Australia to 1968

This page looks at the history of censorship in Australia, as an aid to understanding the evolution of current regulation of online content in Australia, free speech and access to information.

It covers -

• planting the flag - censorship and free speech during the early colonial period
• censorship under the self-governing colonies
• development of a national regime at federation
• the 1914-18 War and the Red Flag - wartime censorship and postwar anxiety about socialism
• the impact of new technologies such as film and broadcasting
• defending Fortress Australia - the war on Japan, comics and Hollywood
• D Notices and the Cold War
• the swinging sixties - from communism to classification?

     planting the flag

It has been conventional to characterise censorship as an ill that appeared at Federation or the War To End All Wars. In fact the regulation of speech and print predates those events by more than one hundred years: censorship arrived with the First Fleet.

European philosophers at that time pictured the lives of Australia's Indigenous peoples as blissfully free of government surveillance and restrictions on what could be said or known. Rhapsodies in the coffee houses of London, Paris or Vienna about the unspoilt state of nature were, of course, misplaced. Social interaction across the continent featured gender, age or other constraints on the transmission of information (eg punitive sanctions against revealing secrets to women or uninitiated men). Persistence of such constraints is evident in works as various as the Margaret Simons' The Meeting of the Waters: The Hindmarsh Island Affair (Sydney: Hodder 2003)

European settlers brought with them preconceptions about the proper ordering of society and the appropriate mechanisms for its maintenance. The first governor and judges of the colony in New South Wales thus unpacked existing English enactments and case law that encompassed public speech and published literature, with sanctions for example regarding

all blasphemies against God as denying His being or provenance ... or profane scoffing at Holy Scriptures or exposing any part of them to contempt or ridicule

... seditious words, in derogation of the established religion are indictable as tending to a breach of the peace.

The persistence of that law - albeit increasingly as a curiosity - is reflected in action by Reverend Ogle and Reverend Father O'Neill during 1986 against the film Je Vous Salue Maria under blasphemy provisions and the 1997 'Piss Christ' case (Pell v Trustees of NGV) by the Archbishop of Melbourne to suppress a work in the National Gallery of Victoria.

Settlement coincided with the exhortation by King George III in 1787 for the public to

suppress all loose and licentious prints, books, and publications dispensing poison to the minds of the young and the unwary, and to punish publishers and vendors thereof.

Military government was evident in licensing and daily censorship of the first publications in the new colony (daily newspaper censorship ceased in 1824, a year after the end of military government) and of public performances. The local consumption and production - or non-production - of what Robert Darnton characterised as 'underground literature' during the period is uncertain.

The 'Six Acts' of 1819 in England - which included the Blasphemous & Seditious Libel Act and the Newspaper & Stamp Duties Act - were reflected in local enactments and court rulings in NSW and Van Diemens Land, such as the 1827 NSW law against "publication of Blasphemous and Seditious Libels" (first offenders were fined, repeat offenders were liable for transport to Port Arthur). The development of Australian and overseas defamation law is discussed in detail here, along with a shorter note on sedition.

Economic growth, a larger population, more traffic with the rest of the world and emergence of a local bureaucracy saw elaboration of the existing regime, for example through the Places of Public Entertainment Act 1828 in NSW colony.

     censorship under the self-governing colonies

A recognisable censorship regime emerged in the self-governing colonies following passage of the Obscene Publications Act in England in 1857 (with for example revised regulations about "obscene and indecent" imports) and the 1868 Hicklin case, with a rationale for suppressing works liable to "corrupt and deprave".

It reflected -

• technological advances such as photography (much attention over the following 100 years was paid to "dirty postcards") and telegraphy (the first cable across Bass Strait was operational from 1859, a year which saw Darwin's The Origin of Species, Mill's On Liberty and the Great Moral History of Port Curtis, claimed as Australia's first comic)
• economic growth, with the rise of mass-circulation newspapers and books
• anxieties about the "national fibre" and social order (otherwise manifest in developments such as the emergence of the Boy Scouts and Boys Brigade, jeremiads about birth control and masturbation, and moral panics about Fenians, the Yellow Peril and Hooligans)
• the self-interest of emerging bureaucracies and advocacy groups.

Moral panics in the mother country, for example following the oft-cited seizure in 1874 of around 130,000 'obscene' photographs and 5,000 slides in a London police raid on property owned by photographer Henry Hayler.

