and recognition of customary law
• cartographies of danger - anxieties about the Tsar, the Bolsheviks, the Rising Sun, Hollywood, the jihadis and other perils 'out there'
• symbols and sedition - exemplary prosecution for what is carried and said rather than what is done
• privatisation of the body - consenting adults behind closed doors?
• cooption, repressive tolerance and commercial self-censorship
• the big chill - defamation, sedition and whistleblowing in Australasia

Particular questions are explored in more detail in the Censorship & Free Speech guide elsewhere on this site.

     orientation

Contrary to the assertions of some enthusiasts, regulation of content on the net is neither uniquely problematical or without precedent. Australian and overseas legislation and industry codes are situated within an economic, cultural and legal context.

One way of understanding internet censorship legislation and issues is to examine the history of content regulation, particularly because Australian and New Zealand regulatory mechanisms build on past practice - they are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary.

Such an examination highlights the importance of individual action in application of codes and law, since in some periods legislation was tacitly disregarded by bureaucracies and in other periods was directed against figures such as the sadly unappreciated Christina Stead. Her Letty Fox, Her Luck was banned by the Commonwealth in 1946, followed by A Little Tea, a Little Chat in 1948 ... joining works such as Boccaccio's Decameron, Huxley's Brave New World and Norman Lindsay's Redheap. In Australia differing responsibilities led to significant variation in policy and practice across the colonies and states.

An examination also highlights successive waves of anxiety in Australia and New Zealand - for example regarding silent films, comics and 'video nasties' - which appear and disappear, leaving behind legislation, regulatory bodies and an academic dissertation or two about past moral panics. Forever Amber vies with Lolita and American Psycho, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Boys in the Band confronts Pasolini's Salò.

As we noted in the Censorship guide, much writing about content regulation is polemical. Much is devoted to individual incidents, often portrayed - Whig-style - as landmarks in a long and often interrupted but ultimately triumpant march to enlightenment. There are few statistics and fewer comprehensive studies.

   next page (Australia to 1968)