|
COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Queensland Press
On March 13 1946, Robert Close sat on a wooden bench in the Victorian Supreme Court, and listened to his novel being read aloud. Copies had been distributed to the jury and the Crown prosecutor, Leo Little KC, stood in the middle of the room and read Love Me Sailor from beginning to end, until the end of the next day. A year before Close and his publisher, Ted Harris of Georgian House, had been charged with a criminal offence: `that they did, on or about the 16th of February 1945 publish the said book, being one containing obscene matter' (Case notes Victorian Law Reports). Specifically, they were charged with the rare offence of obscene libel; after three trials, a campaign of support from left literary circles, and further broad public interest in the case, they were found guilty. Close and Georgian House were fined, the book was immediately withdrawn from sale, and, in a moment without precedent or recurrence in Australia, Close was sentenced to a prison term. On his release, after serving ten days of what was originally a three-month sentence, Robert Close denounced Australia, and left for Europe and apparent literary and intellectual freedom, not returning for twenty-five years.
Love Me Sailor as a phenomenon has a definitive place in Australian cultural history, but Close and his book are now generally known only for the severity of his sentence, if they are remembered at all. The nature of the obscenity charges, the content, marketing and genre of the novel, and the circumstances of its banning are all due for some new discussion. The case of Love Me Sailor is variously revealing, not only of the ways in which sex and sexuality signed and were policed in post-war Australia, but of the importance of these signs to some high-stakes struggles over and in relation to public culture after the war. In this period in which A.A. Phillips identified `the cultural cringe', judicial decisions about literary obscenity can be seen to have actively articulated national boundaries.
In relation to the publishing trials of Come in Spinner (1950), her novel with Florence James, Dymphna Cusack declared that Australians were `basically wowsers', in this period, who hadn't read much foreign literature. Her comment seems to engage with a more widespread consensus: that Australian national identity was positively, even assertively, tied to its refusal of explicit sexual representation. Thus Cusack commented in an interview six months before she died, in 1981: `They would accept in London, Paris or Berlin what they wouldn't take here' (Cusack, `A Sense of Worth' 61). In the mid 1930s, the period of Australia's heaviest censorship, up to 5,000 books were on the prohibited imports list (Buckridge 174). l want to suggest, contra earlier discussions of the Close case, that the Australian state's extreme response to what it chose to define as literary obscenity was more clearly about the sex in the book than has been acknowledged, and that the nature of this objection is revealing in itself. The obscenity on trial in this case can figure as one index of local definitions of both sex and obscenity: in the informing discourses that prosecuted Close, sex stands in stark and illegal relation to the national character. With other cases, the Close affair evidences the role of sexuality in publicly mediating, for the various arms of the state, the relation between culture and nation, and in offering a focus for a moral consensus fortifying that relation.
Writing in Hope and Fear, John McLaren's account of the relation between politics and literature in postwar Australia, begins (like this essay) with the Close case, with the moment of Leo Little reading aloud. McLaren discusses the aborted first trial, Justice Martin's comments and his literary ignorance, and briefly considers the detail on which Love Me Sailor's obscenity was judged. Apart from its effect on Close, the importance of the case for McLaren is that it provided a precedent for using criminal law to suppress resistant writing in Australia. Continuity of personnel connects the treatment of Close's novel with other obscenity cases of the period: the Close case began one year after the Ern Malley hoax poems were used to convict Max Harris of publishing an obscene publication (not a criminal charge); it was South Australian police who instigated the proceedings against Close (as he recounts in his autobiography, Of Salt and Earth), as they did against Harris, and the zealous detective J.A. Vogelsang was prominent in both cases. The same judge, Justice Martin, presided over Close's case and Frank Hardy's trial for criminal libel five years later, in what was even more clearly a case of state-sanctioned prosecution of overtly political literature (McLaren 3). McLaren pointedly suggests that what was really offensive about Close's novel was its apparently unvarnished, vulgar expression of an independent working-class Australian identity. He lauds the novel and its legal defence as a radical challenge to traditional British forms of repression and of order (1).
This implied link with the case of Hardy, in particular, deserves closer scrutiny. Obscene libel is a criminal charge that defines a serious form of obscenity that not only outrages public decency, but also endangers public morality; unlike the criminal libel invoked in the trial of Hardy for Power without Glory, it is not libel of any individual, but of society. In his judgment on Close's appeal, from the full bench of the Victorian Supreme Court, Justice Herring approvingly quoted Justice Martin's interpretation of the offence: `it is not everything that is filthy that comes within the criminal law, there must also be a tendency ... to deprave and corrupt people whose minds are susceptible to corruption and into whose hands [the matter] may fall' (VLR 446). The charge used against Close and his publisher was based on the 1868 British test case for criminal obscenity, R. v. Hicklin, from the observations of Sir Alexander Cockburn as presiding judge; Cockburn's definition of the common-law offence of obscene libel became the standard test for obscenity in England, the United States, Canada and Australia (Hunter, Saunders and Williamson 66).
In 1946, when adjudicating on the Close case, the Australian judges quoted Cockburn almost directly. Although the original sentence was reduced on appeal, all judgments strongly asserted the authority of the...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