The South Australian Post Office Act of 1876 thus empowered the colony's Postmaster-General to

at any time cause any postal article having anything profane, blasphemous, indecent, obscene, offensive or libellous, written or drawn on the outside thereof, or any obscene enclosure in any postal article, to be destroyed

The 1876 Victorian Obscene Publications Act 1876 similarly allowed the seizure and destruction of improper literature, imported or locally produced. The colony's Customs officials accordingly confiscated a shipment of works by Zola and others during 1889 to protect Melbourne from the "subtle and deadly infection of French literary vice" (Henry Vizetelly had been imprisoned in London that year for publishing six-shilling translations of Zola novels) and went on to seize a collection of 'art photographs'.

Three years later the 1892 Western Australian Police Act - like counterparts in other colonies and the UK - sought to underpin civil society by providing that

Every person who in any street or public place or to the annoyance of the inhabitants or passengers, shall sing any obscene song or ballad, or write or draw any indecent or obscene word, figure, or representation, or use any profane, indecent, or obscene language, shall be deemed guilty of disorderly conduct and be punishable accordingly, and any person who shall use any threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour in any public or private place, whether calculated to lead to a breach of the peace, or not, or who shall extinguish wantonly any light set up for public convenience

     development of a national regime

Federation saw the new Commonwealth government gain powers regarding defence, telecommunications, customs (ie imports) and other matters, along with responsibility for censorship in the territories. The states retained responsibility regarding identification and distribution of offensive content within their jurisdictions, licensing of public venues (eg theatres and cinemas, usually under Places of Public Entertainment Act legislation dating from the early 1880s) and broader questions of public order (typically under a Crimes Act).

The Commonwealth Post & Telegraph Act 1901 empowered the new Postmaster Generals' Department (PMG) - formed from the colonial postal departments and at that time comprising around half of the new federal bureaucracy - to impound and destroy offending material. Overseas publications were dealt with through the Customs Act 1901, the basis of most federal censorship for the rest of the century.

Access to federal government information was governed by a Commonwealth Crimes Act; Australia did not follow the UK in establishing an Official Secrets Act. As noted in the Censorship Guide and Privacy Guide elsewhere on this site, a range of enactments during the past century deal with freedom of information and archival access to government information, along with legislation regarding protection of census, taxation or other information collected by government.

Systematisation of responsibilities was reflected in passage of updated 'offensive' literature and public performance legislation in most states, for example the NSW Obscene & Indecent Publications Act 1901 and Western Australia Indecent Publications & Articles Act 1902 concerning publication, sale and possession of texts and images. That legislation and its implementation varied from state to state.

As part of the British Empire Australia committed to the 1910 International Agreement for the Suppression of the Circulation of Obscene Publications, which provided that signatories

agree to take all measures to discover, prosecute and punish any person engaged in committing any of the following offences, and accordingly agree that it shall be a punishable offence:

1) for purposes of or by way of trade or for distribution or public exhibition to make or produce or have in possession obscene writings, drawings, prints, paintings, printed matter, pictures, posters, emblems, photographs, cinematograph films or any other obscene objects;

2) for the purposes abovementioned, to import, convey or export or cause to be imported, conveyed or exported any of the said obscene matters or things, or in any manner whatsoever to put them into circulation;

3) to carry on or take part in a business, whether public or private, concerned with any of the said obscene matters or things, or to deal in the said matters or things in any manner whatsoever, or to distribute them or to exhibit them publicly or to make a business of lending them;

4) to advertise or make known by any means whatsoever, in view of assisting in the said punishable circulation or traffic, that a person is engaged in any of the above punishable acts, or to advertise or to make known how or from whom the said obscene matters or things can be procured either directly or indirectly.

The Agreement was extended in 1923 by the International Convention for the Suppression of and Traffic in Obscene Publications.

     the 1914-18 War and the Red Flag

Outbreak of war in 1914 saw the imposition of military censorship by the federal government, with supervision of telegraphic and postal communication across the national borders on the model of the regime established in the UK (with MI8 concerned with telegraph censorship and MI9 with postal censorship).

Australian censorship of civilian traffic was formalised under the War Precautions Act 1914, which provided for suppression in Australian newspapers, journals and newsreels of illustrations of "the gruesome effects of warfare", "give comfort to the enemy" and - particularly after 1915 - "statements likely to prejudice recruiting" and promote disquiet about the "health or conduct of troops".

Ellis Ashmead-Barlett tartly described the censorship as "beyond all reason", complaining that after treatment by a range of censors in the UK and Australia his writing resembled "chicken out of which a thick nutritious broth has been extracted." Newspaper and magazine editors in Australia were expected to exercise judgement - aided by government guidelines - in not publishing 'inappropriate' content and in seeking the advice of censors. Unlike some countries, those censors were not permanently stationed on publisher premises.

Correspondence of military personnel was undertaken under the Defence Act by military and government employees.

