Censorship, Liberty and License

THE FIRST BOOK I asked for when I became a reader at the Bodleian Library was Lady Chatterley’s Lover—a bizarre choice for a student about to embark on a thesis about formal satire from 1590 to 1650. This was an obscure subject and turned out to be an education in the characteristics of bad verse. So why start with D.H. Lawrence? I had read in Melbourne an expurgated version of the novel, and the fuss that was caused by its proscription. Of course my curiosity was aroused, but I hadn’t counted on the depth of my disappointment.

I had no idea what I hoped to discover, but the last thing I expected was to find some of Lawrence’s worst writing. It was ludicrous without being funny. I had no views about censorship at that time, though I suddenly remembered that my mother had told me about the fate of a book she had bought in 1929 in New York. The Well of Loneliness, by Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, is about lesbianism. She was reading it on the ship on the way to London. One day the ship’s news bulletin reported that it was tried for obscenity and banned. So she finished reading it and threw it overboard before she reached England. Hall’s appeal against the verdict was refused, despite the support it received from E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Arnold Bennett.

It was not long before I discovered that censorship had a lot to do with the nature of the satire I was about to unearth from obscure pamphlets and manuscripts. In 1590, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London made a bonfire and burnt all the satires which were deemed to be a danger to the state. Their action was not entirely successful, but it did influence the way satire was written and distributed, as did the Puritans in the next century. For a brief period the press had been free. But on July 11, 1637, the Star Chamber issued detailed orders for the licensing of the press, assigning censorship duties to various officials according to the nature of the offending publications. Outside those which were dealt with by the Star Chamber:

all other books, whether of Divinitie, Phisicke,
Philosophie, Poetry, or whatsoever, shall be allowed
by the Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, or Bishop
of London for the time being, or by their
appointment, or the Chancellours, or Vice
Chancellours of either of the Universities of this
Realme for the time being. Always provided, that
the Chancellour or Vice Chancellour, of either of
the Universities, shall Licence onely such Booke or
Bookes that are to be printed within the limits of
the Universities respectively, but not in London, or
elsewhere, not medling either with Bookes of the
common Law, or matters of State.

Against this background, Milton published his courageous and eloquent defence of a free press, Areopagitica. His vast learning is brought to bear on this subject. He refers to Selden’s writing on natural history to argue that “errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest”. Good and evil “as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the world”, and perhaps Adam’s doom was “knowing good by evil”. That leads to one of his most memorable declarations. The person who can “consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian”.

If we regulate printing in order to rectify manners, Milton argues, “we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man”. And he provides a long list of possible prohibitions: music, “except what is grave and Dorick”, dancing, windows and balconies, frontispieces in books, village instruments, household gluttony, daily rioting and alehouses. He reserves his most ardent defence for learning:

And how can a man teach with authority, which is
the life of teaching, how can he be a Doctor in his
book as he ought to be, or else had better be silent,

when as all he teaches, all he delivers, is but under
the tuition, under the correction of his patriarchal
licencer to blot out or alter what precisely accords
not with the hidebound humor which he calls his
judgement …

Despite Milton’s forceful and measured argument, the press was not freed from the licensing prohibitions until 1694.

Milton’s argument relies on his faith in the moral sense of what is good, and in the strength of his “wayfaring Christian”. How could he have anticipated the depths of depravity that would be reached by a flourishing trade in pornography? His name was invoked when the National Literature Board of Review was created just over 300 years later in 1968, though it was not always clear that those who referred to him understood the circumstances which gave rise to Areopagitica. I was appointed to the Board in 1971, and remained on it until it was abolished by Senator Lionel Murphy in 1972. It was one of his first actions as Attorney-General, but unlike Milton, he did not see any need to provide arguments for its abolition.

