Jan Stinson and Bruce Gillespie have announced the eighth issue of Steam Engine Time. My favourite piece is James Doig’s presentation of documents surrounding the 1945 banning of Olaf Stapledon’s novel Sirius in Australia by the Literary Censorship Board. The Minister for Trade and Customs overturned the board’s majority opinion and relied on the objections of one member to ban the book, writing:

In my opinion, the publication is a useless and degrading effort and I consider that its importation should be banned completely, on the grounds that it is indecent within the meaning of Section 52(c) of the Customs Act.

The entire book, a philosophical exploration of consciousness, was useless and degrading because of some minor scenes that one board member found distasteful, in particular when an intelligence-boosted dog and his human carer mark territory with urine on a remote moor. This scene was written entirely without prurience, was philosophically central to the story, and if it was shown discreetly in a movie today would probably get no worse than a PG-13 rating.

Thank goodness this sort of belligerent self-righteousness no longer holds political power over artists and writers in Australia today. Whenever one comes across this sort of narrow-minded bluster about decency, the most obvious conclusion is that any indecency comes from within those raising the objections and not from the work itself. It is nice to think that ordinary Australians are no longer subject to the Dictatorship of Bluenoses as we were in the 1940s. Or then again, maybe not…

Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture.
~Theodore Schroeder