Postwar anxiety about bolshevism - or merely a supposedly restless working class, youth, women and migrant groups - was reflected in continued surveillance of potential subversives and restrictions on particular expression. After the March 1919 'Red Flag Riots' in Brisbane, for example, 15 men were gaoled for an average of six months each for carrying the red flag during a protest march.

     the impact of new technologies

State licensing of local feature film production, exhibition venues and exhibition of individual works operated in tandem with Commonwealth restrictions on film imports under the Customs Act. From 1919 to 1929 that centred on the Film Censorship office in Sydney, the port through which most foreign films were imported, with a part-time Chief Censor in Melbourne.

1919 Regulations under the Act provided that the Censors were to examine applications for registrations of imported films, refusing any film that

a) is blasphemous, indecent, or obscene,
b) is likely to be injurious to morality, or to encourage or incite to crime;
c) is likely to be offensive to the people of any friendly nation
d) depicts any matter the exhibition of which is undesirable in the public interest.

It was expected that state governments would ensure that unregistered films were not exhibited. Those governments were independently able to classify films that had been registered. Insights are offered by Sonia Walker's 2002 paper Film Censorship In Western Australia: Public, Government & Industry Responses 1898-1928 and Ina Bertrand's Film Censorship in Australia (St Lucia: Uni of Qld Press 1978).

A similar regime applied to print publications, with powers held by the states. (The federal government regulated works in the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory through regulations under Commonwealth legislation.) Changes to the Customs legislation in 1928 established a Commonwealth Film Censorship Board and Appeal Board (both based in Sydney), reflecting recommendations by the 1927 Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry.

The new regime encompassed a ban on foreign films "likely to be offensive to the people of the British Empire" and a prohibition on export of any film that

depicts any matter the exhibition of which is undesirable in the public interest or is likely to prove detrimental or prejudicial to the Commonwealth of Australia.

The Commission had recommended that all film distributors in Australia should be registered, contracts for film distribution should be limited to 12 months, all film exhibitors should be registered and films should be graded by the Censorship Board as "suitable for
Universal Exhibition" and "For Adults Only". The shape of censorship is evident in a 1936 NSW ban under the Theatres & Public Halls Act 1908 on public performance of Odets' anti-Nazi play Till the Day I Die (on advice from Commonwealth Attorney-General RG Menzies that it would offend Germany) and a 1936 Commonwealth ban on Reed's Ten Days That Shook The World.

Legislation establishing the Australian Broadcasting Commission, modelled on the UK BBC, featured references to prohibition of blasphemy, obscenity and other offensive content. Regulation of commercial broadcasters was underpinned by the Commonwealth's spectrum licensing regime under telecommunications provision of the Constitution, with an expectation that radio stations broadcasting 'improper' content would lose their licenses (articulated in 1942 by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Joint Committee on Wireless Broadcasting).

During 1935 Commonwealth Customs Minister Sir Thomas White warned about

minds that are capable of being influenced by specious approaches, with results that are injurious, not only to themselves, but also to the State; and it is both the right and the duty of the Government to protect them. The depths to which Communist propaganda would sink - and this applies also to books printed in England, where much of the Communist propaganda is produced ... wherein religion, the law, the Empire, and every tradition revered in England are held up to ridicule and reproach.

White lamented that

The Labor Party supported the proclamation prohibiting the entry into Australia of all forms of literature suggesting the overthrow of government by revolutionary means, the abolition of all forms of law, and incitement to assassination, yet during its occupancy ... it allowed all kinds of literature to freely come in.

In 1937 a Commonwealth Literature Censorship Board and Appeals Censor were established under the Customs (Literature Censorship) Regulations of that year, administering a blacklist of prohibited imports and determining whether any imported literature was
blasphemous, indecent or obscene. Establishment followed suppression of James Joyce's Ulysses in 1929, local author Norman Lindsay's Redheap in 1930 and Huxley's Brave New World in 1932, with the regime being strengthened through introduction of an 'average householder test' on the UK model in 1930.

White claimed that some 294 books had been banned up to the end of 1931; that figure has been questioned as relating only to works of 'literature', with suggestions that bans on imports of work 'without merit' were in fact higher.

It also followed the 1934 Customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations which updated restrictions on imports of photographs and other images. Ulysses was unbanned in 1937 - a year after the Book Censorship Abolition League (formed in Melbourne during 1934) became the Council for Civil Liberties - but again banned in 1941.

     defending Fortress Australia

1939 saw the establishment of a Commonwealth Department of Information, modelled on its British counterpart and similarly controversial. Military censorship of overseas telecommunications was instituted with the outbreak of war and units within the armed forces expunged correspondence from servicemen, described in Blue pencil warriors : Censorship and propaganda in World War II (St Lucia: Uni of Queensland Press 1984) by John Hilvert.