At that time, I had no particular views about censorship, but as so often happened throughout this period, I saw no reason to reject an offer of appointment, and this one, unlike many others, such as membership of the Corrective Services Advisory Council, at least seemed to be within my chosen profession. The Board came within the portfolio of Don Chipp, who was Minister for Customs and Excise in the McMahon government. This fact was exploited by those who were strongly opposed to censorship and it was easy to ridicule its operations. My introduction to the Board’s activities was a detailed explanation of how the Customs Department handled the written material being imported into Australia. I thought that, through my reading, I had some acquaintance with pornography, but I was deeply shocked by what I saw.

I learnt that the Board had been set up as a reference point for the customs officers whose task it was to dispose of the worst material, but to send on to the Board any books which it might judge to have literary merit. Their professionalism was not in doubt, and they erred on the side of leniency in their judgments. Each member of the Board, among whom were Kenneth Slessor and James McAuley, was required to write individual reports on the books referred to us, and these were discussed at the meetings before decisions were taken. The question we had to answer was not whether certain books on the list should be censored, but whether they should be released. A statistical record of the releases was kept and the Commonwealth Gazette published a list of all books retained on it. There were few appeals against the decisions.

IN JUNE 1970, Don Chipp issued a statement on censorship, which was the first made since 1938. He quotes Milton on the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: “None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.” Chipp argues that “political censorship or censorship of knowledge has no place in democratic society at peace”, and asks whether it is consistent “to object obsessively to love-making scenes and yet allow evils such as hate, greed, envy, calumny and violence to be depicted in minute detail”. He reluctantly concludes that “censorship, though undesirable, is necessary”, but insists that “in the ultimate, all members of the community, especially parents, have the prime responsibility in censorship; the community simply cannot sit back and expect the Government to protect it”. In that spirit, the Board operated, and we became increasingly convinced that it was films, not books, which would soon be the centre of attention. It was in this context that James McAuley said, as an aside, “Things go bad from the top.” He was soon to be proved right.

As we were near the end of a major review of all the books remaining on the list, we were visited by the recently elected Lionel Murphy, who, without paying any attention to the decisions we had already made and those yet to come, ordered all books to be released immediately. That was the end of the Board and censorship. He thanked us for our work by entertaining us to dinner in a Canberra hotel, at which wine flowed freely. At 10 p.m. he told one of his staff to take his place as host, and left the dinner. The next day we read in the papers that he had flown to Melbourne to raid the offices of ASIO.

Some time later, after a dinner in Sydney hosted off campus by the Science Foundation for Physics, Murphy insisted on ordering a bottle of champagne and, very much in his cups, berated me about censorship. He had been extremely active in the campaign to buy Australian goods and to reduce the level of imports. I reminded him that all the pornographic material I had the misfortune to read was imported, and expressed surprise that he had encouraged the grisly trade. He told me that I was a bloody reactionary old blue-stocking. I thanked him for the compliment, and never had occasion to speak to him again.

Murphy was probably responsible for the rapid change in what we thought of in the 1970s as community standards. I’ve often wondered what Milton would write today about the hard-won freedom of the press. The late Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Sydney, David Maddison, took the view that since there was no solid evidence about the effect of pornography on young people or on those with psychological problems, it was wise to proceed with caution, and not to permit indiscriminate distribution of material. I thought we had become case-hardened until I read (Sydney Morning Herald, September 25-26, 2004) that some teachers and book-sellers had objected to The Bad Book by Andy Griffiths. The argument seems to be on old ground, but it is an unusual alliance of interests, contested by the predictable defenders of liberty. Milton would regard the latter as defenders of licence.

I believe that great literature enriches one’s experience and understanding of the world in which we live and of those who came before us. It also deals with complex moral issues. It’s therefore inconsistent to argue that the portrayal of violence (especially in film) and the use of sexual innuendoes in advertising, and of pornography in both does not distort and diminish the understanding of those, especially young people, who are exposed to it.

“Milton! Thou shoulds’t be living at this hour”, just 300 years after you fought the battle for freedom. We still have need of you, though I fear that you have been banished from syllabuses. Had you not been, the standard of debate in Australia might not be so impoverished, and it might even be possible to reinstate Milton’s distinction between liberty and licence.

Dame Leonie Kramer was Chancellor of the University of Sydney from 1991 to 2001.