South Australia breaks with federal/states' uniform censorship to allow sale of 'Portnoy's Complaint' in 1970
Patrick Mullins' book, The Trials of Portnoy, describes Penguin Australia's defiance of the ban on Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint, with South Australia the only state to declare it wouldn't prosecute anyone selling it.
Image courtesy ABC News.
South Australia was the first, in 1970, to legally allow the sale of Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint while other Australian states were vowing to prosecute the anyone who was marketing the book.
Six months after South Australian Liberal government attorney general Robin Milhouse had allowed the ground-breaking homosexual play The Boys in the Band to be staged barely uncut in Adelaide, his new Labor government successor Len King moved to relax censorship conditions in South Australia.
When the South Australian government refused to prosecute over the distribution of Portnoy’s Complaint by Penguin Australia, headed by John Michie, book, it meant that “in one fell swoop, that whole uniform censorship was broken, completely torn apart, punched a hole in the system.” That uniform censorship system had been established by the federal parliament in agreement with the state governments in 1968 after the New South Wales government refused to prosecute one of the publishers of Lady Chatterley's Lover with a crime because of his celebrated service as a World War II veteran.
In 1970, the federal minister for customs and excise Don Chipp was asked in the House of Representatives regarding any complaints that “Portnoy’s Complaint which has been banned by his department as pornographic, is permitted to be openly sold in South Australia by the Labor government in that state?” Chipp said the ban wasn’t because the book was pornographic but because it was part of the 1968 uniform censorship agreement.
Chipp said he was not diametically opposed to the South Australian attorney general’s view that adults shouldn’t be denied to read what they want in private but, in New Zealand, a lack of restrictions on books such as Portnoy’s Complaint meant they could be read in milk bars: “That would concern me and I am sure it would greatly concern this government I am sure that the South Australian experiment will be watched with great interest by other state governments … if (the South Australian attorney general) does intend to allow to be printed and sold in South Australia books depicting excessive violence, hard core pornography or incitement to drug taking, we on this side would take a very strong view against the proposition”.
Penguin Australia’s decision to secretly print and distribute 75,000 copies (sold out in two weeks) of Portnoy's Complaint, with its graphic masturbatory habits of Alexander Portnoy, broke the Australian censorship system.
Within 10 years of federation, Australia had become one of the most censorship-heavy nations in the world. Customs officials were given speed-reading courses and the responsibility for keeping blasphemy, sedition and obscenity from entering the country and its bookshelves. From the 1930s to the 1950s, material censored for being potentially seditious ranged from modernist novels, like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, to international fashion magazines, like Harper's Bazaar and Cosmopolitan that published articles about the Easter rebellion in Ireland during World War I.
In the 1960s, the Literary Censorship Board began to relax Bans on books like Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover were reversed. The federal government had been exposed to ridicule by a domestic edition of The Trial of Lady Chatterley, an edited transcript of the failed court proceedings against Penguin Books UK for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Britain in 1960.