Criticism of federal censorship of newspapers, radio and journals under the National Security Regulations was reflected in establishment during 1942 of the Advisory Committee on Censorship, ostensibly to enable media barons such as Warwick Fairfax and Sir Keith Murdoch to work with the censorship branch of the Prime Minister's Department.

Disagreement about the nature of censorship of the major newspapers peaked two years later, when the tabloid Daily Telegraph and other Sydney newspapers demonstrated the work of the 'blue pencil warriors' by leaving blank spaces in articles to indicate deletions. Commonwealth and NSW police were ordered to stop distribution of those editions. Parts of the 'ethnic press' had simply been suppressed at the commencement of hostilities.

In regulating non-defence content life in the states appears to have continued as normal, exemplified by the Angry Penguins prosecution in Adelaide during 1944.

Post-war anxieties saw Commonwealth bans on Robert Close's Love Me, Sailor (also banned by Victoria in 1946), Glassop's We Are The Rats, Christina Stead's Letty Fox, Her Luck (1946) and A Little Tea, a Little Chat (1948), despite criticisms such as Brian Penton's Censored! pamphlet. The extent of self-censorship by Australian creators and publishers is unknown; the archived records of Customs, police agencies and literary censorship bodies do not provide much detail on what was suppressed.

Anxiety about imports from Hollywood were reflected in the Western Australia Censorship of Films Act 1947, Queensland Picture Theatre & Film Act 1947, a Commonwealth ban in 1948 on the impoort of 'horror films' and the Tasmanian Censorship of Films Act 1949. In the latter year Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania signed an agreement delegating film censorship functions to the Commonwealth. Most states had cracked down on local and overseas comics, echoing the moral panic of 1948 in New Zealand and the UK.

Queensland subsequently passed its Objectionable Literature Act 1954 and established the Queensland Literature Review Board in 1954. Two years later conductor Eugene Goossens was charged over photographs seized at Sydney airport; Customs ineptly went on to seize copies of Catcher in the Rye intended as a gift from the US Ambassador to the federal government

     D Notices and the Cold War

In 1952 the Commonwealth introduced a 'D Notice' (ie Defence Notice) system, modelled on that established in the UK in 1912 and updating advice to Australian editors from 1914 onwards. The Notices were issued to media organisations by a Defence, Press & Broadcasting Committee (chaired by the Minister for Defence).

They outline subjects that "bear upon defence or national security", with a request that editors refrain from publishing certain information about those subjects. The scheme is voluntary; non-compliance carries no formal penalties but is underpinned by government suasion through implicit withdrawal of licences (eg broadcast arms of some media groups) and more broadly denial of access to government sources and action under the Crimes Act. The system appears to be largely moribund.

D Notices in effect from 1982 supposedly include those regarding the "capabilities of the Australian Defence Force, Including Aircraft, Ships, Weapons, and Other Equipment" and "Whereabouts of Mr and Mrs Vladimir Petrov".

     the swinging sixties?

The complexity of government censorship policy and community debate in the 1960s means that we should be wary about some of the more simplistic characterisations about a march to enlightenment. In retrospect the period was marked by a shift - evident in other advanced economies - from outright prohibition to classification.

Debate within Australia saw another generation of moral panics about social disorder and "permissiveness", with

• campaigns to restrict the production, distribution and consumption of comics and paperbacks aimed at the youth market or working class
• recurrent anxiety about communism
• anxiety about the impact of the electronic mass media, with calls for greater government regulation or self-regulation by media proprietors conflicting with consumer desires - manifest in commercial television viewer metrics - for a more liberal regime
• attacks on "free love", "psychodelia", long-haired youth and birth control

in tandem with the decriminalisation of private activities, changes to restrictions on birth control technology and the emergence of tensions within some anti-censorship groups (eg arguments by some feminist thinkers that the removal of constraints on heterosexual publications such as Playboy served to repress women).

In 1963 the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, the model for activists in other states, was established. A year later the Oz magazine censorship trial in Australia demonstrated that grundyism was alive and well. Agreement about a framework for uniform State-Commonwealth censorship laws was reached in 1968 but left considerable leeway for action by individual governments against publications and performances.

America Hurrah! was thus banned in NSW during 1968 under the Theatres & Public Halls Act 1908. Commonwealth Minister for Customs Don Chipp (later founder of cross-over party the Australian Democrats) banned Tynan's Oh! Calcutta book in 1969. The same year saw Roth's Portnoy's Complaint become a prohibited import (with prosecutions by the NSW, WA, Qld and Victorian governments against local publishers or retailers in 1970) and censorship by the Victorian state government of Crowley's The Boys in the Band.

   next page (Australia from 1968)