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Censorship exhibition highlights Australia’s take on blasphemy, indecency and obscenity

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By Steven Raeburn, N/A

September 12, 2013 | 2 min read

Two free public seminars on Australia’s Banned Books are taking place to shed light on Australia's censorship processes in recent history.

Naughty, naughty.

Popular fiction titles Love Me Sailor, Road Floozie and Crimes of Passion are among those seized by Customs officers and banned.

"Even books that today are loved as literary classics, by writers such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, DH Lawrence and Honoré de Balzac were also deemed as unsuitable for Australian minds from the 1930s to the 1970s – because they were considered blasphemous, indecent or obscene,'” said Mairi Popplewell, from the National Archives in Brisbane.

“Robert Close, the author of Love Me Sailor, was even prosecuted on the charge of 'obscene libel' and sent to prison in 1948. On his release he left Australia vowing never to return. His book was later published in France and became an international bestseller. Love Me Sailor was eventually cleared in 1960, and described by the appeal censor LH Allen as 'a remarkable achievement in the literature of the sea',” the Government said in a statement announcing the exhibition.

“The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger was banned by the Minister for Customs in 1957, without being referred to the Literature Censorship Board. It caused national embarrassment when a copy was later found in the Parliamentary Library,” it added.

'Modern readers are sometimes unable to understand why certain books were ever banned,' said Popplewell.

The seminars take place on Wednesday 18 and Saturday 21 September.

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